The mortal storm

As another storm brews in the tropics and the projected tracks loom treacherously close to this land which we cherish and love, we here in the coastal South cast a wary eye over the water with no uncertain trepidation.

For we know all too well here in the Pelican State that powerful weather systems are no sneering matter. They can and do lead to major tragedy.

What disaster may be in store for us? What terrible fate may befall us now?

Older and wiser, with the tragic holocaust of nearly exactly three years ago still fresh in our minds, we know well the consequences of lack of vigilance. We know well how chains of events can spiral beyond even our worst nightmares to expose the gates of Hell right here on earth.

We have observed the darkest elements of humanity played out on a massive scale to rape and loot our state. We have seen the scions of the power elite turn their backs on us in our hour of supplication, in their preoccupations with enriching themselves and their friends on the backs of the suffering. We have borne the insults of the rape of our land by State bureaucrats, insurance agents, and other such hucksters.

We have witnessed the receiving end of social marginalization, have been called 'looters' and 'refugees', equated to the sickening rabble of a Third World country.

We consider the acronym of a certain lethally incompetent federal agency to be a four letter word (hint: it starts with "F").

The storm destroyed livelihoods and property, laid waste to human lives, dreams, and hopes alike. Over 1,800 of our brothers and sisters paid the ultimate price.

Lost in the subsidy train for those who were helpless before the deluge and who continued the trend of their mooching lives in the aftermath, were those working folks who lost jobs and homes by the capriciousness of brute fate.

No assistance was given them since they lacked either the proper skin color, sense of victimhood or entitlement, or political connections.

Careers were truncated, lives were destroyed, and with nowhere else to go whole families were cast out into the optionless horizon of the street when the pittance of disaster relief dried up.

I barely avoided this fate myself; only with a massive stroke of luck (and I do mean luck) was I able to dodge permanent marginalization such as the residents of our still-extant "temporary" RV parks have fallen into.

Some vanished forever, into homelessness, into drink, into a life barely a shadow of the productive, valuable contribution that they maintained before the storm. Human potential was cast aside like so much storm debris, as in a fit of societal insanity we discarded valuable human capital in the mass profit taking and "holding pattern" non-recovery which followed like locusts in the wake of crop failure.

After the storm, talent was desperately needed to rebuild the state and get things back to working order. But the bureaucrats and the powerful shitheads won the day, and also the rewards. In the aftermath of the hurricanes, furthering the careers of the pinheadocracy and making sweetheart deals for the elites and their friends was apparently more important than returning this state back to normal. So guess whose fat bellies profited, and guess why tens of thousands of the non-connected, non-powerful across the state today still struggle with the scars of that fateful August day???

The storm exposed the two tier society in all its unholy putridness, separated the comfortable from the desparate like wheat from chaff, accomplished major strides toward the elites' long desired goal of creating a permanent Amerikan caste system based on color and socioeconomic origin.

The storm provided great cover to advance the social engineering principles of those for whom the system is set up to benefit.

The dickhead gatekeepers of the admittance into a life of decency found ample cause in the wake of the storm to roll up the mats of opportunity, ramp up the marginalization of their supposed "inferiors", distribute human resources in their desired manner - more for food service, less for jobs of the mind.

After the storm, fast food huts and other such establishments were begging for workers, with $10/hour (and up) wages not uncommon. Yours truly was forced by circumstance to take them up on the offer, for a time.

But any sane man knew that the situation was unsustainable. And after a year, $10 an hour was deemed economically unviable, and those who had not managed to escape the trap (that is, the people who stayed behind, not including myself) were suddenly facing the raw pavement again, replaced by cheep Mexican workers for which minimum wage is a princely sum.

And what did they have to their work histories, except a lost year gaining poverty wage skills at some fast food hut out on some anonymous suburban highway? Many had taken fast food work as temporary income until they could resusitate professional careers which had been truncated by the storm. Little did they consider that they were now persona non grata in the professional world, only fit to grace the kitchens of further fast food huts, making starvation-level wages in the pursuit of selling the almightly hamburger...

