If not now, then when?

In the aftermath of a disaster, we're often told it's not time to ask questions

The day after a tragedy in my hometown, 53 years ago. (Photo from Rapid City Public Library)

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The tragedy that struck the Texas Hill Country over the 4^th of July weekend is too familiar, and so is the response. It evokes painful memories.

One warm night in the summer of 1972, a billion metric tons of water fell on South Dakota’s Black Hills, swelling the winding mountain tributaries of the Cheyenne River. At the edge of Rapid City, my hometown, picturesque Rapid Creek turned into a 20-foot wall of water that tore down a narrow gulch known as Dark Canyon, destroying along its path dozens of lovely homes that I can yet picture today. People looking down on pretty little Canyon Lake from the hills above watched helplessly as the water began to overflow the lake’s shoreline, and then suddenly flush out as it breached the 20-foot-high dam built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.¹

My little city was torn in half. More than 1,335 homes were destroyed, some 3,000 people were hurt, and 238 died. The property damage was estimated at $160 million — in 2024 dollars, that’s $1.2 billion. As significant as that toll was in a community our size, I must say that the impact on our citizens’ mental health was incalculable.

Here’s something I didn’t know until much later: Some 15 years before that tragic night, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, noting that the Cheyenne had flooded 33 times since 1878, had proposed flood control projects in five areas of the Hills, including Rapid City. But the residents of our little city didn’t like the idea of channelizing Rapid Creek and extending nine bridges to accommodate the creek’s wider path; they blanched at the $2.7 million pricetag. And so when the 1972 flood came in the middle of a summer night, there was little that could prevent devastation.²

My family was lucky that night. I was away at school, and my parents lived on a hill, so even though phone lines were down and I couldn’t talk with them, I figured they would be safe. Three days after the flood, I caught sight of my dad in a Today show segment; he was presiding at a funeral. Later I learned that my folks had taken in a family that had survived losing their home. Others were not so fortunate; some friends died, others endured devastating losses.

So what happened this month along the Guadelupe River in Texas was sadly resonant for me, as it surely was for many who have witnessed up close the impact of a natural disaster. At this writing, 121 people are confirmed dead and some 170 remain missing. Our sincere empathy, well-meaning as it surely is, may have little effect on those who are encountering the searing pain of loss just now.

Empathy, after all, is just a feeling. It is has value only if it motivates moral behavior — that is, if it provokes action.

Yet some of what strikes me as an appropriately empathetic response to the tragedy along the Guadalupe River is these days being rebuffed, largely by people who seem to have a stake in limiting our response to something more superficial, and less threatening.

As questions emerged this week about whether the Hill Country had been appropriately prepared for the flooding and warned of impending disaster, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott used an analogy from football, the state’s favorite sport, to deflect questions. Blame, he said, was “the word choice of losers.”³

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that it was “depraved and despicable” to question whether President Trump’s cuts to the National Weather Service had left people unprepared to absorb the storm’s impact. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she oversees, was slow to respond to the Texas disaster were “absolutely trash.”⁴

Yet journalists on the scene in Texas and covering their beats in Washington and Austin have uncovered facts that officials cannot hide, and that raise questions of whether government cuts under this administration set the stage for the Guadalupe disaster.

Trump has said that he wants to eliminate FEMA and leave disaster response to states, and Noem earlier this year imposed new limits on the agency so that her personal sign-off is now required on any expenditure over $100,000. Officials told CNN that as a result of that rule, they were unable to quickly deploy critical search-and-rescue teams and lifesaving resources as the floodwaters raced through the Hill Country.⁵

It's also unclear if cuts to the National Weather Service, which lost 600 employees this year, might have had any impact on the forecasts. The Austin/San Antonio NWS office currently has six vacancies, including the position of warning coordination meteorologist, who acts as liaison to local officials. To be sure, the NWS had warned of “pockets of heavy rain” and dangerous flash floods in the region, but twice as much rain as was forecast fell on the two branches of the Guadalupe just upstream of where most victims have been found. Experts say it would have been impossible to predict that the horrifying reality of the river rising 26 feet in just 45 minutes.⁶

Yet I hear an echo of Rapid City in what we’ve learned in recent days about the local response to the threat of floods in Kerr County. About eight years ago, it turns out, county officials in Kerrville considered installing an early-warning system for the region. But year after year, the state didn’t come through with a grant that would have paid for it, and officials say that local residents didn’t want to shoulder the tax burden themselves. It would have cost $1 million.⁷

That sounds too much like the South Dakotans’ refusal to contemplate flood control along Rapid Creek until after the 1972 calamity.

