Top 549 Hurricane Sandy Quotes & Sayings - Page 10

A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

We're still putting 110 million tons of man-made global pollution into the air every single day as if the sky is an open sewer. More than 90% of the extra heat energy is going into the oceans, and that's why superstorm Sandy was so much more destructive, that's why the ice is melting more rapidly, that's why the water cycle is being disrupted and we get a lot more water vapor coming from the oceans into the sky, and that's why we get these enormous downpours and big floods. They happen all the time. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.

Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation.

Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

Whether we're talking about what the role of the government is, what you think of the United Nations, political leaders or how to respond to [Hurricane] Katrina and whether it had anything to do with race, across a wide variety of issues we see differences between mainstream black and white American opinion that dwarfs anything in American public opinion, period. Democrat versus Republican, men versus women, conservative versus liberal, the black/white divide is the biggest, one of the biggest in the world, and certainly the largest gap in the United States.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

It began as most thing begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here comes the villain music, dire warning at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky. It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got an hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical.

For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the '70s, and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.