{"id":4990,"date":"2020-01-12T15:33:51","date_gmt":"2020-01-12T15:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=4990"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:56:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:56:12","slug":"storm-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2020\/01\/12\/storm-damage\/","title":{"rendered":"Storm Damage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For an award-winning journalist covering Latin American and the Caribbean, Hurricane Dorian illuminates the consequences of American isolationism. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

by Tim Padgett \u201984 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Hurricane Dorian devastated the northern Bahamas last September, my sense of purpose took a hit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not my immediate sense of purpose. Natural disasters like Dorian\u2014and the need to inform the world about apocalyptic storm damage and desperate aid appeals\u2014 are part of what define a journalist\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre. So I, of course, headed to Freeport on Grand Bahama island to file dispatches for my NPR affiliate in Miami. That <\/em>sense of purpose was in full gear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m referring to a larger, more existential sense of purpose\u2014and that had little to do with the Bahamas and everything to do with America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I was reporting on Dorian\u2019s aftermath, news broke that the Trump administration had diverted almost $4 billion from the Pentagon\u2019s budget to the construction of a border wall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why would an issue so relatively far away hang over me in the muggy air of the Bahamas that week? Because of something Father Stephen Grant told me as we toured the hurricane damage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grant is the rector <\/strong>of St. Jude\u2019s Anglican Church in Freeport. He\u2019s a soft-spoken but sagacious community pillar. And he seemed to know the storm fate of every household we passed as he delivered donated food in his church van to hard-hit neighborhoods. At one pink house he slowed down and spoke so quietly and somberly my recorder barely registered what he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe storm surge rose so quickly in that house it caught two people as they tried to escape to the attic, and they drowned,\u201d he said with a lost gaze, coming to a complete stop. \u201cEvery house in this district was underwater one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Storm surge\u2014the tsunami-like floodwaters that hurricanes push inland\u2014was as high as 20 feet in the Bahamas during Dorian. Even more than the storm\u2019s 200-mile-per-hour wind gusts, the surge exhibited how global warming\u2014and global warming symptoms like sea-level rise\u2014are turning more and more Caribbean hurricanes into Category 5 monsters. What used to be the aberrant storm is today the norm. And that fact weighed heavily on Father Grant\u2019s husky frame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why, after the food was delivered, we drove to a vast limestone mining pit that he and many others in Freeport and Grand Bahama had long feared would serve as an open canyon for storm surge in a powerful hurricane\u2014as it apparently did during Dorian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOK, that limestone quarry has been profitable for Grand Bahama,\u201d Grant pointed out, \u201cbut look at the price we paid for it during this hurricane. If climate change is making these storms stronger, we\u2019ve got to correct mistakes like this and invest in a lot more mitigation.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I reminded him a small, poor island nation like the Bahamas might not have the resources to do that, Grant nodded and said: \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re counting on the U.S. to help us out in that effort.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when I felt like turning off my recorder and hanging my head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States<\/strong>, I could have told Father Grant, seems to be getting out of the business of \u201chelping out.\u201d And that\u2019s where the larger sense of purpose I\u2019m talking about comes in.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my more than 30-year-long career, covering natural disasters in the Americas has always meant more than tallying death tolls and destruction figures. Because I\u2019m an American correspondent, it has also entailed measuring the U.S. aid response. Increasingly, it involves a degree of moral responsibility: Countries like the U.S. emit the bulk of the greenhouse gases that cause the global warming that\u2019s hammering the islands next door to us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not so long ago, Americans seemed to understand the global obligations that accompany the level of our wealth and the consequences of our weight. But in a recent Eurasia Group Foundation opinion survey, only 18 percent of Americans said the best way to achieve peace is to promote and defend democracy around the world. As globalization abroad and demographic change at home fuel a national identity crisis\u2014and the \u201cAmerica First\u201d fervor that comes with it\u2014much, if not most, of my country is turning precariously inward and xenophobic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hearing the news about billions going to the border wall only reminded me of that trend, and it made me brace for more isolationist news concerning the Bahamas. Sure enough, the U.S. refused to grant the customary visa waiver to Bahamians who needed to relocate to South Florida for a while to regroup after having their homes, belongings, and lives swept away by Dorian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t the country <\/strong>I grew up in. In Indiana, my senator was the iconic statesman Richard Lugar. And it certainly isn\u2019t the sense of purpose I received at Wabash College, which prepares students for the global leadership no superpower in any age can shirk\u2014and teaches them that any superpower that does shirk it is no longer really a superpower. