And Other Disasters Facing the Nation and the Planet –

A satellite image shows Hurricane Ida in the Gulf of Mexico and approaching the coast of Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2021: NOAA

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s Déjà vu all over again.

Yogi Berra made that phrase famous when he witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs in the New York Yankees’ seasons in the early 1960s while he was the manager.

As you know, it’s the feeling that you’ve been here before, seeing the same thing all over again.

That’s how I feel this Sunday morning while watching the swirling image of hurricane Ida spinning toward New Orleans, on the web and TV, and as I write my Sunday column sitting at a dining room table just north of the nation’s capital in the suburbs of Maryland inside the Beltway.

Related: Hurricane Ida Expected to Rapidly Intensify Ahead of Landfall in Louisiana

When I penned my first column on the web as an independent journalist no longer tethered to the infrastructure of a newspaper or magazine, I had moved from New Orleans, where Katrina hit, to the D.C. metro area. The bad president at the time was George W. Bush, who in retrospect appears to be a choir boy of bad presidents compared to Donald FY Trump.

Related: Original Cowboy Blog

The tension in the air over Washington was palpable back then as the U.S. military had already invaded Afghanistan and was on the way to Baghdad in Iraq. At the time I spent some months in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon, as military aircraft moved almost constantly to secure the city in the aftermath of 9/11 and on the way overseas.

I often rode my Cannondale mountain bike around on the many trails in the area, taking breaks to read actual books in print in the wonderful parks scattered around along the Potomac River.

This past week, as I camped in the woods on Catoctin Mountain in Maryland near Camp David, the aircraft from Andrews Air Force Base seemed to be constantly on the move, on the way to rescue American personnel and allies from Afghanistan.

Maybe I’ve become more used to it, but the tension is not as high here now that Trump is gone and Democrat Joe Biden occupies the White House and stays at Camp David on the weekends.

We thought back then that the world was hurtling toward its final rotations around the Sun. Little did we know how hot and screwed up things would get nearly two decades later, with no impending relief in sight.

CBS News just pitched its Sunday morning coverage with the phrase “a trifecta of disasters.”

As I write this, Hurricane Ida is making landfall in Louisiana, as the Covid crisis continues to fill hospital beds with mostly unvaccinated patients, and people who worked for the United States in Afghanistan are scrambling to get out.

But that’s not even including the story of the wildfires still raging out West, in Canada, Siberia and other places, or the story about the Colorado River Drying Up Fast.

It’s hard for a television news broadcast to include every disaster facing the planet all at once, I guess, and of course they have to find a feel good story or two to round out the broadcast.

Hey, we did report some good news last week, when the Biden administration announced it would finally ban the chemical pesticide chlorpyrifos from being sprayed on food crops.

Related: Biden EPA Bans Chemical Pesticide Linked to Psychological Health Disorders in Children

And I got a lot of engagement on Facebook this week when I reported the results of a routine full body scan showing I’m clear of any skin cancers. More people seemed to like that than all the other news combined.

It’s nice to be loved, or at least appreciated.

I just wish we could do more to change the world and stop all these disasters from happening in the first place. But there’s only so much an American writer can do.

At least we can reinforce the idea that there is some good still in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

There’s Some Good in This World, And it’s Worth Fighting For