One Small Voice: Trump is like an erratic haboob

by Lynn Mandaville

Monsoon season has finally arrived here in the Valley of the Sun.

Sunday last, late in the afternoon, the sky darkened with that eerie yellowish glow that, back in Michigan, used to forebode strong thunderstorms or a tornado warning.  Here, it is the warning that the thunderstorms coming over the mountains are pushing before them dust storms, or, in really severe weather, a haboob.

The word haboob comes from the Arabic and signifies an intense dust storm carried on an atmospheric gravity current, or to us laymen, a weather front.

This is the time of year that dust storms are common.  A real rip-snorter of a haboob is more rare, but Sunday we had a full-blown haboob.

Two weather fronts collided over the valley, one from the west and one from the south, each pushing in its own thunderstorm and dust storm that met over the south valley.  It was really something!  In Chandler we got not one drop of rain, but boy did we get dust!

Then Monday, when no storms were predicted, a big front came over the mountains to the east of us, and we got a half inch of rain and a bunch more dust!

Tuesday was quieter, and storms without dust occurred all around the valley, but not in Chandler.

Wednesday brought another dust storm.

And tonight, while fireworks were exploding over the end of the Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Delaware, strong thunder and lightning were firing up all around the valley, first blowing in from the west and then from the east.  And we had more blessed rain.

As I sit here reflecting on our erratic monsoon weather, I can’t help but see a parallel between it and the three and a half years of the Trump administration.

If you’ve ever spent time in Arizona and paid attention to the lay of the land, you know that the Phoenix area lies in an actual valley.  It is bordered on the east by the Superstition and the White Mountains which run in a northwest to southeast direction across the state.  There is also a line of mountains that runs similarly to the west of Phoenix.  And because the Phoenix area lies at such a low elevation, weather tends to swirl around the bowl from all directions, sometimes all during the same storm.  A vortex existing within one weather event.

Similarly, for three and a half years, we’ve been caught in a vortex of chaos wrought by Donald Trump

We have never seemed to know from what direction the next crisis would come.

Just when we had the hatches battened down against one approaching crisis, the storm or chaos would change direction and blow at us from another angle altogether.

Then the storm would die down for a day or two, like the Tuesday respite we had between dust storms, before it would start up all over again.

Our battle with SARS-CoV-2 in Arizona has been like that, too.

And we have been experiencing a respite this week.

New cases have slowed, the death rate is dropping, and the positivity rate has gone from 25.4%  two weeks ago, to 12.5% last week, to 4.2% or 6.2% this week, depending on whose data you’re reading.

This is truly wonderful news for us here.  We still have a way to go before things are what you’d call good, but at least we’re trending in the right direction for a change.

In further good news, our governor seems to have experienced a lessening of his lock-step adherence to the president’s views.

On a recent trip to Washington, where the president heaped undeserved praise on Governor Doug Ducey for his handling of the coronavirus, Ducey came very close to contradicting the president when Trump tried to draw our governor into the anti-mail-in ballot argument.  When the president tried to pry agreement from Ducey that mail-in voting was a bad idea, Ducey went into defensive mode, declaring that Arizona had, for many years, been conducting mail-in balloting quite successfully, without incident.

That was an unexpected joy to behold.

Circling back, like Arizona weather in our big valley, the Democratic Convention, such as it was in the Worrying Times, ended tonight in a brilliant display of fireworks.

In the parking lot outside the convention center, spectators sat in their socially distanced cars, waving American flags, and watching the same fireworks being enjoyed by the officially, newly minted Democratic candidates for president and vice president of the United States and their smiling spouses.

And we sat in our living room, smiling, too, at the welcome rain that had come to us tonight, and at the aura of hope and promise that the convention had instilled in us.

Without balloons and the unbearable fanfare of traditional conventions, we had experienced four nights of understated yet heartfelt support for a candidate who promises us a different reality than that which we have endured under the Trump administration.

And it feels so nice, so right, to be looking forward to a not-so-distant future when the only chaos we’ll know will be the erratic weather patterns of our southwest home.