I really am disturbed by my giving in to the practice of BUYING water.  I look for the cheapest spring water sold in the super market and have no idea why I am doing this.  Carol does not like the flat taste of distilled water that I think must be the purest sold. I have gotten to the point where I really do not want to drink water straight from the PUBLIC tap although I know that the authorities have not permitted an outbreak of any kind of water borne disease.  It is this distrust of GOVERNMENT that has gone over to a privately held water company – surely that water is as tainted as is the service provided in tax offices, the police and by the PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

My argument is that we witness daily disgrace of capitalists and their accountants and do not want to tear down their businesses.  Yet, the very mention of public malfeasance makes the best of us want to get rid of government, huddle in our gated communities and hire guards to keep the unwashed, the unlettered, those not like us and undeserving others away from our possessions.  But liquid is the water of life or something like that.  On Mars, “May you never thirst” there was the greeting Robert Heinlein invented for the denizens who lived on the very dry Red Planet.  Water is important yet we want to get rid of it when we have too much – we want it very badly when there is too little. Maybe we should ask the government to take care of this.

We have recently seen the destructive power of too much water moving too swiftly.  Floods in Europe and the U.S. as well as in spots all over the inhabited world show our lack of wisdom of aiding too many people who choose to live in flood plains.  All over the world in tropical climates monsoons, typhoons and hurricanes demonstrate in the blink of an eye the power of Mother Nature in her windy and watery moods. Then there are people who try to exist in deserts.

Then, there are the puny humans who in their hubris decide to live in chancy places and put themselves squarely in harms way.  They choose to live in the path of airborne and earthly water on the move over and over again.  They have a great resistance to rational thinking about the “perfect storm” and think it is entertainment. This is not only proof of liquid recidivism on Nature’s part but also on the part of people everywhere.  They seem to be testing who is stronger – the forces of destruction of wind, flood, tsunamis, tidal waves or the other extreme of draught against the will and desires of little men. Maybe we should ask the government to take care of us.

People sometimes place their faith in levees and houses on stilts and are surprised when they have neither planned wisely nor well.