Hurricanes Helene and Milton may be gone, but they won’t be forgotten, certainly not by the hard-hit residents and businesses of the Southeast.
The immense economic devastation and loss of life wrought by those hurricanes—and, in the case of Milton, the tornadoes it spawned—will be felt for years to come in Florida and Western North Carolina.
The hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of residents whose homes and lives were shattered by Helene and Milton will never be the same, but they will rebuild them as best they can. That is, after all, the indomitable American spirit.
Meanwhile, nonprofits and religious charities, such as the Red Cross and evangelist Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse, are on the front lines of recovery efforts as partisan political battles rage over the allocation of federal disaster relief aid.
The Biden-Harris administration disputes Republicans’ assertions that hundreds of millions of dollars of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds it has spent on the care and feeding of the millions of illegal immigrants it has waved into the country were misspent and is money that could have—and rightly should have—gone instead to American citizens who lost their homes, and in some cases, all of their earthly possessions to the hurricanes. Many remain without electricity to this day.
Adding insult to injury, this comes amid a tone-deaf Biden-Harris administration announcing on Oct. 4 that it was shoveling $157 million in humanitarian assistance to Lebanon, which is caught in the crossfire of Israel–Hezbollah fighting.
According to NBC News, that $157 million “brings the total humanitarian assistance provided to support vulnerable populations in Lebanon and Syria to nearly $386 million as of fiscal year 2024.”
The announcement came just one day before Milton intensified from a tropical disturbance into a hurricane.
“This funding will address new and existing needs of internally displaced persons and refugee populations inside Lebanon and the communities that host them. The assistance will also support those fleeing to neighboring Syria,” the State Department said.
All those millions of dollars would be much better spent helping “internally displaced” North Carolinians and Floridians who fled Helene and Milton to rebuild their lives and livelihoods.
According to Business Insider, preliminary estimates by the Fitch Ratings credit rating service say Milton caused between $30 billion and $50 billion in damage. As of Oct. 12, its death toll stood at 23. The comparable figures for Helene were 250 deaths and $40 billion in damage.
The newest federal largesse for Lebanon amid back-to-back U.S. hurricanes called to mind a spoken-word recording that dominated radio airwaves and the Top 40 charts half a century ago.
In late 1973 and early 1974, two separate recordings of Toronto CFRB radio broadcaster Gordon Sinclair’s editorial “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion)” lauded U.S. generosity in sending disaster-recovery aid overseas.
The first version was released on record by Byron MacGregor, a news anchor of a different radio station, CKLW in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit, recited over a recording of “America the Beautiful” by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
It reportedly sold 3.5 million copies and reached No. 1 on the trade publication Cashbox’s bestseller chart and No. 4 on rival Billboard’s chart. MacGregor donated all proceeds to the Red Cross.
Subsequently released on record by Sinclair himself in early 1974 with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing in the background, “The Americans” again made the Top 40, though it reached only No. 24 on the Billboard chart.
A third version, narrated by country music singer Tex Ritter and released posthumously, topped out at No. 35 on the country chart.
In the original editorial that thrice became a 45-rpm recording, Sinclair, then 73, recounted how, as a youngster six decades earlier, he had read of floods on the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China in the early 20th century.
“Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did, that’s who. They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Ganges, and the Niger,” he said on his June 5, 1973, broadcast. “Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is underwater, and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help.”
That was a reference to the Mississippi River flood that occurred between March and May of that year. Spawned by torrential rain, it inundated more than 17 million acres and damaged more than 30,000 homes. It caused nearly $170 million in damage in the Mississippi River Delta. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, that’s the equivalent of $1.22 billion today.)
Sinclair noted the seeming ingratitude of some foreign recipients of U.S. financial and material assistance and lamented the lack of reciprocity when the U.S. itself was stricken by natural disasters.
“When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it’s the United States that hurries in to help. Managua, Nicaragua, is one of the most recent examples,” Sinclair’s editorial said. “So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes—nobody has helped.
“I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone raced to the help of Americans in trouble?” he said.
No, I can’t, but now would be a good time for them to start.
Originally published at WashingtonTimes.com