When I sat down to write this essay, Hurricane Michael had just devastated the West coast and pan handle of Florida, and for the media it was the A-block story. Within that great noise, like a drowning man’s head bobbing up and down in the water, I began to see a secondary story line, one that I had first become aware of less than a month earlier when I was reading, and viewing on cable news, accounts of how people behaved during the catastrophic flooding that accompanied Hurricane Florence. In the Guardian newspaper I came across an interview with a 57-year-old man in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who was asked by a reporter why he had stayed in his home when he could have gotten out. His answer, “It’s too expensive to move out to a hotel, I could be out for days and I can’t afford to leave my home behind.”1
With Hurricane Michael I was looking for these stories, and […]
I think the author forgot to mention the fear of looting afterwards as a reason some people ride out storms in their homes. The world population is 7.5 billion people. The United States population is 325 million. The United States “has 25% of the worlds billionaires”, yet constitutes only 4% of the world population. That seems to say a lot about the opportunities available to anyone in this country. The three wealthy people (oligarchs) mentioned in the article, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos all started with nothing and became rich in one lifetime! The wealth they have created… Read more »