I won’t pretend it was a happy time for me, I hated the place and the people. I was homesick and culture shocked, and still trying to detoxify from my total failure to get any traction in the Master’s astronomy program at USF. I was young, and still trying to get my bearings, and the job was an ethical minefield. I couldn’t decide what was more dishonest, what I was doing for a living, or how I tried to morally rationalize the big bucks and boulevardier lifestyle I was enjoying in what I now like to call “my colonial period”. In more ways than one, it was my graduate school in Conflict of Interests. Well, Orwell had his Burmese Days and Conrad had his Heart of Darkness, didn’t they? Maybe so, but I ain’t them.

Well, that was almost a half century ago, I know that world has changed forever. It would be unrecognizable to me now, even if there hadn’t been a hurricane. But when I saw the video coming out of the island after it got hit by the storm I was shocked; not just by the devastation, but by how the people were broken. I once thought I knew those people, but now my heart broke for them. Suddenly, my own troubles and complaints were all a young man’s arrogance and selfishness. Those people were still familiar to me, I understood their suffering. I knew what they were going through. And no one should have to go through that.

I’ve always lived in hurricane country, I’ve been in several, some of them big ones, and I’ve watched their effect on many other places with an understanding those who weren’t brought up in Florida can never have. I was in the Bay Area when the big ‘quake hit San Francisco. Natural disasters aren’t fair and those who pass through them unscathed mostly do so because they have invested nothing in those broken communities they can’t afford to lose. I’ve been lucky, I’ve never suffered personally, but I’ve seen others lose it all.

I wasn’t ready for Puerto Rico. I saw the video, I heard the voices, I read the reports. Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue. Not a fucking clue.