Quick Quiz
Who said?
A—“It’s like one of those raging rivers that sometimes rise and flood the plain, tearing down trees and buildings, dragging soil from one place and dumping it down in another. Everybody runs for safety, no one can resist the rush, there’s no way you can stop it. Still, the fact that a river is like this doesn’t prevent us from preparing for trouble when levels are low, building banks and dykes, so that when the water rises the next time it can be contained in a single channel and the rush of the river in flood is not uncontrolled and destructive.”
B—“Argentina’s lessons for the current moment are multiple: When tyrants threaten, more people and institutions may cower than resist; the loss of checks on state violence can be catastrophic; and no one knows who the next victim will be. This much is clear: Recovering from the damage will be even messier and more difficult than preventing it in the first place.”
C—“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
D—“You pay for the causes or you pay for the effects.”
(Answers: A—Niccolò Machiavelli, translated by Tim Parks; B—Julia M. Klein, in The Atlantic (1); C—Benjamin Franklin; D—Me)
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Somehow the lesson doesn’t stick. And the world has to learn over and over again the dire consequences of not “preparing for trouble when [river] levels are low.” In a word, “Texas.”
But even if the world has risen to the task and installed the necessary defenses against impending harm, internal destroyers will arise to undermine the figurative “banks and dykes.” Think Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the anti-vaxxers. Polio was defeated; measles destroyed. They are welcomed back. The harm unleashed is not as picturesque as the heaped rubble of a flooding’s onslaught, but it is real nonetheless. Children died in Texas; children are dying in adjacent states.
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But not only is the present administration not willing to pay for the causes, it isn’t willing to pay for the effects.
[Trump] is pushing to eliminate FEMA, which distributes disaster-relief funding, meaning that states might have to spend more on disaster response than they do on preparedness. (2)
And even if FEMA funds are available, where do they sometimes go?
Florida is turning an abandoned airport in the Everglades into the newest — and scariest-sounding — local prison to detain migrants. The remote facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” will cost the state around $450 million a year to run, but Florida can request some reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (3)
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I think, in summing up, we can say that a society is defined by the defenses it chooses to build and the defenses it chooses not to build.
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(2) Stephanie Bai, Atlantic Daily newsletter
