Pakistan is described as an American ally. If so they will surely be disappointed that we will stand back after the last year they’ve suffered through. There have been Death Valley hot days this year in the nation of 127 degrees Fahrenheit. I visited California one summer when the temperature hit 113 degrees and my memory is of driving on a back road and seeing two horses standing over one lying on the ground. Horses never lie on the ground. And California is blessed with air conditioning.
Then the monsoons fell and fell and fell. One third of a nation a sixth the size of the US was covered in water.
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/08/30/1119979965/pakistan-floods-monsoon-climate
I began collecting stamps when Pakistan was divided into two largely Muslim nations on either side of India a largely Hindu nation one third the size of the United States. Ten years after I put my stamp collection away they were each racing to build nuclear weapons. Then there was a Monsoon that devastated East Pakistan leaving a million dead on the beaches as high water washed over their coasts. That was followed by Civil War as the Pakistanis of the East blamed Western Pakistan with not doing enough to help their slightly different peoples.
Now West Pakistan can wait in vain for the worlds help as its richest countries are focused on the absolutely useless and destructive war in the Ukraine which is, unlike Pakistan, in their backyards with another Chernobyl on the cusp of exploding.
Twenty years ago I made friends online with a woman living on our East Coast who was from Bangladesh and lived through the Civil War. Bangladesh is the name East Pakistan adopted in its Independence. I am a little shocked that I have never mentioned my friend in the blog but we had stopped chatting five or six years before I began the blog. Her path to Massachusetts through Libya under Muamar Kaddafi was an interesting one. When Claudia and I paid a visit on her and her husband her in-laws were visiting. When Ru and her husband offered us finger food to be eaten with fingers and we joined them in their custom their very Westernized parents were scandalized that they let us Americans see them eat in such a non western way……I mention that only because it occurred to me in the absence of any earlier commentaries her in Lincolndemocrat on the great calamities of Earth.
When, not if, Greenland adds ten inches of water to the ocean the next storm in Bangladesh will put the one that led to civil war to shame.
