A devastated Mid-America

[auld argonian]

This is happening again this year and it's really breaking my heart.

When I was a little boy I would drive out from Chicago to Iowa and Kansas with my grandfather (the one from the Scottish side) to visit the family. When I got older, we started driving out to look at architecturally significant sites in the Midwest and I have to say that I'm really in love with and deeply moved by the area. People who figure that a vacation is a trip to Hawaii make fun of me asking how can I get off on driving through miles of flatland and cornfields? But I love Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois and times have been tough enough without these natural disasters so this makes it all the more bitter.

I have no romantic delusion about people who live outside of large urban centers leading some kind of bucolic good-life but I have immense respect for them for sticking it out in what have become some really economically depressed areas.

Everybody in the USA should be required to work on a farm for at least one week and see just where their food comes from and the amount of work it takes to get it to them. If they did, they wouldn't take it for granted and why this flooding is so sad. And that sympathy should extend to the folks in the towns and small cities out there who are working to make ends meet and now have to deal with this.

I've gotten to the point where I get a couple of inches of water in the basement and I just shrug it off now because I've seen so many people have everything ruined and I realize how lucky I am.

I hope that things calm down and those folks can get things back to normal. This country has been very generous to other parts of the world but we should really take care of our own right now.

Best

AA

[macwilkin]

This is happening again this year and it's really breaking my heart.

When I was a little boy I would drive out from Chicago to Iowa and Kansas with my grandfather (the one from the Scottish side) to visit the family. When I got older, we started driving out to look at architecturally significant sites in the Midwest and I have to say that I'm really in love with and deeply moved by the area. People who figure that a vacation is a trip to Hawaii make fun of me asking how can I get off on driving through miles of flatland and cornfields? But I love Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois and times have been tough enough without these natural disasters so this makes it all the more bitter.

I have no romantic delusion about people who live outside of large urban centers leading some kind of bucolic good-life but I have immense respect for them for sticking it out in what have become some really economically depressed areas.

Everybody in the USA should be required to work on a farm for at least one week and see just where their food comes from and the amount of work it takes to get it to them. If they did, they wouldn't take it for granted and why this flooding is so sad. And that sympathy should extend to the folks in the towns and small cities out there who are working to make ends meet and now have to deal with this.

I've gotten to the point where I get a couple of inches of water in the basement and I just shrug it off now because I've seen so many people have everything ruined and I realize how lucky I am.

I hope that things calm down and those folks can get things back to normal. This country has been very generous to other parts of the world but we should really take care of our own right now.

Best

AA

Well said, AA.

I'll be calling this evening to check on my family in Cedar Falls/Waterloo. None of them live near the Cedar River, so here's hoping & touch wood they are all fine and weathering the storm as best they can.

And btw, I'm the same way about those Iowa cornfields.

T.