Fortunately for my hometown, the federal government responded quickly to the Black Hills flood. Even though the state was then represented by two Democrats in the U.S. Senate — one of whom, George McGovern, was just then on the verge of becoming his party’s presidential nominee — President Richard Nixon quickly dispatched a top aide, Robert Finch, to assess the damage on the ground. An urban renewal plan was shaped that included contoured levees and channel improvements, as well as acquisition of 1,100 parcels of land containing 3,100 acres, at a cost of $48 million. It stands today as a mark of effective government: It includes nature areas and trails, ballfields and a golf course. Over the past half-century, it has protected the city from significant flooding damage.⁸

While Trump similarly promises quick aid to Texas now, his vow might fairly be absorbed with some doubt, and not just because he is demonstrably an inveterate liar. Consider, for example, the jealousy that a Californian may fairly feel: The deadly January wildfires around Los Angeles killed 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 homes and businesses, yet the state is still waiting for Trump and the Republican-led Congress to free some $40 billion in disaster aid. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s congressional delegation are pleading for help, so far in vain.⁹

California, of course, is led by Democrats; Texas these days is reliably red. You may observe that Californians no less dependably fund the federal government than Texans, but the pain of their losses seems to strike officials who now lead our nation as less worthy of response. Trump has suggested the California wildfires were caused in no small part by bad forest and water management by Democratic officials, and that they should change their policies as a condition of any help.

That sort of quid pro quo, or anything other than a fulsome response to need, is inappropriate to consider for Texas just now, the White House insists. Doing anything but focusing on the immediate losses “serves no purpose during this time of national mourning,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.¹⁰

Nor, presumably, is this a time to note that Trump’s vigorous efforts to undermine any government action to lessen the impact of climate change make it all but certain that there will be more frequent disasters like the Hill Country flood, and indeed more severe weather events generally. He wants to cut up to 40 percent of the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and abolish the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Climate scientists warn that we are degrading our best efforts to avert climate disaster.¹¹

Perhaps this isn’t the place to note that. Sympathy and care are indeed the appropriate first reactions we might rightly summon to the Texas calamity. But how often have we heard politicians claim tragedy as an excuse to dodge responsibility for action, or for inexcusable inaction?

In 2017, after 58 people were murdered in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, President Trump declared that it was “premature” to explore how the government might respond to such violence. “We are not going to talk about that today,” he said.¹² After 18 people were killed during a deadly shooting spree in Lewiston, Maine, in 2023, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that “the problem is the human heart, not guns,” and that it was inappropriate to discuss gun control “in the middle of a crisis.”¹³

So if a crisis is not a time to discuss solutions to its cause, when might it be appropriate? Perhaps when people have moved on to other concerns, and when the hot impetus for meaningful response has cooled? For those comfortable with the status quo, that seems convenient.

Time, after all, is finite; opportunities can fade if they’re not acted upon promptly. There’s a familiar line attributed to Hillel the Elder, a Jewish sage who wrote in the first century BCE: “If not now, when?”

That notion, incorporated as part of the Talmud, likely influenced Charles Dodgson, a student of religion as the son and grandson of Anglican clergy, who as Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to his more famous classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the second novel, the White Queen offers Alice a sweet treat of “jam every other day,” but not on that day. “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today,” the queen declares. Alice is perplexed.

For the reader of that book, whether child or adult, the message is clear: It is folly to consider a reward as something only imagined in the future or recalled from the past, but never realized in the present. How silly; how like contemporary American politics.

“Jam today,” in contrast, represents the notion of seizing the present moment. It’s not just about having fun now; it’s about making reality out of what we imagine or aspire to achieve. “Jam today” is, thus, a call to activism.

Yes, as Ecclesiastes teaches, there is a time and a place for everything. And if today, then, is not the time to draw attention to steps that arguably made the Hill Country flood more disastrous, and actions that make its repetition more likely, then when might the time be right?

Or isn’t it in fact the very time, just now, for “jam today” — and isn’t this in so many realms likewise the right moment for us to engage in the activism that is the manifestation of true empathy?

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20071009114711/http://sd.water.usgs.gov/projects/1972flood/

2. https://www.nwo.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheet-Article-View/Article/581806/historical-vignette-the-rapid-city-flood-june-1972/

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/us/abbott-blame-floods-losers-football.html

4. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/08/politics/biden-blame-trump-texas-flood

5. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/fema-texas-flood-noem

6. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/crews-search-dozens-missing-after-texas-floods-2025-07-09/

7. https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-camp-warning-system-not-funded-0845df62390b9623331ba4a030c5fc7d

8. https://www.npr.org/2012/06/08/154576917/disastrous-s-d-flood-caused-national-wake-up-call

9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/09/texas-flooding-trump-politics-disaster-relief/

10. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5388114-leavitt-trump-texas-floods/

11. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-lasting-threat-of-trumps-cuts-to-noaa-and-nws-on-american-communities/

12. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/05/opinion/editorials/editorial-debate-gun-control.html

13. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/27/speaker-mike-johnson-gun-control-gay-marriage

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The button was a Christmas present a few years ago from my daughter, who embraces its meaning.

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

- Rex Smith