Ignorance is Expensive

As I'm talking to you, I'm taking a look at the live footage of mudslides consuming highways, of rain coming into public transportation stations, stories of a horrific tragedy of a five year old being swept away by the storm that folks are now emergency operators are now looking for. These things are not acts of God, and that is what frustrates me. Whenever we continue to see headlines that say historic, catastrophic, unbelievable, billions of dollars worth of damage.

Is that then meteorologists, whether people and others will kind of shrug and just say, well, another state of emergency has been called from such and such a state, and our thoughts and prayers are with them. It's the same thing that we do about gun violence in the United States. We send our thoughts and prayers, we send a few news cameras, we take footage, we take interviews, and then we move on follow the bouncing ball. Our weather, our climate is out of control. The climate crisis is no

longer impending. It is here. I keep thinking about. And of course, as the news story and the calendar year changed, we're not still talking about the catastrophic winter storm that took place in Buffalo that killed dozens of people. Now I want folks to wrap their minds around this because I've said this before, but as I was on holiday break, I'm watching like everyone else's the news coverage and just my jaw dropping open when you're hearing reports of people

who are found frozen to death in their cars. There were about forty people found frozen to death in their cars. I want you to think about that for a moment. That is not normal. It is not normal for temperatures to drop in such a way and for snow to come down in such a ferocious way that it was like the winds of a hurricane and then the snow storm of your worst kind of snow coming down. Also,

think about this. People who live up and around the Great Lakes, up and around in Buffalo and bordering Canada. They know how to do winter. This is not like a couple of years ago when there were some snowflakes that hit the ground in Atlanta, Georgia, and we heard reports of children being stranded on school buses for like several hours because Georgia never has snow, so people don't know how to drive and they don't know how to protect themselves. That is not the case. We're talking about

parts of Canada and New York that borders Canada. These people, these towns know how to brace for snow. There was also a lot of blame that went around as we were watching this news unfold several weeks ago, just a couple of weeks ago, actually not even a month has passed, and blame going to local officials for not announcing an emergency soon enough. But again, if you believe that this is a normal snowstorm, then you are going to take

normal precautions. But when you were talking about a snowstorm that meets hurricane winds, you are talking about an entirely different beast. We cannot continue to operate as if all is normal when it is not. We cannot continue to deal with these impending storms as if they're just par for the course. They are not human beings are not supposed to freeze alive. The last time, I feel like, if you guys remember and I say, it's a terrible

great movie. The day after Tomorrow. The Day after Tomorrow is this, you know, super fantastic kind of sci fi dramedy of a movie where these three major storms, historic storms, converge around the globe and for about one week, every bit of satellite is blacked out by the amount of snow. The temperatures drop about forty degrees within like an hour, everything is covered in ice and snow, and there is a breaking of the border on American side in order

to go south to Mexico and in southern States. It is a scene that pretty much if you saw the pictures over the holiday of the houses encased in ice, literally encased in ice, these homes that were on a lake. The wind brought in the water, then the snow covered down, the temperatures dropped, and these people would have to chisel their way out. People were trapped in their car died six minutes away from home. You think to yourself, well, six minutes, why couldn't they just walk? Oh, because when

they got out of the car. The snow was waist deep and they could not see nor could they traverse in waist deep snow and get home. Stories of a man carrying a woman's body frozen and leaving it at the steps of I believe a fire station or a police station so that she could be found. These are the stories that have kind of been glossed over. And we're glossing over these storms as if it's just par

for the course. They are just going to get worse, and there's no real way to prepare when everybody is sticking their fucking heads in the sand as if they are ostriches and pretending that what we are seeing is normal weather. If people are not alerted to what is happening and understand that this is what climate change looks like. It looks like storms that are labeled as historic coming

each and every fucking couple of weeks. It looks like each season bringing us historic weather events that we've never seen and so don't know how to deal with. Ignorance is expensive, not only in the cost of lives, but in the cost of money that it is going to take to rehab these towns and places. Can you get ice insurance? For a house when it's encased in it, and then when it melts, then it's a flood. The

