The Ant and the Grasshopper, or "First They Came for the Socialists..."

You must know the Aesop's fable of the industrious ant that saved for the winter, and the lazy grasshopper that didn't.  When winter came, the ant had food, the grasshopper didn't, the grasshopper begged for food from the ant, but the ant refused.  The grasshopper died.

And the famous poem by Martin Niemoller, about all the people who stood passively by, while the NAZIs rounded up group after group.  But the individuals didn't protest, because they were not part of the group being persecuted at that moment.  When the NAZIs finally came for those who had not spoken out on anyone else's behalf, there was no one left to speak out on theirs.

There's some discussion, and debate, here in BP about whether we have a problem with standing water.  The issue is what water remains after a heavy rain, and indirectly, about the water table.  Some of us are concerned, and others of us want to reassure ourselves that there is no meaningful, or out-of-the-way, problem.  Yet.

There's agreement they have a problem on the Beach.  There seems even to be some agreement that they have a problem in CNM, which borders us.  Not precisely here, though.  Not according to the rules.

I remember back in '05 and '06, when I started attending Commission meetings.  I had just moved here in July, '05.  I don't know if it was the '05 hurricanes, or just some unrelated pressure, but there were some of our neighbors along Griffing, on the canal side, who complained that the level of the canal would rise, and they would get backyard flooding, and even some water in their houses, seeping up from saturated ground.  No one complained about standing water in the street, though, and some say there still isn't, at least according to the rule-based definition of problematic standing water.

So some of us wait.  Presumably, they're waiting for some more incontrovertible evidence of a problem.  This approach calls to mind the failure to see a forest, for the trees.  Or the saying about penny wisdom, and pound foolishness.  Keeping one's head in the sand, or trying to navigate with blinders on.  If you're rolling your eyes at the profusion of cliches--two in the title of this post, and four more in the beginning of this paragraph-- some others of us roll our eyes at the effort not to see what seems so plain.

There's a contingent of Americans who don't believe in global warming, either.  Bleached and dead coral reefs, melting and shrinking ice masses, rising sea levels?  Nope, not global warming.  It must be something else.  Or maybe just a weird coincidence.  And when you talk to these people, it becomes clear that it's not really that they don't believe the earth is warming, per se.  It's what to do about it that bothers them.  They don't like the idea that money would have to be spent, and some of it would be government money.  That's their money, the money they resent paying in taxes.  The rest would be money paid by manufacturers, to retool to make products that use less energy, leading to higher prices for those products.  That's why they don't want there to be global warming.  Because they don't want to pay any more than they already do.

And so it is here in BP.  The reason some of us don't want us to have to acknowledge a problem with standing water, now or in the foreseeable future, is really that we don't want to have to pay to treat it or prevent it.

Are we waiting, as Americans seem always to want to do, for this to become a crisis?  And when it does, at whom will we be angry?  Whose fault will we want this to be?  And whose responsibility will we say it is to give us the money to address it?