I get so annoyed (well, angry) when people make comments like, “Why do those people insist on living in a hurricane zone? Why don’t they just get smart and leave?”

I want to observe that those supposedly un-smart people are putting food on all our tables and electricity in all our transmission lines.

If New Orleans with its associated port facilities blinked out of existence tomorrow, the United States, not to mention parts of the rest of the world, would plunge into an economic crisis to make covid consequences look like child’s play.

New Orleans didn’t spring into existence by some random chance. It grew into a major metropolis because we need it to be there.

If we as a nation don’t make serious investments to take care of the people who live and work there, that says something pretty terrible about us. And it says something pretty racist about us.

That’s just one city affected by climate change. We are more and more going to have to deal with all kinds of problems like that, and with the reality that Black people in our nation often perform the the most thankless work.