pipes have burst in these people. Homes are demolished, lives are being upended because we refuse to deal with the climate crisis that is not impending, that has arrived and arrived with significant fucking force. So now we switch gears to look at California, where, according to the New York Times quote, a catastrophic string of storms continue to pummel California, with the additional rain aggravating ongoing flooding conditions and raising

the risk of flash floods and mudslides. Scenes of destruction played out across the state. In Chatsworth, a Los Angeles suburb, several people were rescued. Get this, folks after a sinkhole swallowed two cars, augusting Los Angeles River and mudslides threatened homes in southwest Los Angeles after rare flash flood warning was issued Again we're using words like rare. People don't even know what that sound is, if it's something that has never happened before. How the fuck do you know

what to do when you hear this sound? What do you know is coming in the northern part of the state. High winds and flooding rain carved out a chunk of a pier in Capitola, a suburb of Santa Cruz. Parts of Union Station in downtown Los Angeles were flooded on Tuesday morning. LA Metro officials warned customers to expect major delays. Now, folks, if you go on the New York Times and you look at some of the catastrophic scenes, it is like

a river entered the Metro station in La. Now, I remember it was last year in New York that I think about maybe five to seven inches of rain came down in a day. And some of the subways in New York, which are so antiquated were built in like the nineteen twenties, look like it was a geyser, right, So that's happening. Then they go on shaver Lake. Earlier rainfall had already drenched the ground and increased runoff. There have also been landslides in the shaver Lake area in

Fresno County in the central part of the state. So there is not an area that hasn't been affected. Now, I want you to think about California, in LA in particular, what is a joke about La It never fucking rains there. They are consistently and have consistently been in a drought for I don't know how many fucking years at this point. So the ground is super super dry. Then you have these catastrophic storms that come. The ground is dry, which means you would think like, oh, it just saturates and

that's good. No, it's too fast. It's like when I allow my plants to dry out, then I go ahead and warter them the same amount. Well, I actually need to ward them slow of the pace of how the plant floor is saturating. I can't bring down the planter all at once, right, because then I overwhelmed the plant and it overflows. That's exactly what is happening here. So all over California, from Sacramento to San Francisco to Santa Cruz, Santa Barba, Los Angeles. The pictures, folks have cars that

have water up to the windshield. People are literally in kayaks kayaking down what used to be a street that they drove down. The flash flooding is coming so quickly it is literally wiping cars and people in them away. The death toll is now in the dozens of people in California. So in California it's rain, and in some areas in the north it's snow. In Buffalo bordering in

Canada it was catastrophic snowstorm. All of these quote unquote historic weather events, and yet we have a political party, a white supremacist political halt, that wants to argue still the merits of climate change as dozens of people die now in places where we're not used to hearing these things. It's not like, oh, well, another hurricane is hitting Florida. No, but every hurricane that has hit Florida in the last couple of years or hit Puerto Rico has been what

historic and catastrophic. There's only so much money to repair these places because we're not having any conversations about weatherizing. We're not having any conversations about mitigation, We're not having any conversations about prevention. All we are doing is all we've ever done. And how does that match up? How does the status quo match up with historic events? It doesn't fucking apply. I'm so outdone because it's like reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. It is like watching

any sci fi novel put to film. All of this has been predictable. As a matter of fact, all of

it was predicted twenty and thirty years ago. But there is something about greed that has people overlook the human cost and tragedy so that they can continue to drill for oil, to frack the fuck out of this planet, the only home that we have, and continue fucking it up so that they can put money in their pockets and do dick measuring competitions into outer space, where guess what, We're just going to continue to transport our racism, our

white supremacy, our misogyny, our capitalistic thinking of extraction out into outer space. Nothing's going to change. We're just going to continue to ruin the only home that we have, and those that can afford to postpone the devastation will for the rest of us. It will be Elyseum the other terrible movie, but basically lays out Earth has become the fucking ghetto in terms of no access, no water,

systemic oppression, systemic everything, disease, all of these things. Elyseum is where the wealthy live, where there's no disease and there's just peace. And because they cherry picked the people that they want to exist in this place. These movies that were sci fi that were made back in the early two thousands, and books like Octavia Butler's Parable series that was written in the early nineties seems so far fetched.

