Our Point of View

Consider This...

By Mark A. Jicha

More than anything else, recent weather patterns seem to offer more than enough reasons to stay worried about the future. The storms & rain, to say nothing of hurricane winds & catastrophic flooding, are well beyond anything in recent history and forces some serious considerations about little things like global warming and rising sea levels.

A couple of years ago Hollywood cranked out a digitized version of world cataclysm's in 30 days, a ridiculous premise designed to provide cinematic substance to Al Gore’s campaign. It still ranks with the worst of modern cinematography, but it’s premise is coming to roost.

Just this week Hurricane Wilma finished with the Yucatan Peninsula; devastation probably equalled or even surpassed Katrina’s wrath, but care begins at home, and it seems like we have more than enough to worry about these days.

Wilma ripped across Florida and entered with the Gulfstream just as Tropical Depression Alpha, an entirely new batter in the lineup, popped into the Caribbean. That storm married Wilma and morphed into horrific vortex of global energies just as a huge mass of Arctic air ripped thru the Great Plains out toward the Atlantic.

The perfect storm hit the Northeast on Tuesday before chugging out to sea. Remember last year when that monster undersea earthquake set off a tsunami of Biblical proportions that took out huge chunks of coastlines in TWO oceans. Remember when that was the Cataclysm of the Millennium?

Then, if you consider current events, you can see another perfect storm forming.

We’re watching a Lone Star political machine grinds itself into oblivion and the government into gridlock, which may well be the best possible scenario. Returning residents of New Orleans find disasters trumped by bureaucratic ineptitude at criminal levels. FEMA has ONE person in New Orleans when the storm struck, and he was ordered not to disturb Director Brown’s dinner plans in Baton Rouge.

“His personal time is very important,” a FEMA official reported.

Fed Vunderkind Greenspan probably intends to jack up interest rates a few points before leaving office to help housing tank as energy costs continue to spiral ever upward. That’s one thing about Texans - they usually stand together with big oil.

And I don’t even want to think about Iraq and the Middle East right now.

But just when it seems matters can’t get more mangled, that nothing will ever penetrate these gloomy, low-riding rain clouds, the sun pops thru and I see the light on the horizon: GA-FL Weekend is only a few days away!

There is something both very reassuring and deeply disturbing about the prospect.

Ugga. Ugga.