What is your definition of real catastrophe?
Well the textbook definition for is, “an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.”
Hurricane Irma first hit Puerto Rico, but the island avoids the worst of the storm. However, two thirds of the island’s electricity was cut off and about 34 percent of the population was left without access to clean water according to Bloomberg.com. Then on September 20, Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico and leaves the entire island without power. A large amount of the population is left without access to clean water. The next day, the electrical grid is destroyed and three days later, about 85 percent of the islands cell phone towers stopped working, along with internet and television. The official death count is 16, and yet estimates show that they are much higher because those who died from lack of oxygen or dialysis were not counted as official deaths.
It’s clear that Hurricane Maria was a catastrophe for Puerto Rico.
However, during Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico he met with government officials and proceeded to compare the death toll of the country to that of Hurricane Katrina and say that “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here and what is your death count? Sixteen people, versus in the thousands. You can be very proud.” Let that sink in.
An entire island was left devastated, with currently half of it lacking electricity, access to clean water and food, with a rising death toll, was not a real catastrophe according to the president who arrived 13 days after the hurricane and walked around some of the wealthier neighborhoods says the people should be proud that worse didn’t happen just because the official death count is 16.
It’s ridiculous.
While it’s a great relief to may that more didn’t die, although more than 16 people did die as a result of the hurricane, those people are more than a number. They had family and friends who are grieving and yet Trump throws it out as a complement, something to proud of.
Then there’s the fact that he disregards all the destruction caused by the hurricane, the millions of people left without electricity and clean water, people who are left without food and have lost their homes, just because of the low official death toll. He also overestimates the death count of Hurricane Katrina, 1,833, in order to continue making the island’s suffering less than what it is.
People are suffering and yet it seems that’s not enough to qualify as a catastrophe despite the event fitting perfectly into the denotation and connotation of the word catastrophe. And it’s not even people from some foreign state, it’s U.S. citizens who Trump seems to value so much.
It’s clear he doesn’t even care for the actual people, as seen in a later photo of him tossing out supplies to the people like candy from a pinata as if that was proper or helpful to them.
This is a serious issue and it’s not something that can be fixed by tossing a couple of supplies out to a crowd. People are dying, others are lacking basic human necessities and yet it’s not a “real catastrophe”.
The president must stop looking at things from a political lens that only includes numbers and see the actual damage that the people are going through. There is no comparison for what counts as a real catastrophe and there should never be one because these are people’s lives involved, not numbers to be played around with.