Leadership Quote by Charles Rangel

Rangel’s line looks like a weather report, but it’s really a budget argument wearing a barometer. By saying hurricane season “routinely” hits the Caribbean harder than the U.S., he’s not litigating a single storm; he’s normalizing imbalance as a pattern. That one adverb quietly shifts the debate from sympathy to responsibility: if this is predictable, then the moral failure isn’t nature’s violence, it’s political neglect.

As a New York congressman with deep ties to Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean diaspora, Rangel is speaking to two audiences at once. To mainland voters and lawmakers, he’s puncturing the comfortable assumption that “American” disaster preparedness ends at Florida’s coastline. To Caribbean communities, he’s affirming what they already know: vulnerability isn’t just geography, it’s the accumulated result of weaker infrastructure, higher debt burdens, colonial or quasi-colonial governance arrangements, and slower federal response when the affected people are seen as peripheral.

The sentence works because it refuses melodrama. No images of ruin, no pleas for pity. That restraint is strategic; it implies the facts are so obvious they shouldn’t require theatrics. It also carries an indictment of media attention cycles: U.S. landfall becomes a national emergency, while Caribbean devastation is treated as regional misfortune.

Underneath, Rangel is making a case about who gets counted in the American “we” when resources, urgency, and empathy are allocated.