"Someday a real rain will come..."
Once again, it is rainy season here in the VI and once again, the runoff from the nearly endless barrage of storms we've had these last couple weeks has washed untold amounts of silt, sand and soil into the harbors (not to mention dish soap, laundry detergent and raw sewage) - turning our deep blue Caribean water a lovely shade of "doodoo brown".
I guess I'm going to have to start going to Coral Bay Community Council meetings so I can gripe about this to someone. Why don't our culverts and storm drains cache water for St. Johnians to drink?! Oh right. because we live in a corrupt, Capitalist™ society, where any money set aside for such a project is immediately absconded-with by corrupt politicos and their corporate golfing buddies. How could I forget?!
Not that (to the best of my knowledge) there has ever been much of a push for cache-basins or water-towers in Coral Bay... I know that there is something similar in Cruz Bay - but of course, Cruz Bay is the corporate/economic hub of the island and as such - has the benefit of entitlement.
Meanwhile: the coral reefs will continue to die, the tourist dollars will continue to gradually dwindle, the charter boat and dive industry will continue to suffer and we will all - as a species - continue to shortsightedly crawl (lemming like) toward a completely dead, commodified, Blade Runner-esque world where everyone will sit on their thumbs and say: "Well, we tried"
No you didn't.
Example: The Economic Stimulus Package
As is almost always the case with such things in a Capitalist™ society, the stimulus package money has been completely misallocated and mispent. How did it happen? Lawyers like Ed McKenzie and corrupt local politicians colluded with eachother to create corporations that (ostensibly) created 'Green Jobs' (i.e. pay some poor kid $7-$8 an hour to assemble solar panels that are 'manufactured locally'). The jobs of course, are contingent on the demand for the product and there is no demend yet because the 'free solar water heaters' that they've been advertising (that is how to mis-spend stimulus money) aren't really free.
They could have been. The stimulus could have bought every home-owner on St. John a free solar water heater and a free solar-powered pumping unit. But that (of course) would not have allowed anyone to take their fee off the top. Of course, the operative phrase here is "home-owner", because god knows poor people who rent don't need any stimulus money.
At this point, they'll be lucky to get green jobs.
