Rod Dreher's Blog, page 539

Liz Gilbert’s ‘Truth’

The author of Eat, Pray, Love reveals that her marriage to Jose Nunes, the man she met on the journey detailed in that book, and later married, ended this spring because she ran off to take up with her gay best friend.  Gilbert wrote on a Facebook post that it was her friend Rayya Elias’s terminal cancer diagnosis that flipped the switch. Excerpt:

But something happened to my heart and mind in the days and weeks following Rayya’s diagnosis. Death — or the prospect of death — has a way of clearing away everything that is not real, and in that space of stark and utter realness, I was faced with this truth: I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya. And I have no more time for denying that truth. The thought of someday sitting in a hospital room with her, holding her hand and watching her slide away, without ever having let her (or myself!) know the extent of my true feelings for her…well, that thought was unthinkable.

Here is the thing about truth: Once you see it, you cannot un-see it. So that truth, once it came to my heart’s attention, could not be ignored.

But what to do with this potentially life-shattering truth?

Now let me tell you something I’ve learned from Rayya, over the fifteen years of our friendship. She is the most brave and honest person I know, and she has taught me more about courage and honesty than anyone I have ever met. Here is her mantra on truth, which I’ve heard her express so many times over the years, in so many difficult situations:

“The truth has legs; it always stands. When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will always be the truth. Since that’s where you’re gonna end up anyway, you might as well just start there.”

So I did what Rayya has taught me to do: I just started there. I spoke my truth aloud.

 

UPDATE: In an earlier version of this post, I had some very caustic commentary about Gilbert’s words here. A friend and reader of this blog e-mailed me to point out that I was guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Gilbert had generously blurbed a book of mine, and in this reader’s view, I was wrong to be so nasty about this affair in her life. The reader was right. I had forgotten about the favor she did for me. I was wrong to issue a public rebuke, and I apologize. I took this post down while I finished a different task, but decided to put this amended version back up because so many of you had comments pending that it didn’t seem fair to you not to post them. I did want to take down my own ungenerous words, though. Whatever my opinion of her public act, it was not my place to say so.

I suppose it hit me so hard because I’ve spent this week working hard on the revisions of a core chapter of The Benedict Option manuscript — the one in which I lay out the monastic way of life, and include material from my interviews with the monks there. Adding material, and refining other passages, to this chapter has forced me to dig even deeper into the disorder of our time, and I found some stuff I plan to share with you on Thursday — material from a secular source that brings into sharp relief the fragility of our society and civilization, and how hard it is to maintain anything constant today.

All that was very much on my mind when I read Gilbert’s Facebook post, which another reader had sent, and it set me off. So much in our popular culture, both at the superficial level and in the deep structures of modernity, conspires to destroy anything permanent, including the things we need to have a humane life together. I’ll write more on this tomorrow, but let it suffice here to say that seeing all the struggles people in my actual, flesh-and-blood life are having to hold things together, Gilbert’s way of framing her domestic situation really got to me. I say that not to excuse my uncharitableness, but to offer an explanation for what was posted here before, if you were one of the readers who saw it.

 

Needed: Phyllis Schlaflys For Religious Liberty

The Atlantic has a piece by Kate Klonick up, paying tribute to Phyllis Schlafly — this, though Klonick’s politics are opposed to Schlafly’s. Excerpt:

As states were busy ratifying [the Equal Rights Amendment], Schlafly was setting up a movement that would help put an end to that honeymoon. Many look at Schlafly as a defender of femininity; a 1950s housewife who staged rebellion to save her breed. She was anything but. Schlafly was a veteran of politics with years of elite education and political experience (though little of it successful) to build on: She was an honors graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and a masters program at Radcliffe. She twice ran unsuccessfully for United States Congress. She authored dozens of political (some might say conspiratorial) books and she was active in national Republican politics for decades before picking up the STOP ERA mantle.

Few that joined her STOP ERA cause could match her resume. That day from across her desk, she described her volunteers as “housewives” who “didn’t even know where their state capital was.” She taught them how to give STOP ERA talking points at their local representative’s office and she taught them how to send thank you notes afterwards. She taught them how to wear the “right colors for television,” and style their hair and makeup so that all STOP ERA representatives looked the same—looked like her. She held seminars where she played videos of herself speaking and would have them mimic her ability to give “20-second sound bites.”  She taught them to stay on message. She taught them how to smile.