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s why foreign language instruction at Wabash was and is focused not just on grammar and vocabulary, but on how those play out in global practice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My professor of Russian, Pete Silins, knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, which is why our morning tutorials often sounded like press briefings. \u201cUh-uh,\u201d Pete would scold me from his reclining chair as we discussed Pravda articles he\u2019d found to translate. \u201cIf you want to be Our Man in Moscow, you can\u2019t ask a question with a terrible declension of the genitive like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ditto my Spanish professor, Bernie Manker. Few courses I took at Wabash have been more useful to my work as a Latin America correspondent than Bernie\u2019s ingenious vocabulary classes. They readied me for Latin America\u2019s overwhelmingly balkanized Spanish\u2014for the fact that a word for \u201cslipper\u201d in Venezuela can mean \u201ccuckold\u201d next door in Colombia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wabash Magazine <\/em>captured the College\u2019s work helping its students understand the world and become international leaders some 20 years ago in an issue called \u201cOur Epistles to the World\u201d about Wabash men abroad. It also captured the optimism of the post\u2013Cold War globalization then emerging, and the important role Americans like those Wabash men would play in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But two decades later we have to acknowledge there was also a lot of arrogance attached to that optimism. The current administration came to power thanks in no small part to the educated U.S. elites who inexcusably allowed so much of the U.S. working class to be left behind by globalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Globalization was inevitable and unavoidable\u2014the culmination of two centuries of technological revolution, from trains to jets to the Internet, which ultimately annihilated distance and borders. But even so, U.S. business, government, and unions\u2014Democrats as well as Republicans\u2014did next to squat to prepare ordinary Americans for globalization\u2019s tectonic labor shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, globalization\u2019s high priests, including the media industry I work for, helped stoke ordinary Americans\u2019 resentments by adding insult to their injury. They gave the impression that folks who weren\u2019t part of their internationalist club were losers. And if those folks didn\u2019t like it, well, they could go vote for an isolationist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, that doesn\u2019t excuse the equally arrogant folly of turning America\u2019s back on the world\u2014gutting and demoralizing our foreign service in the process\u2014especially when it works against America\u2019s interests. Denigrating immigrants and traumatically separating asylum-seeking families, for example, has actually set back the long-term effort to reduce illegal immigration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 2010s, Washington finally woke up to the fact that illegal immigration is best confronted not at the border but at its source. So it began investing in ways to convince migrants, especially Central Americans, to stay home. Congress and the Obama administration mustered a billion dollars to help Central America\u2019s hellish northern triangle\u2014Guatemala, El Salvador, and especially Honduras\u2014reduce poverty and elevate security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2015 it was starting to work, particularly on the security front. That summer I spent time in Honduras reporting on U.S.-spearheaded efforts to professionalize the police and reclaim vast swaths of the country from the vicious maras<\/em>, gangs like MS-13. They rule whole cities and send countless Hondurans\u2014especially the youths the maras <\/em>try to forcefully recruit\u2014fleeing to the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the current administration defunded the program. One likely result is the new wave of Central American migration we\u2019ve seen at the border in the past year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That kind of migration <\/strong>may soon be coming from the east as well as the south if the U.S. continues to dismiss global warming and its impact on the low-lying islands of the Caribbean. Scientists say some of the basin\u2019s smaller isles could actually disappear in future hurricanes. But pulling out of the Paris climate accord doesn\u2019t exactly signal that America is concerned about that prospect\u2014or, for that matter, about the reality that sea-level rise could dunk much of U.S. coastal cities like Miami by the middle of this century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, China is taking advantage of our indifference to the Caribbean by mounting large-scale infrastructure projects there\u2014and generally broadening its influence in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Caribbean denizens like Claudina Swann may well decide the best move is to emigrate to the U.S., legally or illegally. Swann and her two young children were almost swallowed by Dorian\u2019s terrifying storm surge before they miraculously scrambled to the roof of their Freeport home. But Swann confided to me that every storm she faces now seems deadlier than the one before\u2014\u201cTrust me,\u201d she said in tears, \u201cthis last one was the worst of them all\u201d\u2014and that she fears she won\u2019t survive the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My sense of purpose was formed in a country that realized it ignored fears like Swann\u2019s not just at her peril, but at our own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

TIM PADGETT <\/strong>is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN and has reported on Latin America for almost 30 years. He received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for his work in the region, and in 2016 he earned the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Series for The Migration Maze, about the brutal causes of\u2014and potential solutions to\u2014Central American migration.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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