Since everyone who knows me for more than three minutes knows that I am a political junkie, I have been asked repeatedly “What effect do you think Sandy will have on the vote?”
What are the politics of disasters?
When someone at work asked me this question yesterday, I answered the question a little differently.
“You will go vote tomorrow”, I said. “You have repeatedly heard me talk about liberty and how it hangs in the balance in this country and that how this election may have a profound effect on whether religious liberty, among other liberties, will still really exist in this country.”
I saw the look on his face and his eyes roll, there goes Patrick again.
You don’t think these liberties are all that important, fine. You don’t think that limits on the government are important fine. But you asked me about the disaster which you acknowledge is a big deal. So let me put to you this way.
Over the last 2,000 years of recorded history, if you took all the deaths from every known natural disaster, and added them together. From the 2004 Tsunami and the quarter million who died there all the way to the Antioch earthquake in the year 526 AD, and every disaster in between and since. If you added all that death together it would be quite a massive sum, probably somewhere close to 10 million deaths.
Now think that in the 20th Century alone…