This tribute jumped out at me because I recently talked with a political activist who is involved in the religious liberty fight. I asked him what ordinary people could do. One of the things he recommended is for people to get organized at the state and local level, and engage lawmakers, especially in face-to-face meetings. It’s important to be respectful, and also to have a clear (and realistic) idea of what you want. Religious leaders need to be involved too, meeting not only with lawmakers, but with business leaders and others at the state and local level, to share their concerns about religious liberty.

Where are the Phyllis Schlaflys of the religious liberty movement? Is there a religious liberty movement? I told the activist that my usual experience when talking about religious liberty with people who aren’t directly engaged with the issue (even if it’s only to follow news about it), is that they have no idea what I’m talking about. They aren’t hearing about it from the news media (of course), but neither are they hearing about it from their pastors. Most people have no idea what’s going on, and what’s coming.

If they did, would we have a Phyllis Schlafly? Could we produce a new — and doubtless quite different — Phyllis Schlafly, capable of working with the political and cultural realities we now have, and being just as effective?

Hillary Clinton: Davos Dynast

I made fun of Hillary Clinton going to a big $100,000 a plate fundraiser at Lady Rothschild’s beach house while Louisiana was underwater last month. I want you to read this story from The New York Times about her fundraising, in particular these passages:

Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.

And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.

“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.

Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet. At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.

If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech.

And:

Mr. and Mrs. Clinton have occupied a particular place in the social fabric of the enclave. Over the past several summers, they have spent the last two weeks of August in a rented 12,000-square-foot home with a heated pool in East Hampton and in a six-bedroom mansion with a private path to the beach in Sagaponack. This year, the former first couple stayed in the guesthouse of Steven Spielberg’s East Hampton compound built on nine acres overlooking Georgica and Lily Ponds.

Try to say with a straight face that this woman is anything but the Queen of the Davos Set. In terms of social status, and being wired in to the globalist establishment, compared to her, the vulgar billionaire who lives part time in Mar-a-Lago is damn near a proletarian.

Keep these oligarchic tableaux in mind when you read this pseudonymous piece on “The Flight 93 Election,” appearing in the Claremont Review of Books. The author lands some wincing blows on Conservatism, Inc. Check out this passage:

One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But, says the writer, look at what conservatives do, or rather, don’t do. They’re proposing that things continue as they are, with some rightist pruning. The writer continues:

How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well. If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.

All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their “opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.

A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.

It’s absurd to assume that any of this would stop or slow—would do anything other than massively intensify—in a Hillary administration. It’s even more ridiculous to expect that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly become effective.

The writer’s basic point is that yes, Trump is problematic, but at least he offers a chance of things changing. Whatever Trump’s character flaws, at least he’s right on trade, immigration, and non-interventionism — three policies that have to change, says the writer, to keep the Republic from going over the cliff. The writer says that conservatives who recognize what a Hillary presidency represents, but who can’t stomach Trump, need to confront what four years of a Hillary presidency is likely to mean with regard to the trends they see as dooming the Republic.

Read the whole thing. He’s talking to conservatives like me.

One problem is that Trump may be right on those three issues — he’s certainly far closer to my own position than Hillary — but his character flaws are not incidental. I don’t find it hard to think about voting for him because I disagree with his policies, at least not strongly. I find it hard because I think he’s reckless, amoral, and a liar.

Then again, I think Hillary is superficially prudent, amoral, and a liar too. The difference is that Hillary’s predictably bad, in exactly the way the writer of this piece says. Who knows what Trump would do? The writer says that’s what makes it worth taking a chance on him, and he’s right. But it’s also true that Trump, because of his instability and recklessness, might do something genuinely terrible that inadvertently starts a war. The devilishness of Hillary Clinton does not make Trump any less of a devil himself.

In any case, I can respect this writer’s position — that as bad as Trump is, voting for Hillary would seal the Republic’s fate, ergo a vote for Trump is a desperate, storm-the-cockpit opportunity — without sharing it. It’s because I’m so pessimistic that I think nothing political is going to alter meaningfully our trajectory, because the core reason for our decline is moral and spiritual. Both of these candidates are symptoms, and both would, in their different ways, accelerate the decline. People who think the Benedict Option project is about restoring a Golden Age that never existed fundamentally misunderstand it. It’s about building long-term Christian resistance to the country’s likely future — a future that’s probably coming no matter who wins in November.

If you are liberal or moderate, you surely feel that you have no choice but to vote for Hillary, given the alternative — especially because under Hillary, you’ll get all the social liberalism you could possibly want (though it’ll be Obamaism with an inhuman face). I get that. But you should admit to yourself that you’re voting for the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and most of all, Davos. Given that, I’m not so sure you have grounds to get super righteous about people who are voting Trump because they cannot abide four more years of rule by the American globalist elite.