The great fascist economy device of stripping opportunity for the alternative of placing "talent" where it can be most controlled worked just as planned by society's architects - that is, those in power. The not so invisible hand (or more precisely, fist in glove) of sorting the masses to the least common denominator in an unfree economy worked perfectly.

And these were only the fortunate. The immediate and severe contraction of opportunity in the wave of the holocaust rendered hundreds of thousands superflous and redundant. Some managed to repair a semblance of their former lives in other cities, other states, their talents and contributions lost to Louisiana forever, so to shrink the ranks of the productive and that much progressively enlarge the proportion of the grotesque, the inhuman, the morally crippled, the emotionally insane, and the otherwise overall takers of society. Others were consigned to the bleak fate of bureaucratic limbo, all in a futile and pathetic effort to delay the inevitable day when they would finally be facing bare pavement, without a roof over their heads, and empty pockets and stomachs.

We are all drowning in idiocy, of which Mayor Ray Ray of Chocolate City and his political cousins of all ideologies and colors are merely the most obvious symptoms. And even now the powerful make a show of "preparedness" all while they are nursing their stashes in foreign parts and leaving us to die in the dust - or more precisely, to drown in the surge. For as I have said, they are all complete egotistical narcissists who seek only pure pleasure, and thus do not give one flivvering fuck whether the vast hordes of 'nobodies' which constitute "the people" that they are sworn to serve either live or die.

When the second rape of this great state comes, will we have learned anything? Will we demand that disaster planning be performed with competence? (Now's your chance, Bobby boy, to show the people that elected you that their faith in your abilities was not misplaced.) Will we make the effort toward a true recovery, instead of leaving it in the hands of imperial officials from distant lands who hardly give a damn about this state, its people, or its economy? (The stillborn status of the so-called recovery from the previous storms, with cities and lives in ruins three long years after Doomsday, should provide a clue.) Will we let the worst and darkest aspects of our human natures control us, or will we stun the world and act like civil men and women?

I hold out little hope that another disaster will be handled with grace and class. Past experience is cold comfort, if you know what I mean. The people of this state are by and large not up to the task. With so many on the subsidy dole, it is no wonder. The remnant of us who slave our lives away to support these assholes will use this looming catastrophe as the final straw, the final reason which justifies abandoning ship once and for all.

And then for those who love this state and were committed to making our lives here, there will be nothing left, and unless we manage to really impress the corps of dickhead hiring managers-cum-gatekeepers to the good life who await us in Atlanta and Dallas and Nashville and Charlotte (fully knowing our desparate position and like the animals they are, all too happy to exploit it for everything they can get out of it), we will be forced to survive by digging for roots and hustling for change.

I say all this not to shock, but to convey the extent of the enormous human tragedy of a Katrina or Rita. Hurricanes are not just about damaged property, floods, storm surge, and physical ruination. They are testaments to what a society values, and its moral character. The Chicago of 1871 could rise again from the ashes, because the talents of the people in that laissez-faire age were allowed to run free and rebuild a great city from the ruins of tragedy. The New Orleans of the bleak present, in contrast, remains in a stultified state of ruin, precisely because it is no longer about a free people. It is about power and who sucks whose dick, plain and simple. That is what the State, and all the social maxims which it personifies and teaches, is all about.

I have never mentioned this before, but Katrina is what made me a libertarian.

And nothing has changed in these three years to make me believe that it will be any different next time. In all honesty, I believe it will be ten times worse. People (holier-than-thou shitheads from up Northeast in particular) are too desensitized to suffering and the omnipotent State today to give a shit anymore about what atrocities go down in "that" part of the world. We are all just a bunch of looters and apes, eh? The next time the levees break, they will say, "Stick a fork in them, Louisiana is finished! Let the mass disinvestment commence!!"

So comes Gustav. The bodies shall hit the floor and the rivers of blood shall again flow free as the destruction of our state and its people that was commenced three years ago is now completed.