Puerto Rico's devastation daunts us. The mayor of San Juan cries, we’re dying. Help! We help some out of guilt then turn away. The explanation is not hard to say. We do not take the time we need to think. The world is binary. We cannot cope. We wrongly think our task is to rebuild. Our minds are not prepared to think in threes. Thinking in threes is open, supple, free. Rebuilding is the last thing on our minds. Disaster always heralds a new way.

We need to build past all that we have known

We need to build so hurricanes can’t win. We need to watch them safely, not succumb.

Tolerance has no place in our thinking. We build as if Brute Force could always win. Brute force is impotent. It cannot save. A new way will be supple, tolerant. Our minds could move from fixed to flexible. Thinking in threes moves us beyond what doesn’t work. Three step thinking is a reality that considers ethics and aesthetics as a basis for actions and expressions.

Tolerance and helpfulness are winners

Helpfulness is nothing if not constant. You don’t solve things by being there and gone. Enabling is the heart of helpfulness. Instead of soldiers, we need helping hands. Survival should not be the work of pros, it should become what everybody knows. Health should not be just professionals. The ways of health should be universal.

Such simple thinking seems beyond us now, however

We seem unable to grasp thinking past two. Rebuild is not the answer but it stands. The rhetoric says this is great success. Thinking outside the box is not our way. It’s funny until tragedy is chronic and repetition comes to rule the roost. Haiti knows the ways of this approach.

Our cyclone corridor knows just the same. We soon will not remember all the death names. Sandy, Katrina, what was the last one?

We’re part of nature, not its enemy

“Madame Secretary” should have taught us to think a bit about “beyond the box." But it did not have a punch like “Hunger Games." We make our culture just like hurricanes.

Smartness becomes evasion of disaster. Success means not being as bad off as "they."

The president as an evil principal

And for this, we get the yellow-haired scourge to play the evil Ferris principal. We should not expect less than more mayhem. Puerto Rico will suffer the problem the president embodies. He has a reflexive animosity toward anything that is not himself.

We are left with a lonely aphorism. The worse off nature is, the worse off we are.