Seawalls

When we visit Vallarta, we like to ride the bus from Villa del Palmar to the very beginning of the malecon.  It's a pleasant walk along the sea past Sergio Bustamante sculptures, acrobats twirling down and around impossibly tall poles while dressed in Mayan regalia, sand-covered chess players masquerading as statues, sculptors making sand castles on the beach, and vendors hawking shrimp on a stick and Mexican corn.

It is especially cool when the wind comes up and the tide starts lapping up the side of the concrete wall.  On many afternoons, only the malecon is keeping local institutions like Señor Frog's and The Cheeky Monkey from ankle high water on their patios with the ocean views.

The fate of Señor Frog notwithstanding, the malecon is a seawall that protects downtown Vallarta and its hordes of tourists from periodic flooding.

What the world needs right now are more seawalls.

Those Scandinavian coastal countries have faced reality and used public money to erect seawalls to protect against the frequent buffeting they receive from sea.  Makes sense, but to the American ear such forethought smacks of socialism (insert gasp).

When Atlantic City, along with much of the Eastern Seaboard got inundated by a hurricane a few years ago, I wrote a post in here speculating that the chances of the Eastern Seaboard getting inundated again were probably pretty good, so maybe we should start thinking Scandinavianly (great word) and erect a few seawalls.  I noticed that actual pundits in actual newspapers said the same thing.

A Side Story:  You can build seawalls to mitigate against other things than just, you know, the sea.  In the men's locker room at the Y (I hope I will see it again some day.), the drinking fountain is hanging on to the wall by a thread.  There must be just one bolt holding the thing on and I don't want to be standing in front of it when it blows.  I told the folks at the desk.  I even told one of the maintenance guys.  No luck.  The kind of foresight that would fix the fountain before it actually blows--let me call it "seawalling"--costs money.

Let's talk about seawalling vis a vis the Coronavirus in particular and pandemics in general.  We weren't prepared for this.  No one, with the possible exception of South Korea and Singapore, was.  It is of course a temptation to point a finger at Trump for his ham-handed way with messaging and his tendency to hide his head in the sand while pointing his finger backward at his predecessors, but let us be honest, any president--Franklin Delano fucking Roosevelt for Christ's sake--would have been overwhelmed by the events of the last few weeks.  Any stock market would have reacted the same way.  The fact remains.  We were not prepared and things would be better if we had been.

I don't want to be a prophet of doom, but I have a feeling that pandemics are going to be a lot like the periodic pounding of the Atlantic on the Eastern Seaboard.  We need to build seawalls!  We need to have masks and ventilators in reserve.  We need to have the infrastructure in place to get all those supplies to where they are needed.  We need to have an economic plan that will get us through time and again until the most recent hurricane, the most recent pandemic, fades away.  And someone, somewhere needs to develop a defense and an efficient way of delivering it.  Finally, we need to believe in science, get vaccinated, and do what the experts advise.

I wish I was in Vallarta right now, hanging out on the seawall, maybe even getting a drink and some nachos at Señor Frog's.  I wish we all were.  Maybe next year.