The Texas Floods and the Lives Lost at Camp Mystic
The Sleepaway camp where my ten -year -old daughter will live a month this summer prohibits telephone calls for the first six days, with the exception of emergencies. Then children receive a brief call at one hour set, once a week. This is also the frequency to which the camp sends photos, in which your child may appear or not. (I comb through these as they are a lost roll of Dealey Plaza: there is a badge, there is Babushka Lady, there are my child.) No personal devices – circles, iPads, GPS trackers – are authorized. Instead, my daughter and I exchange handwritten letters. Last year, I started to think that she was having too fun writing at home, but, in fact, she had written five letters in seven days, and they all arrived at the same time.
I am grateful for the restrictive communication policies of our camp, and I know that many other sleeping camps adopt a similar approach. Children should be free to throw themselves into the fabric of the camp – jump, hiking, crafts, singalongs, stage performances, playing “froccer” – without taking hold of the outlets of the house. The sleeping camp feels ideally like a world in itself, a secret sorcerer ritual in the woods, both wild and autonomous. As children are old enough to participate, parents had years of practice to entrust them with guards, teachers and other caregivers for many of their hours of standby; Entrusting these children to what is equivalent to a temporary company in itself is a next wide but logical step. And although a parent can feel guilty or uncomfortable to admit it, it is pleasant to give in all the control of the education work of children for a few weeks, to have the chance to miss your child. It’s good, from time to time, not to have to think of her at all.
Of the more than eighty-dix-confirmed victims of catastrophic floods in the center of Texas, which started the hours early on July 4, twenty-seven dead were campers or advisers of Camp Mystic, a Christian camp for girls in the county of Kerr, on the western shores of the Guadalupe river. At least ten campers are still missing. The river has increased by about twenty-six feet in forty-five minutes and apparently swept away girls in their berths while they were sleeping. The youngest children were eight years old. Photographs of the Aftertermath show mattresses have torn the sources of bunk bed coils, duvets and lunch boxes and sneakers and animals in plush sewn in mud. In a photo, I saw a rescue worker carrying a complexion of a motorhome; I had to turn away.
The disaster is still taking place, with heavy rain planned in the coming days. As for the devastation that the region has already endured, there will probably be a lot of blame to put in the weeks, months and years to come. Was the National Weather Service, one of the many federal agencies recently dug by DOGECorrectly equipped and equipped to provide floods? Have local officials responded to the imminent threat to appropriate speed and care? Would the authorities had to evacuate the low zones near the Guadalupe river, including the berths of the Mystic camp-in the afternoon of July 3, when the office of Austin / San Antonio of the NWS published a flood watch? Why are Kerr county managers unable to guarantee the financing and construction of a stop system after previous fatal disasters? (During a press conference on Sunday, some of these questions were asked in the sheriff and the municipal director of the county of Kerr, who suddenly put an end to the session and left the room, while the journalists continued to call them.) And to what extent did the tragedy were caused or exacerbated by climate change-and by the greed and nihilism of his companies and the political drifts, in particular climate of climate gangliation?
The search for someone or something to blame can be moral and rational. The blame, if it is properly placed, can stimulate action and save lives in the future. But blame is also a means for the search for patterns, the parts oriented towards the effect of the human brain to take control of a set of uncontrollable and unfathomable circumstances. When a child is injured, his parent, rushing to give meaning to the pain and misfortune of his family, can settle down to blame the nearest person at hand. If only I had kept my child at home. If only I hadn’t sent her to this camp. If only she had been safe with me. If only I had done my job and had protected it. About twenty kilometers east of Camp Mystic, a family of three people, in town for the Rodeo, went to camp together; The father was confirmed dead and his wife and his son are still missing. ♦
