Two important stories from the USA, the first is the flooding of the Mississippi; although only two dozens died because of the flooding and no major urban area has been effected, yet, the consequence of the flooding is much more widespread. This year is a year of high agricultural prices and supply shortages, the flood has destroyed a large amount of crops and delayed the shipment of supplies, causing prices to rise; the outlook for this summer’s harvest is bad.
The latest flood brings back the discussion about the management of the Mississippi; the river has been confined by levees all along the plains-for thousands of kilometres-down to the vulnerable city of New Orleans. The levees force the river to rise instead of spreading over the flood plains. As levees are built high water levels get higher, levees fail and then rebuilt higher, which only forces the river to rise to unprecedented levels. The high level of the river this time has never been seen before; the levees naturally didn’t stand the pressure, failing along the river.
As levees upriver fail the pressure on downriver levees decline, proving in effect that the problems lies in the concept of levees along the river stretch. The ability of local authority to rebuild the current levees, let alone improve them, is doubtful; funding from the federal government might no be forthcoming. In a few years the river will wash away all but the most hardened levees-like those protecting the city of St. Louis-and reclaim its natural flood plains forcing farmers to adopt their agricultural practice to the natural cycle (i.e. instead of growing wheat, maize and soybeans they might have to grow barley, oat and rye in the wintertime and abandon their fields to the river in the summertime).
The second story is many magnitudes more important than the flooding of the mighty Mississippi, not because of the event it reports on but for its importance in showing us one of the most fundamental problems of modern society that is causing a huge amount of turmoil and misery: seventeen girls in Gloucester Massachusetts, none above the age of sixteen, has made a pact to become pregnant and has done so.
A Puritan founder of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would have been horrified at the fact that young women are having children out of wedlock, but he would be more horrified at the fact that the parents of these young women consider them to be ‘children’ and don’t want them to marry until they are at least a decade older; he would consider children out of wedlock a problem of loose morals, as to the parents he would consider them ungodly people, no better than the Sodomites.
Is Puritan society correct or modern society? Well Puritan society built the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a founding member of the United States of America and a leader of its industrial revolution; modern society, on the other hand, is being washed away by the floods.