 

Social Justice Washrooms

Virtue-signaling at its finest, from tomorrow’s generation of American elites:

Brown University students are returning to classes this semester to find free tampons and sanitary napkins in academic building bathrooms.

The students leading the initiative at the Ivy League school say the products are a necessity, not a luxury — an argument that’s being made across the country in efforts to stop taxing feminine hygiene products.

The products will be available in women’s, gender-inclusive and men’s bathrooms in nonresidential buildings. Students wanted to offer the products in all bathrooms to be inclusive of transgender people, said Viet Nguyen, president of the Undergraduate Council of Students.

Nguyen hopes to motivate other universities and student governments to take similar actions to address this issue of equity.

Meanwhile, the world takes note of the United States’s moral leadership on this front.

Censors Out For Harambe

If I told you that two white college dorm RAs had compared black people to gorillas, what would you think of them? What if I told you they are Social Justice Warriors? It’s all too true, reports Robby Soave at Reason. Excerpt:

Poor Harambe. The gorilla murdered at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child wandered into its enclosure has now essentially suffered a second, equally odious death: this time at the hands of humorless University of Massachusetts residential advisors who told students to stop making Harambe jokes.

These jokes “are not only derogatory but also micro-aggressions,” two RAs wrote in a letter to the UMass-Amherst students who live on their floor. Failure to desist could even be a violation of Title IX, they suggested.

You might not have known this, but Harambe jokes are a thing. A very funny thing, if you ask me. They’re not actually making fun of the dead gorilla, but of the clutch-the-pearls reverence some people had for him. It’s a South Park-y way of mocking pop-culture sanctimony.

Naturally, SJWs in the Puritan State are going to find some way to racialize Harambe jokes and censor them. What does Title IX have to do with it? Well, take a look at this, but one word used is NSFW. Because I am immature and a huge fan of the Jackass movies, I think this is hilarious. But even if I didn’t think Harambe jokes, especially those involving todgers, were funny, I would feel honor-bound to laugh at them just to tick off Ryan and Colleen, the uptight RAs. Take a look at the letter they sent out, photographed by a student:

My RA killed Harambe #RIPInPeace @stoolpresidente @FeitsBarstool pic.twitter.com/MIybw5XK8W

— Jarod Sasdi (@JarodSasdi13) September 5, 2016

Clearly Dean Wormer and Greg Marmalard (NSFW: language) have found worthy successors in Ryan and Colleen. Men of UMass, you know what you must do now.

ITT Today, Christian Colleges Tomorrow?

The Wall Street Journal reports that ITT Technical Institute, which has 130 campuses nationwide, ceased operations today after the federal government cut off student loan aid. The feds lost confidence in the school’s ability to provide a quality education to its students. Excerpt:

Shutting off the spigot of federal student-aid dollars has devastated other schools. MedTech College, offering entry-level programs in medical assisting and nursing at a handful of locations, closed this summer after the government cut off student-aid funds, while the Marinello Schools of Beauty closed more than 50 campuses earlier this year once its flow of funds dried up.

ITT Tech, among the nation’s largest for-profit college chains by revenue, had been facing accusations from its accreditor of chronic financial mismanagement and questionable recruiting tactics. It is also under investigation by more than a dozen state and federal authorities, including the Massachusetts attorney general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Why does this matter to religious conservatives? Because it shows how access to federal student loan aid is the lifeblood of many colleges. ITT went down the drain because the federal government thought it was a lousy operation. In the future, the federal government may well cut off student loan aid to students attending Christian colleges that observe traditional teaching on sexuality, especially homosexuality — this, on the grounds that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t fund “bigotry.”

The reader who sent me the Journal piece adds:

I’m totally fine with the feds cutting off federal student aid to the school. From what I’ve heard, schools like this and many other for-profits are terrible. That said, I fear this is the trap many traditional institutions are going to fall into. If the fed doesn’t like the way you do things, goodbye privileges. Again, I don’t have a problem with the federal government acting this way—it’s a democratic republic and public morals change. Religions need to be independent of state funding. More importantly, pastors and parachurch organizations who enjoy non-profit status today need to remember, this could be them if they too become too reliant on federal aid.

