Flooding the Zone & Flooding the Planet
New study says it’s time to start evacuating New Orleans, but no one is listening
I learned about opportunity costs in a high school economics class, but today the term most aptly applies to our media ecosystem. For every story we spend our time paying attention to, there is another story we don’t have time for, and many of those stories that are lost in the clutter are incredibly important.
Corporate media knows this, and corrupt billionaires count on it to help them hide their thievery, their manipulation of global markets, and their weekend getaways to Epstein Island. Flooding the zone is how they keep us ignorant. It’s how they use our reality TV addiction to keep our attention on the left/right nonsense as one of our most historic cities is about to become the next Atlantis.
According to a new study published in the academic journal Nature Sustainability, the climate crisis is about to swallow up one of our oldest and most historic cities, New Orleans, Louisiana.
The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
Having lived in New Orleans for a few years as a kid, I knew a few things about the place before I read the study. I knew the entire city was below sea level, and I knew that meant it had to rely on a complex system of levees and floodwalls to keep the water out. I also remember what happened in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit and that system failed, costing us over 1800 lives and over $108 billion in damages.
Now it’s just over 20 years later, and it looks like we have to surrender the city due to our inability to responsibly handle the damage we’re doing to our own planet. And if we ask ourselves how we got here, the only real answers we can come up with are also the reasons we do just about everything in America today – greed and denial. I’d add apathy to the list as well, but since the Epstein Class has been flooding the zone with climate denial propaganda for the last half century, our apathy is mostly a product of their greed. Our collective ignorance is just the latest example of billionaires getting exactly what they paid for, and drowning New Orleans is a small price to pay to keep the stock prices high.
But the most shocking thing about this new study is not that the city is doomed, but that no one seems to care. I mean, even with a 24-hour news cycle, there is simply no room for this story, and if it ever becomes national news in any serious way, we already know that the oil companies will hire competing scientists who will tell us all is well, and then they will pay whatever is necessary to make sure we hear the denial hundreds if not thousands of times for every single mention of the danger. As the water rises, they will pay whatever they have to pay to make sure we don’t look at it.
As the edges of America are being swallowed by the oceans, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the people who live in these areas, the families who built their wealth on the land that will soon be underwater. I also wonder what our corporate media will say about it when the order is given to evacuate. My guess is that whoever steps up to that microphone to tell the plain truth to a dying city will instantly become the target of a corporate ad buy so large that he or she will lose the next election in a landslide. That’s the cost of telling the truth when a lie is better for the bottom line, at least in today’s America.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.