In Texas The Water Rises: A Reckoning

By now, the South should know better.

Oh, we’re all different, but we’re also all very much the same. Florida isn’t Texas, and Alabama isn’t Georgia, but living in the South, for all its beauty and wildness, means something is always trying to kill us, be it the weather, the wildlife, or the natives.

We’ve always lived close to the edge of rivers, oceans, brutal deserts, poverty, and the limits of our patience. The South has never been a place that promises safety, only resilience.

And God help us; we need that word today, don’t we?

Resilience.

As if it’s a virtue rather than a necessity. Like it’s something we choose rather than something forced upon us by broken levees, splintered roofs, washed-away roads, and the new federal indifference to death and loss engineered by Trump’s White House, Russell Vought, DOGE, and the Project 2025 goons..

This past weekend, the floodwaters came again, this time to Texas.

The swollen rivers, no longer politely meandering but angry and ravenous, swallowed highways, homes, livestock, and at least 83 lives at this writing, including at least 10 young girls from Camp Mystic. Kerr County and the region of the Guadeloupe River took the brunt of 1.8 trillion gallons of rain in just a few hours. In places across Texas like Houston and Dallas, where the concrete lacks the common courtesy to let the land breathe, there’s a long history of the water rising fast and without pity.

There’s a grim familiarity to it.

Just as there are in the tornado sirens in Mississippi that sound like something out of a Soviet nightmare, the hurricane watches in Florida and Louisiana that drag out over weeks like funeral dirges, and the wildfires that increasingly crackle across the Panhandle like God’s own judgment. We know these miseries by name. Katrina. Harvey. Helene. Camille. Idalia. Ivan. Michael.

We’ve buried our dead and rebuilt our churches and claimed it as character, but the truth is darker than folklore and more damning than scripture: we keep suffering, in part, because we keep electing people who think government help is a sin.

Let me say it plainly because subtlety is a luxury in a drowning land: You cannot bootstrap your way out of a flash flood.

You cannot marketize a levee. You cannot libertarian your way through a tornado tossing a double-wide half a mile down the road or the flood waters ripping a child from your arms. The water does not care about your tax philosophy. The wind is not impressed by your rugged individualism. The fire has no love for your private-sector ingenuity.

But the National Weather Service does.

FEMA does.

At least, they did, back when they had the funding, the mandate, and the political will to act as if America was one nation, indivisible, under threat by forces that no human can stop but for which some can prepare.

These are the quiet, bureaucratic saints of modern life: the meteorologists who lose sleep to calculate how many inches per hour will turn your street into a river; the FEMA recovery officers who parachute into chaos with tarps, water, and medical supplies; the radio operators in windowless rooms who send out warnings at 2 a.m. that save whole towns.

And they are under attack.

Not from fire or flood or storm, but from a different kind of weather event: a high-pressure system of ideological stupidity, the kind that forms over Project 2025 and DOGE extremists who saw the word “climate” and read it as “communism.” It’s an article of faith in their safe Washington offices that FEMA is a waste, that the Weather Service is a luxury, and public infrastructure is just socialism in drag.

These are the same folks who will scream about tyranny if the federal government tells them to get their kids vaccinated against measles but beg for a Coast Guard helicopter to rescue them from their summer homes when the levee breaks.

It’s a peculiar theology, especially common in the MAGA era of the Deep South, where God is omnipotent, but FEMA is too expensive. Where men in camo hats and F-150s watch their homes float away while muttering darkly about the evils of “big government,” even as they wonder why the Deep State won’t let Donald Trump cut disaster relief checks. They think “freedom” means refusing help until it’s too late.

And then? They vote for the same people who gutted flood maps, deregulated zoning, slashed emergency response budgets, and told them FEMA was an enemy of liberty. Russell Vought and Elon Musk wanted to shred the NWS because Project 2025 thought it was a hive of climate heresy and not meteorology nerds. Cutting NWS’s minuscule $1.4 billion budget to the bone is ironic as hell after last week: more than a few billionaires will save more on their taxes due to the BBB than NWS’s entire budget.