I have a problem with the state doing this in our pluralistic nation, but too many liberals today are on a mission from a God in whom they do not believe to stamp out evil. If that means some poor Latino kid is not going to be able to borrow money from the government to go to a small Christian school, well, sucks to be that poor Latino kid, because every tree in the Republic must be cut down to get to the devil of anti-LGBT bigotry.

Point is, what happened to ITT today could easily happen to academically reputable Christian institutions tomorrow — and will. I think by now we all understand that the Law of Merited Impossibility is the best tool for interpreting what’s being said today, and what’s going to happen tomorrow.

UPDATE: I don’t understand why some of you commenters think I’m defending ITT here. I’m not. I have not been following the stories of ITT’s travails, but if they are offering a terrible product, then the government is right to withhold federal student loans from them. It would be irresponsible not to. I only bring up the ITT example to show how critically important the federal student loan spigot is to the survival of many colleges and universities. This was why the recently defeated California bill to prevent state grants from going to “bigot” Christian schools that didn’t embrace LGBT progressivism was an existential threat to a number of religious colleges there. The point of this post is to highlight where progressives are going to attack orthodox Christian institutions next.

Privatizing The Humanities

Hey readers, you will likely have noticed that you can’t access comments now. That’s because some work is being done on the website. This too shall pass.

Over the weekend, one of you sent me this blog post by Razib Khan, who reflects on how political correctness and progressive ideology is destroying universities as a place for study of the humanities. He comments on a recent speech given by Alice Dreger, the historian of science, and an atheist as well as an old-fashioned liberal (you can watch her speech in an embed inside Khan’s comment). Dreger is a passionate advocate for freedom of speech and inquiry within academia, holding that a university cannot do what it must do if it doesn’t protect controversial speech. Khan comments:

Though I hope that Dreger and her fellow travelers succeed in rolling back the clock, I suspect that the battle here is lost. She points out, correctly, that the total politicization of academia will destroy its existence as a producer of truth in any independent and objective manner. More concretely, she suggests it is likely that conservatives will simply start to defund and direct higher education even more stridently than they do now, because they will correctly see higher education as purely a tool toward the politics of their antagonists. I happen to be a conservative, and one who is pessimistic about the persistence of a public liberal space for ideas that offend. If progressives give up on liberalism of ideas, and it seems that many are (the most famous defenders of the old ideals are people from earlier generations, such as Nadine Strossen and Wendy Kaminer, with Dreger being a young example), I can’t see those of us in the broadly libertarian wing of conservatism making the last stand alone.

Honestly, I don’t want any of my children learning “liberal arts” from the high priests of the post-colonial cult. In the near future the last resistance on the Left to the ascendency of identity politics will probably be extinguished, as the old guard retires and dies naturally. The battle will be lost. Conservatives who value learning, and intellectual discourse, need to regroup. [Emphasis Khan’s. — RD]

Read the whole thing. Khan says that the only real future of American universities is to turn them into STEM factories — technical universities, that is — and to privatize traditional humanities learning in “safe spaces” for it. Khan writes:

Those of us who read and think will continue to read and think, like we always have. We just won’t have institutional backing, because there’s not going to be a societal consensus for such support.

There is precedent for this sort of thing. In communist Czechoslovakia, dissident academics who were dismissed from universities for not agreeing to parrot the party line set up underground classrooms where they taught real history, real literature, and so forth. This is how they kept cultural memory alive in the face of the power-holders’ ideological attempt to eliminate it. In my forthcoming book The Benedict Option, I explore the emerging potential for this model in our country.

The Flood Next Time

And how was your weekend? Me, I spent most of it working on editing the Benedict Option book. It’s going slower than it should be because my body is slipping back into mono. Foggy brain, headache, need to sleep, the usual. I really need to finish this thing and rest. Close to the end now, but this last leg before the summit is harsh.

Last evening we drove out to Central, a community in East Baton Rouge Parish, to have dinner with some friends. Central had severe flooding in the recent disaster, though our friends’ house was spared. To get there, we had to drive out Greenwell Springs Road, which sustained some of the worst flooding. Even though I live here and have been following the news closely, there is nothing — nothing — like seeing the damage with your own eyes. You drive for miles and you see giant piles of debris in front of every house and store — and that’s only what you can see from the main road. Each pile represents most of what the family who lived there owned. I can’t say it often enough: nobody had flood insurance because most of these areas had never flooded. 

Even after all we’ve seen and heard, it is still possible to be shocked by how extensive the flooding was. Driving out to Central, we passed a very large thrift store run by a church (see above). Julie gasped at the sight of so much of the store’s goods massed in piles in its parking lot. We pulled in for a closer look; the photo does not do the immensity of the ruin justice. Here’s a short video clip from the church, showing the destruction.

