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.
