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The River is Wise

"I feel like were havin' to suffer for somebody else."

She lives on a farm in Missouri, across the Mississippi River fro Cairo, Illinois.  (You learn, In Cairo, to pronounce it as "Kay-ro".  I do not know why.

Cairo, Illinois, about as far south as one can go in Illinois, is almost a peninsula where the Mississippi and Ohio river come together.  It is where giants come.  It is a poor town of about fewer than 3,000 people, where once there had been 15,000, mostly Black.  The farmers in Missouri, whose land and homes are being flooded, deliberately, by the Corp of Engineers, are not mostly Black.

The Corp of Engineers had to choose whether to let Cairo flood, or whether to let the farms, built on flood lands, flood.  They let the river go onto the farmland, where about 100 farm homes would be destroyed, together with this year's crops.

We ought to be smart enough, by now, to know that Cairo is a stupid place to build a town, and that it is equally stupid to farm natural wetlands.  So when the rivers come high, and hopelessly high, what do you do?  Flood a town of poor people?  Flood the rich wetland farms?

Should the river-bottom farmers suffer for someone else, or should the people in Cairo suffer for someone else?

The levees are a mistake in the first place.  When the rivers flood, they need to spread out, as rivers always have done, leaving rich soil behind, and nurturing a wetland world.

Levees--dikes--force the rivers up into a channel higher than the land, and into still-higher channels, channel after higher channel, until the river becomes a monster needing to break free, going where it  used to go, onto the low lands made rich by the flooding itself.

It is not the river--the rivers  everywhere--that trouble me.  It is the belief that somebody else should pay the price for stupidity and for our own well-being.

"I feel like that we're havin' to suffer for somebody else."

They, or course, ought to suffer for us.

They should pay taxes.  Not us.
They should pay for their own health insurance.  Not us.
They should pay to fix the potholes.  Not us.
They should support the schools.  Not us.
They should go into the military.  Not us.

A nation that says, "Not me!", is not a nation.
A nation is a compromise; a mutual dependency.
A nation is a willing trade-off.

It really isn't suffering to let the river run, but it is stupid to send it down a tube.

The river will run.
It will run when we are gone,
over the towns, onto the wetlands,
because the river is wise,
and inevitable.

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