Enjoying Life in the Sunbelt, Are We? It's been a bad summer for the Sunbelt and the tens of millions of weathersissies who left the cold North for the mild winters of the South. They seem to have forgotten that if it's a lot warmer in the winter, it's a lot warmer in the summer too. Now they get the chance to enjoy heat waves of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end. Some have the pleasure of a drought; others hurricanes and tornados fed by the heat, massive evaporation, and winds of the tempestuous Gulf of Mexico.
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I'll stay in New Jersey, thank you very much. We have had an unusually cold and wet August, which is ordinarily sweltering. Today it was in the 60s and rainy much of the day, and tomorrow is expected to be more of the same. I have had to sleep under a topsheet several nites in a row, and even close my bedroom windows. In August. But we have no drought, no heat wave of 100+ temperatures, no hurricanes, no earthquakes as occur in the Far Western portion of the Sunbelt. All in all, a few cold months and some snow is a fair trade, it seems to me.
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Perhaps some millions of the refugees from winter will rethink their move and return North, backfilling the reduced cities and small towns and restoring national prosperity by reducing the wreckage hurricanes and the like can in the future inflict. And maybe we shouldn't rebuild in areas smashed by storm surges driven by tropical storms. If such areas are to receive help from anyone outside their immediate area (town, county), let it all come from other parts of the Sunbelt. Why should the Frost Belt, which has already been ravaged by mass movement of people and Federal dollars to the Sunbelt, have to send even more money where Northern dollars have been poured by the tens of billions for decades?
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Hey, you want to live in the Sunbelt? Pay for your own Sunbelt problems. The Frost Belt has been drained enuf.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,706 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM