Reviews | Natural disasters hit us hard and quickly. Let’s not blame the victims.

[ad_1]

This is the flip side of that baffling Southern emphasis on freedom that you keep hearing about. This is what rural people do best: they take care of their own. If they have two of something, they give one to someone else. If they have one of something, they divide it in half and give half of it.

And that’s why the hatred that inevitably erupts on social media, or in the commentary sections of reports, is so infuriating. It’s a constant refrain every time something terrible happens in the South: a clamor of voices telling us that we deserve to suffer because we don’t believe in climate change, because we are too stupid to vote for leaders who do. Such vitriol is never directed against the victims of climatic disasters in other parts of the country.

The point is, people are suffering. What if their leaders and experts insist that climate change is a hoax? If their own lives never gave them any reason to question this statement? What if, even now, they are skeptical that strangers will come and tell them that this kind of tragedy will continue to happen, and will happen more often? The answer is not to tell them that they deserve the terrible things that have happened to them.

Instead of engaging in what a progressive friend of mine from a small town calls a misplaced schadenfreude, we need to learn to talk about climate change in a new, not so politically charged, way. And we can start, as climatologist Katharine Hayhoe notes, by making it personal.

It means starting with shared values. The most important thing to do, says Dr. Hayhoe in his TED Talk, is to start with the heart. We can’t start with data, she says, and we certainly can’t start with accusations. We can start with what we share: are we both parents? Do we live in the same community? Do we enjoy the same outdoor activities: hiking, biking, fishing, even hunting? Do we care about the economy or about national security?

Some Republican leaders are starting to recognize that climate change is not a phenomenon they can deny forever, but most of the leaders elected here can still avoid the subject because it is not yet a political commitment. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee claims he doesn’t know how climate change affects precipitation like the one his state just experienced. Why this is happening, I don’t know the answer to that, Mr Lee said at a press conference. I guess there are those who do, but I’m not qualified to answer that. I don’t know what caused it.

Obviously, conversations can’t start soon enough.

You will forget that you ever heard of Humphreys County, Tenn., Long before the people of Humphreys County recovered and rebuilt. New images of devastation are already arriving from Louisiana, but even the most poignant of these photos won’t capture the real destruction and pain Hurricane Ida brings as it traverses the state and beyond.

These tragedies will hit the headlines again and again as the earth continues to heat up, and many of them will have dates from rural southern communities you’ve never heard of from tiny places people suffer. but still working hard. help each other to survive. They won’t need your judgment. What they will need is your compassion.

Margaret Renkl, an opinion writer, is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss and the upcoming Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South.

The Times is committed to publishing a variety of letters to the editor. We would love to hear what you think of this article or any of our articles. Here are a few tips. And here is our email: [email protected].

Follow the Opinion section of the New York Times on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

[ad_2]