The cost isn’t theoretical. It’s measured in caskets.

In Texas this week, the cost came due again. Water doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t bargain or compromise. It just takes. You can be rich, you can be poor, you can believe in free markets or federal relief; when the dam breaks, the water doesn’t check your voter registration card. But it does matter what kind of government you’ve built to meet it.

And we are tearing down the walls of the only shelter we have left.

Congressional Republicans, in thrall to their Ayn Rand fantasies and Steve Bannon fever dreams, want to dismantle FEMA. Cut the NWS. Privatize weather forecasting. Abolish community preparedness grants. Let the market decide, they say. Let people fend for themselves. The invisible hand, apparently, can also operate a rescue boat.

You know what the market gave us in Katrina? Exploding gas prices and private contractors billing $400 for a bag of ice. You know what the market gave us in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in the Florida Panhandle? Trailer parks full of mold, insurance companies that ghosted their policyholders, and a suicide spike among first responders. In my home state of Florida, decades of pro-developer indifference means some folks now pay more per month in insurance than they do on their mortgage.

But sure…let’s put AccuWeather in charge and cross our fingers.

Meanwhile, the storms don’t stop.

They’re coming harder, faster, stranger. Not just because of climate change (though that’s part of it), but because we’ve built so poorly, paved so stupidly, and planned so selfishly that the land is tired of holding us.

Every long-leaf pine forest turned into a subdivision, every bayou drained for a strip mall, every wetland turned into the Villas At Heritage Mill Oaks Landing 5 Phase 3 all stacks the kindling higher.

And still, we are cutting the fire lines.

In Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome, the apocalypse wasn’t loud. It was bureaucratic, banal, and inevitable. That’s how it feels now. Not a single grand moment, but a thousand missed warnings. Not a villain in a cape, but Trump-fellating, small-gubmint DOGE-caucus congressman in a golf shirt who doesn’t know the first thing about storm surge but is quite certain that the government should be run like a business.

Except a business wouldn’t insure or deliver half of what the National Weather Service or FEMA does. A business would let half the South drown in our indifference to one another.

There is a tragic, almost Faulknerian inevitability to it: the proud, doomed man standing on his porch in rising water, shaking his fist at a government helicopter, demanding it leave him be, even as the water laps at his chest. There is pride in it. Madness, too. But it’s ours.

And if we don’t change something, it’ll be our undoing. Government isn’t the only solution: in every disaster, there are civilian volunteers and local first responders who shoulder the brunt of rescue and recovery efforts. In Kerr County, they’re working at this moment to rescue survivors alongside government agencies like the Coast Guard, who, in their usual aw-shucks way, are the heroes we deserve.

This isn’t just about one flood, one fire, or one weekend. It’s about a future where the safety net has vanished, the storms are fiercer, and the only plan left is prayer.

And while I’ve got nothing against prayer, I’d prefer it be paired with a radio warning, NOAA text alerts, and a tougher infrastructure than the slapdash, lowest-bidder trash the South seems willing to tolerate. Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, is a man now proven to mismanage disasters in every season. Still, God forbid he push the Texas Legislature for a truly tougher power grid, better flood control, or sensible resilience planning. Last year, the Texas Legislature proudly killed a bill that would have helped local communities build emergency disaster communications systems.

The South has always lived in the mouth of disaster. Just about the only thing we don’t get here is earthquakes: at this point, it feels like God may be keeping that as a hole card to ensure we pay attention.

But now, the disasters are faster, the tools fewer, and the leaders dumber. We’re dancing toward the edge of the levee, blindfolded, deafened by Project 2025, and DOGE goons screeching "freedom!" as they kick away the last sandbag.

The water is rising.

And without the tiny government agencies like the NWS and FEMA that MAGA loves to hate, there’s not a damn thing standing between us and the flood.