Texas Tragedy

During my teenage years, I spent five summers as a camper and counselor at an overnight camp in West Virginia. Camps are an amazing place where you gain independence and get to have constant fun with friends with few responsibilities (well, except as a counselor). Decades later, I'm still friends with people from camp. My boys are heading to an overnight camp for their 4th, 3rd, and 1st summers respectively. After his first year, The Moose cried on the way home because he was going to miss it. As I'm writing this, Pedro Tulo is at a Scouts camp.

Maybe it’s because of my love of camps, but I'm finding the tragic floods in and around Kerr County, Texas just devastating. Over 100 people were killed including at least two dozen campers and counselors at Camp Mystic and over 150 people are missing as a result of floods. It’s truly awful and sad.

President Trump and his administration are certainly not to blame for the floods. Anyone claiming this is being ridiculous. Before last weekend, it's unlikely that Trump had ever been to Kerr County or even heard of it. Still, looking into whether cuts made to the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and FEMA had any impact on the alert system before the flooding and during the recovery is definitely warranted. So is looking into the state and local emergency systems and policies and procedures. 

This is what Texas governor Greg Abbott said after a reporter asked who was to blame for this tragedy. 

“That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’” (Abbott's quotes available here).

Staying with the football metaphor, this is a really stupid statement. Every football team, particularly at the college and professional levels and likely at most Texas high schools, does extensive film study and evaluates how to improve. If a team wins 17-14, they don't say to themselves, we're good. We don't need to have any more practices. We don't need to evaluate how we gave up 14 points or why we didn't score more. Just show up a few minutes before next week's game to warm up. We've got this. Ma'am.

Now maybe "blame" wasn't the right word in the question, but you absolutely conduct an investigation so that this type of tragedy doesn't happen again.

Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt - AFP via Getty Images

Batman Field Trip

For most of my teenage years, I spent summers attending or working as a counselor at an overnight camp just outside Morgantown, West Virginia. As a camper, you never left the campgrounds except for a once-a-session field trip to Coopers Rock where you climbed on or rappelled down, you guessed it, rocks.

Thirty years ago this summer, we were supposed to go to Coopers Rock but took an unauthorized trip to Mountaineer Mall instead to see the recently release film, Batman starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Kim Basinger. It was awesome!

In hindsight, I have no idea if the counselors really pulled this off on their own or if they got approval from the camp director. We were actually a well-behaved group of about 15 boys (as extreme as we got was one of my cabin-mates playing an Eazy-E cassette every morning), particularly compared to the other group of teenage boys. I also don't remember how we paid for movie tickets or snacks. Did the counselors use the money that was supposed to go towards Coopers Rock entrance fees for this?

While we were sworn to secrecy at the time, I now think that someone above must have given the okay on this trip. If not, sorry if you're only finding out about this now. I hope there’s a statute of limitations on this!


Photo via Warner Brothers.