Welcome to September, a month notorious in this part of the world for being the time of year when summer lands with a thud.
Just in the past few days alone, the clouds and the rain have shown up and the cooler temperatures have arrived. Pretty soon, we’ll all be buried in snow. As they say on Game of Thrones, winter is coming.
It’s this sort of weather that makes you think you’d perhaps like to be in some sunnier climate. Your mind starts to wander as you think about how much better your life would be right now among the palm trees in a place like Florida, or the Caribbean.
On second thought…
There’s truly nothing good about daily life in Florida or the Caribbean at the moment. Or, for that matter, south Texas.
Hurricanes have dominated the news cycle in recent weeks. For those who spend a lot of hours watching cable TV news, it’s meant quite a change in the regular programming. First, there has been the coverage of Hurricane Harvey flooding out the city of Houston. Then you had the coverage of Hurricane Irma, with its winds and storm surge flattening Caribbean islands and washing out Florida.
To make way for this coverage, the news channels have had to usher all the Trump news and these annoying political pundits off the air. That is the good news.
The bad news is instead we are getting nonstop coverage of death and destruction. There is only so much anyone can take of that.
The one saving grace about this hurricane news barrage is that you do hear the stories of heroism and people going the extra mile. You particularly hear about these stories out of Houston of people helping those impacted by the flooding there.
Others have come through with financial donations. NFL player J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans has led a much-publicized effort to raise millions of dollars to Harvey relief.
The worst tragedies really do bring out the best in human nature, for some reason. What you’re seeing in Texas is a good example of that.
Unfortunately, Florida is a different story.
First, you had stories about gas stations and other businesses who decided this was the time to take advantage of desperate Floridians in their hour of need. They jacked up their prices so they could fleece and gouge the long lineups of people at the pumps who were trying to evacuate!
I watched a feed showing the outraged Florida attorney general Pam Bondi at a news conference, and she said they would prosecute these companies who were doing this. Good.
Unfortunately, the state has a lot of prosecuting ahead of them. There are multiple reports about various lowlifes who also decided it was a good time to take advantage of their fellow Floridians by going around looting and stealing from homes of people who evacuated.
Of course, you also have the scammers who always use natural disasters as their excuse to extract money from people, with fraud artists posing as phony charities and the like.
Topping it off are reports about a restaurant in Jacksonville where the manager threatened to punish employees who missed their shifts because they were trying to evacuate from the hurricane.
What a place!
The other stories you hear about have to do with the plight of tourists, particularly those who went to these resorts and wound up in the thick of the storm.
We got no end of reports about frustrated Canadians in the Caribbean who were outraged over being stranded, and blaming the Canadian government for not coming in and airlifting them out.
However, I notice there isn’t a lot of sympathy out there for these tourists, based on letters to the editors I see printed.
First: this was a major Category 5 hurricane that was one of the worst in recorded history! Travel in and out of these places is a headache due to all of the storm damage, so it’s going to be difficult enough to deal with these stranded tourists. Everyone needs patience.
The other thing is these tourists should know what they were in for when they booked vacations in Hurricane Alley.
September and October are prime hurricane season. Guess what happens during that time? You guessed it: hurricanes!
And guess where the hurricanes hit? That’s right: they go after every one of your favorite “sun” destinations pitched to Canadian customers on these travel websites. They’ve all been roughed up from hurricanes at one point or another.
It turns out one of the locales hit by Hurricane Irma was a place I’d been on vacation to almost two years ago: Varadero, Cuba.
There are videos posted of the damage there: uprooted trees, mangled signs and downed power lines. Their airport was shut down and the roads were rendered impassible in and out, and the power was knocked out all over the area. Most resorts are reporting a lot of damage.
Yet, it could have been worse. Varadero should recover and clean up, quickly, but other places hit by Irma aren’t so fortunate.
Getting back on topic, the main reason there isn’t a lot of sympathy for these suffering tourists is because they look like whiners. Everyone knows they’ll eventually return to their nice warm homes soon enough.
The people most hard-done by are the ones who actually live in the hurricane zone, especially in places like Barbuda or St. Martin or the Virgin Islands. These are the people who’ve lost their homes or places of business. They really need the world’s help at the moment.
The whole situation is another reminder that a part of the world that so many of us see as a place to escape from our daily lives, this paradise on Earth, really does have this terrible dark side to it. It shows up every fall when these fearful monster hurricanes threaten to wreak havoc.
I guess what I’m saying is that we probably need to twice before we complain again about the cold and rainy conditions around here at this time of year. As Canadians, we’re very fortunate.
