Catastrophes Bring People Together
by Jordan Cooper
Catastrophes bring people together. No matter if your pet fish dies, people console. No matter if your vehicle is demolished, people empathize. No matter if one of your close human beings die, people feel for you. During the historic flooding of the one-hit wonder Hurricane Joaquin we saw what we failed to look after for the past decades.
Our dams in Columbia, S.C., that were in the making for a lengthy time cracked quicker than some groceries on a carton of eggs. Our lakes that were in creation for a dragging amount of time overflowed without any man-made barriers to repress the abnormal waters. One of the nation’s oldest canals in our midlands broke under tenacious pressure that it was supposed to be able to withstand.
Our man-made infrastructure was ostensibly not up to state and federal codes based on their condition. The super-majority of the people in the midlands do not have flood or hurricane insurance. Businesses are underwater. Homes are being dilapidated by the historic drench. Most of our midlands residents were exceptionally uninsured in this horrendous national disaster and there is a long curfew for when their tribulations will be subdued. FEMA money is hard to come by.
Ask the victims of the tornadoes and wildfires out on the west coast how long that takes to process. People cannot even take a hot shower without being in high probability of catching a case of a communicable disease. Our restaurants cannot give out a cup of ice cold drinking water from the fountain for their customers or themselves.
Our government officials, and non-profit organizations were prepared to respond for the short-term, but not ready to answer to the long term implications of the neglect of our midlands region man-made structures.
Ancient Rome wasn’t built in one day on the Gregorian calendar. General William Tecumseh Sherman burnt down the Old South in a few weeks. We should have learned from the adversities of Hurricane Sandy, and Hurricane Katrina to conserve the vitality of our midlands region.
We did not though.
Now, we have to burden the taxpayers with more expenses to take care of the inattentiveness the citizens have been shackled with for years. Additionally, we have the potential to lose even more of our football season, and perhaps our homecoming, due to the havoc of this natural disaster. Hurricane Joaquin blindsided our state — and the caretakers of our infrastructure are primarily the ones to blame.
Jordan Cooper is a USC graduate who played football under Coach Steve Spurrier. He was the youngest African American to serve on a gubernatorial campaign staff at the age of 13 under then Congressman Bobby Jindal as his Co-Chair for Blacks for Jindal. He was the first African American to serve in the Gov. and Lt. Gov’s offices in S.C. as a Constituent Correspondent and Special Assistant respectively (Haley/Bauer). He was also the youngest to serve in on a GOP presidential campaign staff in America and youngest black Co-Chair of a Congressional campaign (Bauer for Congress 2012). More recently, he has been working with Jeb Bush’s youth outreach campaign and at their request has submitted several policy and speech ideas for Jeb Buish on various subjects. He recently served as an occasional campaign speechwriter for Jeb Bush and some of his material on tax policy was used.