Growing up in bucolic Central New Jersey, I never experienced a hurricane or a tornado or a forest fire or an earthquake. We had some occasional flooding, but nothing like we began to see in the late 1990’s. I once woke up to discover that a layer of Mount St. Helens’ ash had dusted our cars, but that was my only interaction with a volcano. I always felt like we lived in one of the safest places on Earth, and I wondered how people tolerated living in locales where nature could reach out and smite them without a moment’s notice. Somewhere there is a chart that shows how much money New Jersey received in disaster relief in the years between my birth in 1969 and my departure for California in 1989. I can’t imagine that that number is very high. Yet, in all those years, the people of New Jersey were paying more in income taxes relative to what they were receiving in federal expenditures than any state in the union save (in some years) Connecticut.
It angers me that 32 Republican senators voted against giving New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut disaster relief. I don’t care what objections they claim to have to the bill. You fight for what you think should or should not be in the bill and then you vote to pass it (out of sheer politeness if nothing else).
The senators of the Mid-Atlantic did not vote against disaster relief for the Gulf Coast or for the people of Joplin, Missouri or for dealing with the Colorado wildfires or for flood victims along the Mississippi River.
There’s a basic lack of gratitude in this vote just sticks in my craw. I don’t know how a person goes to sleep at night knowing that there is a permanent record of them having voted against giving aid to the victims of Superstorm Sandy. Most of the Gulf Coast Republicans had better sense than to oppose the aid, but not Jon Cornyn of Texas or Jeff Sessions of Alabama or Marco Rubio of Florida. What if we give the middle finger to them from now on whenever their states get hammered by a hurricane? How about Sen. Blunt from Missouri? If his people have another city leveled by a tornado, how about we tell him it’s too damn bad, but he ain’t getting any federal money?
How about this? Why don’t we calculate how much Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey have paid in taxes versus what they have received in expenditures, compare it to Kentucky, and we send Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul a bill for the difference? Then we can do the same thing for Tennessee and Wyoming and Georgia. We’ll do our disaster relief that way instead, and see how these folks like it.
Seriously, though, this really angers more than the usual foolishness. It’s bad manners.