Guest fountainhall Posted January 14, 2011 Posted January 14, 2011 The flooding currently ravaging Australia is the most cataclysmic in more than 100 years. To put it in some sort of persepective, here are two excerpts from blogs on a New York Times site. Queensland is an area of 666,876 square miles - Texas by comparison has 268,601 square miles and Louisiansa 51,843. Queensland is twice the size of Texas and thirteen times the size of Louisiana. In a way this is our own Katrina - hundreds of thousands displaced, 20 to 30 thousand homes severely damaged or destroyed, slowly rising bacteria and virus-laden neck-deep waters with sharks (yes) snakes and mosquitoes sharing streets and yard space with children and emergency workers. I don't know whether it's the difference in media coverage or the difference in the victims, but Australians have taken this in their stride. Some terrible things have happened. Families have been swept away, young children lost, thousands have lost everything. I haven't seen one tear, one emotional outburst on the local television coverage. The people here have worn this with quiet dignity and with courageous determination to get on with their lives and help their neighbours and community. No complaining about taxes or government meddling, just getting on with the business at hand of cleaning up the mess and helping their fellow countrymen. Inevitably, the comparisons with the response in America to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina continue. Here's the key difference between me and so many of my American friends: unlike them, I can sleep at night knowing that the utter train-wreck of a human tragedy that unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina would NEVER be allowed to happen in Australia. Whatever challenges the country might face (and it certainly has to deal with it's fair share of physical and environmental quirks), it is always the character of Australia's people which carries them through this type of adversity - resilience, determination and a genuine sense of responsibility and caring towards others when it counts. Americans could do a lot worse than to look to the Aussies for a lesson or two in what it really means to be a patriot. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/world/asia/13australia.html Also inevitably, the issue of global warming comes up, as does the increasing frequency of such climate-related national disasters. One American correspondent even goes so far as to say the “traditional insurance regime is no longer viable as the primary mechanism for dealing with this.” Does he think governments will take over responsibility through crisis contingency funding? “In our short term, immediate gratification society, Americans don't want to hear it. It was put off in New Orleans and the city paid.” Quote
