Tina Dupuy: The Real Terror: 6,408 Deaths Caused By Extreme Weather!

The 14th Regiment Armory was built for the National Guard in 1893. The massive Brooklyn structure was supposed to mimic the castles of Europe, brick towers and fortifications of previous centuries. Now a YMCA, the Armory today is a shelter, filled to capacity with nursing home evacuees from Hurricane Sandy. The metaphor: What was built originally to protect us, has to be repurposed for a new type of foe. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, in the 1600's was an actual wall. The settlers of New Amsterdam built a northern border to guard themselves against the English and Native American encroachers. In recent times it could be re named Barricade Street. It's a militarized zone with checkpoints and barriers to presumably thwart an attack on the stock market. Those precautions did little when Wall Street was flooded, under water, during Sandy. The markets were closed for a third time in their history. The first being the blizzard of 1888, and the second being the attacks of September 11, 2001. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he "will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it." Romney wants to build more ships instead of building infrastructure so we don't need ships to get down Canal Street. As I write, this part of Manhattan is still dark. Crews are still searching for missing family members on Staten Island. The final death toll has not been tallied. The victims not yet buried. We've been shortsighted. We've marginalized those who warned us. We've treated environmentalism as an irksome fad. We've given cadence to non-troversies and called it balance. We've spent trillions to protect ourselves against terrorists and done nothing to keep our biggest cities above water in a storm. "One of the very important security threats we face is climate change." said Senator Barbara Boxer in a 2007 cable interview.