**Melissa’s Monsoon: When a Storm Hits Harder Than the Government Response**
Listen up, citizens of the great geopolitical arena—we’ve got a watery wallop in the Caribbean and it’s not just about rain. Tropical Storm Melissa has thrown her manic tantrum all over the Dominican Republic like a politician at a press conference after getting caught red-handed. The streets of Santo Domingo? Less “capital of progress,” more “aqua obstacle course from your worst Uber nightmare.”
Cars didn’t drive—they paddled. Commuters looked less like drivers and more like contestants in a low-budget version of *Survivor: Suburban Flood Zone*. And while nature did her part in dumping a biblical flood onto the island, the real deluge is the silence from officials who treat disaster prep like it’s an elective course they skipped in college.
Let me break it down: Melissa isn’t just a storm, she’s an X-ray machine, revealing the brittle bones of local infrastructure and the paper-thin bandaids politicians slap onto crisis after crisis. Drainage? Please. Some of these roads sucked up water faster than a state-run agency absorbs scandal. Flash flooding wasn’t a “surprise;” it was a promise long bred by years of neglected maintenance and redirected budgets.
And let’s talk about leadership, shall we?
Where’s the decisive action? Where’s the mobilized response that says, “We’ve learned from the last one”? Oh right—probably stuck in traffic somewhere between denial and deflection. Instead, we’re handed press statements drier than the actual roads aren’t. Instagram photos of politicians in rubber boots wading through puddles like they just discovered suffering for the first time? Please, save it for your re-election posters, gentlemen.
Now don’t think I’m letting Melissa off the hook. She’s no daisy. The gusts whipped, the waters rose, and the heavens opened like they got a stern lecture from Poseidon himself. But disasters don’t create incompetence, folks—they just expose it. A storm doesn’t choose favorites, but poor planning always does. The rich hover in helicopters while the poor bail water out with soup pots. That ain’t a weather system—that’s a social system drenched in inequality.
So let’s get real.
Melissa is a warning shot—a reminder that nature doesn’t play by polling numbers or campaign slogans. Infrastructure isn’t sexy, but it’s survival. And politicians? Listen closely: You can’t sweep a flood under the rug. You either fund the future or get washed away with the deadwood of mediocrity.
Storms, like governments, only become disasters when we let them.
Until the next thunderclap of common sense,
– Mr. 47