But now we have arrived. We are watching people that have massive amounts of wealth not do anything to help anyone but themselves. They're not taxed in a way where we could take a portion of Elon Musk's over one hundred and forty billion dollars amount of money that this fucking man has. Imagine that actually having been taxed the way that it should and being able to put that money towards I don't know, a green new deal that the Republicans wanted to lambass. Because God forbid. We don't

just deal with the ship that is the present. God forbid. We look forward to the future and we think to ourselves, what can we do so that future generations don't inhabit a trash heap. There was a really funny song that went viral in twenty twenty and it was called Earth is Ghetto. I Want to Leave, And it was like the catchiest fucking tune. It was put to everything Black woman sang it, and it was brilliant, and you know it was just this woman just sitting around waiting for

aliens to come because this place is ghetto. And I don't think that the aliens are interested anymore because who would want to come here? It's like taking over Twitter after Elon Musk? Why is what is attractive about that job?

I you know, these are things. I know that it seems crazy, but these are things that literally keep me up at night, which is I just did not I continue to say it, I did not think that I would be this young watching the planet just combust along with our political landscape, along with everything, all of these systems that have been put in place, all of these ideologies, all of this lies and nonsense just go up in the air at the same time. That's where we're watching

a system's breakdown of everything and anything. And there's no nimbleness, folks, there's no adaptation. How do we move with the new information that we are receiving? How can we move? We're in fucking gridlock because we don't even believe the same reality. So how are we supposed to actually do anything to make significant change? You got fucking Republicans that are still talking about bringing back big call. What are you talking about?

Meanwhile your constituents are drowning or freezing to death. It's really wild, and it's wildly terrifying because I'm not quite sure as I look at these pictures and these videos and listen to story after story, and I'm like, oh, and soon it'll be fire season, and then it'll be hurricane and tornado season, and then guess what, there just won't be any seasons. It'll just be this consistency. Right.

There was one episode what was it? Ah, it was a last season of Dear White People, and they I don't know why they decided to make it a musical, but nonetheless they fast forward to like I think it was twenty five or thirty years into the future, and the two characters this is at the height of quarantine and they have like these mechanical mass now that just

come over your face. You tap an ear and they just like come up over your face, and stores and buildings are set with lockdown mode whenever the air is too polluted or it's raining and it's no longer normal rain, it's acid rain. You are locked into wherever you happen

to be. If you are at a grocery store, if you're at a clothing store, if you're in your home, you are locked in until the air and the environment is clear enough for human beings to be able to go back outside, and it's to just become a part of normal, everyday behavior. You just never know what's coming. That's not too far off. Sadly, that isn't twenty and

thirty years into the future. We already experienced and are continue to experience a global health pandemic that at us all shutter our doors and windows for three four six months, and in speaking of China, three years. I just feel like our leaders are not preparing for what's next. They barely are dealing with the ship that is in front of them, let alone preparing for what is coming. And I got to tell you, folks, what is coming next

isn't good. And I don't see a part of the country that you can safely say, oh, I'm gonna go there and I'll be safe from the tornado, from the fires, from the snow, hurricanes, from all of these catastrophic events. So we're just going to make it part of the course, kind of like losing five hundred people a day to COVID Ah, that's just the way that it is. Every time there is a major catastrophic storm, We're okay with

a couple dozen people dying. We should care more. What this country, what this world is lacking is empathy, It's consciousness, and I just without it, I think that things are going to be getting far worse before they get better. And I just don't know what preparation for catastrophe, historic

catastrophe looks like. For those of you, dear friends that are listening in areas that are being hardest hit, do the best that you can to stay safe, to stay protected, and God willing you're able to weather out these storms. You're definitely in my thoughts and I will continue to lift up these conversations, hoping that they fall on listening ears. That is it for me today, dear friends, on woke a f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.