So apparently none of my friends were impacted by the storm other than power outages, but Hurricane Irene has done some pretty strong damage with the flooding. And my mom made the good point that our infrastructure isn't what it should be - with the weak economy we can't pay for this right now. It's like a family relying on a single car to get to their jobs to pay the bills, and having it break down and being short of credit to get it repaired. BUT - I still assert that the damage we're facing is nothing compared to what Haiti faced, or even what Irene did say to the Dominican Republic. This is a huge disaster when measured in financial terms BECAUSE we have a lot of stuff. Not huge financial damage when shacks are destroyed. That's simply not a good measure from an ethical standpoint. When considering our economy, ok. That needs some serious fixing... As with health care - don't get me started on this :)
So how do we measure 'importance' - it is loss of life? interruption of way of life? % of land/area damaged? financial cost? Certainly the last thing matters for a country's economy - but it isn't as critical as loss of life, in my opinion.
And as an aside - 100 people killed in flash flooding in Nigeria yesterday - I'm sure it got a pathetic fraction of the news coverage that Irene got...
A friend just sent me this link which adds some interesting discussion about poverty:
http://www.quora.com/Poverty/Which-is-harder-being-poor-in-America-or-being-middle-class-in-the-developing-world
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