Sunday and Church

I slept very well last night and  didn't wake up until 4:00. Then I went to the bathroom and took my thyroid pill. Finally, I realized I had my sleep out and just got up. I had several e-mails from Richard. I answered them and then dressed and went in the kitchen to feed Missy and myself.

I have been watching the weather ever since.

It's now 7:00 and I have just been watching the weather news.

It's pitiful how little help Puerto Rico has received and what is even more pitiful is how this president has responded to their need. Until the media got wind of the problem, very little was being done. The president seem to be just obsessed with their debt.

When my Bob responded to Katrina and Rita, thousands poured into the area to help.

One reporter noted some of these concerns:

He was stunned as he walked through the darkened and humid arrivals terminal at San Juan's International Airport two days after Hurricane Maria blasted its way across Puerto Rico.

It was quiet. No military air traffic control units on the tarmac directing planeloads of aid supplies, no bustling command center sending convoys of trucks to hard-hit areas. No mountains of relief goods stacked and ready to be deployed where needed.

There were a couple of airport employees mopping the still-damp floors of the terminal, the only sign of life in the vast space.

"Where," he asked, "is the cavalry?" ''This is it," the man replied, pointing to several dozen National Guard pilots and support people, along with several dozen local and federal officials milling around the Forward Operations Base near the civilian terminal of the airport.

The reporter covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010, among many natural disasters over the course of 30 years in journalism.

Disasters on the scale of Hurricane Maria are usually marked by the inspiring sight of thousands of military and federal emergency personnel flooding into the affected area.

Navy ships offshore, dozens of helicopters and cargo planes flying overhead, military convoys heading into affected areas with supplies and repair crews.

The only traffic on the still flooded highways that Friday consisted of civilians looking for gas, food, water or loved ones in the wake of the storm.

Twenty-thousand troops were sent into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and surrounding areas. Thousands of foreign aid workers rushed into Haiti after the earthquake there leveled Port-Au-Prince, the capital. Within three days of that quake, the U.S. had dispatched some half-dozen ships and 5,500 soldiers and Marines.

The bottlenecks appeared to be easing by this weekend, with thousands of Puerto Ricans finally getting water and food rations, even if help was yet to reach many on the island of 3.4 million people.
Military trucks carrying water bottles and other supplies began to reach even some remote parts of Puerto Rico and federal officials insisted more gains were coming soon.

The U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort has been dispatched to the island and the Trump administration has named a three-star Army general to oversee military relief efforts.

Gov. Ricard Rossello blamed some of the problems on difficulties in getting aid shipments out of seaports and airports that were knocked out of commission in the storm, and then distributing the supplies on debris-strewn streets.

As the reporter departed on Wednesday, lines of desperate people trying to leave the island clogged the sweltering airport terminal. But at least the long-awaited aid flights appeared to be landing, a sign of hope things might start getting a little better for those left behind.

Pitiful, isn't it?

What's even more pitiful is this:

The Puerto Ricans are Americans and they need help badly. Trump says getting help to Puerto Rico is difficult because, "it's on an island in the middle of the ocean."

"Not to put too fine a point on this, but Puerto Rico is in the Caribbean. The U.S. territory is not around the corner, but from Miami, it’s about 1,000 miles – roughly the distance from the White House to the president’s Floridian golf resort. Puerto Rico is obviously an island, but it’s not “in the middle” of a “very big ocean.”

This is from one of my blogger associates.

I will leave in a couple of hours for church.  After that, we will go over to Cherryvale for lunch and then I will come home to do my newsletters and later will watch 60 Minutes on the news.

More later....

Church was good and dinner was too.

Afterward I came home and did the letters. Then I laid down with Missy and watched TV until Bob came. I think I fell asleep briefly.  We watched the rest of a football game and then watch 60 Minutes. Bob got tired and went home early.

I watched the rest of 60 Minutes and then took a bath and got ready for bed. I will go to bed at 9:00.