At dinner, I was talking with a guest who lives in Central (and whose house did not flood), and she said that it’s staggering to think of all the people who have lost nearly everything, and will not be able to rebuild because they had no insurance. It’s what’s on a lot of people’s minds down here, still. The dinner guest said, “I don’t understand why you don’t see more about this on the national news. Any dumb thing Trump or some celebrity said, they’re all over it. But there are tens of thousands of people here who have been ruined, and it doesn’t seem like that big a deal.”

All I could do was nod in agreement. I know you readers are tired of hearing it, so I won’t bang on about it. It does make me wonder how many stories from around the nation are undercovered in the same way. If you have any in mind, let’s hear it.

It seems like the Louisiana flooding from the freak rainstorm may have been the seventh “thousand-year” rain event since 2010.  According to the story I’ve linked, some meteorologists are wary of saying these events are definitely caused by global warming, but it is possible. The New York Times had a big piece over the weekend showing that in some coastal communities, flooding from rising oceans long predicted by climate scientists is now happening. Excerpts:

The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.

Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.

These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water.

In coastal regions, that compounds the damage from the increasingly heavy rains plaguing the country, like those that recently caused extensive flooding in Louisiana. Scientists say these rains are also a consequence of human greenhouse emissions.

“Once impacts become noticeable, they’re going to be upon you quickly,” said William V. Sweet, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is among the leaders in research on coastal inundation. “It’s not a hundred years off — it’s now.”

More:

This summer, on a driving tour of Norfolk [Virginia] and nearby towns, William A. Stiles Jr. pointed to the telltale signs that the ocean is gradually invading the region.

He spotted crusts of dried salt in the streets, and salt-loving marsh grasses that are taking over suburban yards. He pointed out trees killed by seawater. He stood next to one of the road signs that Norfolk has been forced to install in recent years, essentially huge vertical rulers so people know the depth of floodwaters at low-lying intersections.

“There’s just more and more visible impacts: water on the street, water that won’t clear from the ditch, these intense rain events, higher tides,” Mr. Stiles said.

“It’s beginning to catch the attention of citizens, restaurant owners, business people, politicians. There’s just much more of a conversation, and it’s not just in the politically safe places. It’s everywhere.”

Except among House Republicans on Capitol Hill, who forbade the Pentagon from spending taxpayer dollars on building climate resilience (e.g., figuring out how to protect the US Naval Base at Norfolk from rising ocean water).

A Gallup poll taken in May showed that the percentage of Americans concerned about global warming has hit an eight-year high. Only 10 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax.

I wonder what role events like these thousand-year floods are playing, or might yet play, in convincing the public that global warming is real, and a serious threat to them. As far as I know, no one can prove that the freak weather event that caused the recent Louisiana disaster was caused by global warming. But an increase in extreme rainfall episodes are precisely the kind of event that climate scientists say a rapidly warming planet will cause, and are causing (see here too).

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards estimates that the flood caused over $8 billion in damage to the state — a number that is bound to go higher once more data are collected. Excerpt:

Edwards said flood damage has been documented to more than 55,000 houses in Louisiana, and that could double as aid applications and inspections continue. More than 80 percent of damaged homes lacked flood insurance because most were outside the 100-year flood plain. He said initial evaluations show the majority of flooded households were for people with low to moderate incomes, and 20 percent were renters.

More than 6,000 businesses flooded, with more than $2.2 billion in damages to buildings, equipment and inventory, Edwards said. He also said there are “conservative estimates” of more than $110 million in damage to agriculture.

Estimates are that about 30 state roads washed out and 1,400 bridges will need to be inspected, the governor said.

These aren’t just numbers on a page. They represent people. Nearly everyone in my part of the world knows someone hard hit by the flooding. It is hard to express how unnerving it is to drive around your city and see so many areas that no one ever thought were vulnerable to floods damaged. It’s hard to feel secure, knowing that it has happened, and could happen again, without warning. This is the kind of thing that makes a person sit up and take notice.

It’s a small thing, maybe, but in my own case, my wife and I are thinking about buying a house in Baton Rouge in the next year. Suddenly, the housing market here is going to change a great deal, as houses in parts of the city that did not flood become far more desirable, and vice versa. There is no way we could be persuaded to buy a house in a neighborhood that saw water last month. That makes a huge portion of the Baton Rouge housing stock off-limits to us. A real estate agent might say, “But it was a thousand-year flood. It is extremely unlikely to happen again.” Well, maybe. But I’m not willing to make an investment in a house that flooded in this storm, given the scientific data on the warming climate, and the likelihood that extreme rain events like this are going to be more likely for the rest of my life. Maybe I’m too conservative, but that’s not a chance I’m willing to take with my money.

