Facing The Truth About Puerto Rico

It's past time to re-visit Puerto Rico.  Not for business or pleasure, because the island can't handle either one of those things right now.  It's time to revisit the subject of Puerto Rico simply for the sake of basic humanity.

Hopefully, you recall Hurricane Maria from earlier this year, which devastated the island and its people, reducing its living standard to something close to prehistoric levels.  All of the things we take for granted in our lives here on the mainland--food, water, shelter, medical attention, power--can still only be brought in from the mainland, months after the hurricane swept over the island.

And months after Donald Trump visited the island, allegedly to boost the morale of the people and talk about plans for providing them with practical help.  To take care of the former, he threw rolls of paper towels into the crowds of hurricane victims who had come to see him, which made me think he'd taken those old "Bounty" commercials a little bit too literally.  To take care of the latter, he largely talked about what a great job Puerto Ricans were doing to take care of themselves, keeping the death rate well below what it might otherwise have been.  In hindsight, this seems like a pretext for doing much less for Puerto Rico than the needs of its residents dictated, by any basic standard of decency.  Trump had already dragged his feet on providing them aid and, unbelievably, is still doing so.

And the result?

Although the official death toll on Puerto Rico from Maria is 64, the actual death toll is well over a thousand.  That's because the official death toll does not take into account the post-hurricane spike in deaths that, officially, were attributed to natural or medical causes, but were probably triggered by the sudden lack of resources, or anything resembling normal day-to-day life when many people who needed help either could have gotten it on their own, or with the help of friends or family members.

It's all right here.

In the early days after Maria hit, Trump blathered a lot about the difficulties of providing aid to Puerto Rico because it was "an island" (as though he was the first person to discover that fact).  And yet, he refused to waiver a provision of federal law that would have allowed aid from other countries to arrive more quickly.  It's easy enough to attribute his indifference to the future of Puerto Rico to racism, which seeps out of every pore of his Administration.  But what about the rest of us?  What are we doing or not doing, especially in a season of giving, to help?  And why?  And why has the so-called mainstream media largely turned its backs on this story?

We should all try hard to answer these questions, going into the New Year.  And we should all make damned sure we come up with the right answers.  Here is one way to do it.  I pray that you will take advantage of it.