During my high school years, I owned a surfboard.  I remember paddling out beyond the breakers at Carolina Beach, during  the onset of a squall.  The waves were as big as a house.  The challenge was timing, to drive the board between the mountains of water, to avoid the break. If I mistimed the approach I’d encounter a roiling weight of water, likely to drag one some distance below the surface along with it’s churning chaos.  With luck I’d get past the break.  Then laying with the tip of the board pointed toward the horizon,  I was exhilarated as the house-sized wave wall would elevate the board upward, and then came the rapid drop downward on the back side of the wave.  It was heart pounding, exciting and just as terrifying.  At the mind’s bottom I knew, “I can drown out here.”

I can imagine this is something like they are facing now, on the coast of the Carolina’s and much more: the massive storm surge wave pushing over the low lands, and up the river estuaries; with the hours of drenching rains, two feet or more.  These are mind-bending forces, unaccountable, outside of our norms of preparation.  This is what is meant by the term: disaster.

Mother Nature says hello.  Our mother insists upon having a word with us.

Last night I witnessed an email exchange between two friends.  The points of view could not have been more radically opposed.  The bone of contention as you suspect, was politics. At issue, the meaning of the president, his administration and whether it is reasonable to make a distinction between his boorish, erratic, emotionally violent demeanor and the actions taken by him and his administration.

One side contended that it is reasonable to make a distinction.  Never mind the boorish cad that he is, his actions show that he is doing the “good” that he promised to do.  On the other side was the contention that the presidents crazy outbursts, his displays of ignorance are of-a-piece with his policies, and the accomplishments of his administration.  It is impossible, irrational to put lipstick on this pig, –our social fabric is being badly damaged by his policies.

What do I think?  I flashed back to that high school kid on a surf board in a squall.

We are participants in the middle of a vast oceanic/atmospheric symphony, even bigger, -cosmic.  Every point has a counterpoint.  Every action entails its opposite, and makes possible a host of other actions.  There is a counterpoint whenever a melody arises within another melody as a “motif.”*

The gargantuan hurricane lashing the Carolina’s now, is the counterpoint to the increase of heat absorbed by the oceans and the atmosphere, heat thrown off as “waste” by the use of hydrocarbon fuels driving the growth of our cities. Not to mention our factory-farming-agriculture supercharged by fertilizers and designer seeds.  I could go on.  The mega storm is an extension of our way of life, of what we continue to do.  It is a counterpoint in the symphony of man and Nature that has become deadly and dissonant.

The climate-change-denying president stands in direct relation the the great forces that encapsulate us all.  As do you and I.  Everyone and everything matters………..

That is what I think.

*from What is Philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari  p. 185