The flood last month, coupled with climate science data and projections, is changing my behavior as a homebuyer. It would not have had I not seen with my own eyes the devastation in areas everybody thought were safe. These are the kinds of calculations most of us will be making, and be forced to make, not just by what we read in the papers, but by what we experience personally.

 

 

Norcia Update

Monks and the Tipi Loschi, in Norcia

Father Benedict, the subprior of the Norcia monastery, e-mails to the monks’ supporters today:

Dear friends,

Monks have been making rounds in these days to the various tendopoli, that is, to camping centers with military grade tents for families who have lost their homes. It is becoming clearer that most of the damage was done in the countryside around Norcia to the homes of farmers and tradesmen (often those who have the hardest time making ends meet, but a resiliency to rebuild and the skills to do it). Our general contractor, a wall mason named Piero who has become like a brother to many of the monks, has his 2 sons, wife and mother-in-law all in one tent. They cook out of a makeshift kitchen in their garage. We’ve been able to help him get his rebuilding underway and yesterday he returned the favor by preparing Cena (dinner) for the 35 of us monks and workers who spent the day helping clean up and improve our tent site.

Those workers, our beloved Tipiloschi and 6 friends from Rome, also managed to build a cross from reclaimed wood and mount it on one of the highest and most visible areas of the property. A poignant reminder of the one thing in our lives which cannot and will not change. Ave Crux, spes unica.

Friday evening, the first Friday of the month, we honored the Sacred Heart with the litany and Benediction before the Blessed Sacrament. The eastward orientation of the chapel meant that at the final Benediction, all of Norcia was included. Though material needs are often the most noticeable, an earthquake (or a similar tragedy) brings out simmering conflicts in families which would otherwise remain hidden. Those can bring much anxiety and tension to the family, but, with His grace, also healing. We pray that Christ’s Real Presence will bring relief and hope to all those suffering.

Pax,

Fr. Benedict

Subprior

Note: If you want to help the rebuilding process, you can give to the monks by visiting: http://en.nursia.org/earthquake-relief/

It makes me so happy that the book I am writing now will be holding up these monks and the Tipi Loschi (among others) as examples for all the Christian world to see. And it delights me that you can already see the light from these communities right now, amid the rubble.

Norcia Update

Monks and the Tipi Loschi, in Norcia

Father Benedict, the subprior of the Norcia monastery, e-mails to the monks’ supporters today:

Dear friends,

Monks have been making rounds in these days to the various tendopoli, that is, to camping centers with military grade tents for families who have lost their homes. It is becoming clearer that most of the damage was done in the countryside around Norcia to the homes of farmers and tradesmen (often those who have the hardest time making ends meet, but a resiliency to rebuild and the skills to do it). Our general contractor, a wall mason named Piero who has become like a brother to many of the monks, has his 2 sons, wife and mother-in-law all in one tent. They cook out of a makeshift kitchen in their garage. We’ve been able to help him get his rebuilding underway and yesterday he returned the favor by preparing Cena (dinner) for the 35 of us monks and workers who spent the day helping clean up and improve our tent site.

Those workers, our beloved Tipiloschi and 6 friends from Rome, also managed to build a cross from reclaimed wood and mount it on one of the highest and most visible areas of the property. A poignant reminder of the one thing in our lives which cannot and will not change. Ave Crux, spes unica.

Friday evening, the first Friday of the month, we honored the Sacred Heart with the litany and Benediction before the Blessed Sacrament. The eastward orientation of the chapel meant that at the final Benediction, all of Norcia was included. Though material needs are often the most noticeable, an earthquake (or a similar tragedy) brings out simmering conflicts in families which would otherwise remain hidden. Those can bring much anxiety and tension to the family, but, with His grace, also healing. We pray that Christ’s Real Presence will bring relief and hope to all those suffering.

Pax,

Fr. Benedict

Subprior

Note: If you want to help the rebuilding process, you can give to the monks by visiting: http://en.nursia.org/earthquake-relief/

It makes me so happy that the book I am writing now will be holding up these monks and the Tipi Loschi (among others) as examples for all the Christian world to see. And it delights me that you can already see the light from these communities right now, amid the rubble.