As I write this, my dear hometown of New Orleans stands on the brink of total destruction from Hurricane Katrina.  Of course, I remember my science teacher in the 7th grade at T.H. Harris Jr. High School warning us that our city was doomed.  Miss Bordelon, one of the wisest women I've ever known, explained to us in detail, yet in a way that did not unnecessarily panic her students, how the Mississippi River was trying to change its course away from New Orleans.  As it did this, the former river bed at New Orleans woud become a swampy, stinky mud pit and the city's lifeline would be gone forever.  This was the last years of the 1970s and few people had begun to talk about global warming.  But Miss Bordelon did.  Though it wasn't in our curriculum, this scientist extraordinaire explained to us how the temperature of earth's atmosphere would begin to rise as we continued to pump noxious gasses into the air through our automobiles and factories.  And she explained to us how this would effect the climate and weather patterns all over the world.  She also was well aware of how a direct hit from a hurricane would drown our city and many people would die.  There is only one thing that Miss Bordelon had wrong.  She explained to us that this probably wouldn't happen in our lifetime, that our grandchildren would have to suffer these things.  There is no doubt in my mind that only 25 years later, Miss Bordelon's warning has come to pass.  She only got the timing wrong. 

Any person who believes that all of the extreme weather that we have been experiencing over the last few years is not a result of global warming is a fool.  This statement applies to those politicians - including the current occupant of the White House - who try to explain away as circumstance the extraordinary weather phenomenon we have experienced.  A fool can have nothing in the world, or he can control the world.  Regardless, he's  still a fool.

And so, Miss Bordelon's students have grown up and now have children - and in some cases, grandchildren - of their own. New Orleans has been able to dodge disaster year after year.  So far, the Army Corps of Engineers have prevented the river from changing its course to the shorter route to the sea through the Atchafalaya basin.  Yet, the earth continues to withstand the crap that we belch out into the atmosphere, and Mother Nature is becoming angrier by the year.  The storms are coming more frequently and with greater strength.  We humans have only to stand and take our punishment.  I fear that the cost that we will have to pay will be the Gem of the Gulf, the Big Easy, my hometown.  When Bienville decided to build his city on the river's Beautiful Crescent, he could not have dreamed of a storm of the magnitude of Katrina.  He could not picture a river suddenly changing its course 50 miles to the west.  After all, the rivers in France have flowed in the same beds since the end of the last Ice Age, long before human beings could remember.   And he lived and built his city over a hundred years before the first combustion engine was built and began to pollute the earth.  So, he is not to blame for our predicament.  We are solely to blame.  But, pray for God's mercy.  "Thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy."