Coincidence or cause?

By Tom Ehrich

You will be glad to know that I am single-handedly solving the drought that is decimating California.

This is my second visit to the Peninsula south of San Francisco since my wife moved here to spend a year caring for our grandson. Both times it has rained.

In each of our nightly NY-to-CA phone calls, she talks of sunshine and warmth. But when I visit, it has been rain and more rain. She says I should hire myself out to local farmers.

Oh, wait a minute. You say this is just a coincidence? I am not the cause?

How can we blame people we don't like for the phenomena we don't like if you insist on crediting coincidence? That would upset the prevailing political and religious calculus.

We have been told, for example, that America's climate woes are caused by tolerance of homosexuality. Was that simply blather?

We have been told that the poor are poor because God disapproves of their moral character, and that, conversely, God obviously celebrates the moral fiber of the 1% who prey on their customers, get rich by inheritance and call it hard work, deny benefits to the needy and call it patriotism, fight any movement away from fossil fuels, demand government largesse and call it free-market capitalism. Is that simply blather, too?

California is a big state. So whom shall we blame for the drought? Bay Area liberals? Silicon Valley tech-wealth? Hollywood liberals? Orange County conservatives? How about the US Navy? Or wineries? Or dope growers?

Keep the blame flowing, and never look at a farm culture that depends on irrigation. If God had wanted Southern California to be a desert, God would have made it a desert. Oh, wait a minute, that's what God did.

I'm guessing no one wants my services as a rainy-day-visitor. Or as an apostle of coincidence. Blaming is such a handy weapon when you don't have the facts or ideas on your side.