Many are fearful of a repeat of last month here, so they have been running in high gear all week long preparing for this thing. All levels of government have been working in unison here, as opposed to last month, when no one knew what anyone else was doing, this time everyone seems to working together pretty well. There have been orderly evacuations in Texas, and even though the roads leading North have been at standstills, many are getting out of harm's way and will be long gone by the time Rita hits, not like last month, when many were just left to essentially fend for themselves, often with catastrophic results. There have been buses that have taken the poor and infirm out of the area, and there will be no nightmarish place like the Superdome where people will be warehoused under horrid conditions and the tragedy will be made worse. Yes, there are some of these hicks in Texas that refuse to leave the area even though they have been ordered to do so, I saw one on TV earlier and he was standing there all decked out in his red, white, and blue shirt and headband and waving an America flag and saying that he was going to stay so that he could come out right after the storm passed and wave his flag around because he said that the fucking flag represented hope and shit, this rube seemed to not realize that his little flag was going to be no help once the storm came in, and that he very well might not live through it to wave the flag for the TV cameras afterwards, so there are hicks and idiots like that around, but not anywhere near as many as there were last month, most people are taking no chances and splitting the scene. That has made it a bit easier for the local authorities, but they still have a very large task at hand and Washington is helping as much as they can. President Bush has already declared the area a disaster area even though the storm has yet to hit, so the Federal red tape can be lessened once it does. He has also sent a lot of supplies and the like to the area. Trucks loaded with food and water and ice and shit like that are either in the area now or are on the way there so they will be in position about as soon as that hick plans to come out and wave his flag after the storm. All the FEMA crew that can be spared is either there or going there as well, so that organization, one that took immense criticism last month, is going to be trying to redeem itself big time with a quick and helpful response, not the out of touch and lame response we saw before, and they say they are ready. Bush has also done something that he did not do last month, he has activated the National Guard to patrol the area, he has something like 5,000 of them which is about 4,750 more than he activated last month. He says that this will prevent the affected areas from being wild lawless places like New Orleans did last month and that will aid the start of the recovery process. He has sent about all the people that he has available on this one and has been gearing up for a major disaster and response and cleanup and recovery process. Washington and everyone else is waiting with their fingers crossed and breath held for yet another massive test and there is a lot more to lose this time.
Katrina was possibly the worst public relations disaster that Bush and Co. Have had yet. There was no way that you could wave the flag around and scream patriotism on this one or call anyone that disagreed with or criticized you unamerican, and Bush just did not know how to handle that at all. Finally he came across something that was not the making of either him or his cronies and mentors and was far stronger than any of that could ever hope to be, and he crumbled in the face of it. Yes, his scene got a lot of what they coveted in the displacement of the poor so that their land and such could be taken, but at a tremendous cost of serious bad publicity, and for a man who values images and appearances above everything, that was the worst he had even experienced in his life. He was shown as the callous front man for Mr. Businessman that he has always been and that Washington has always been about, and even the cowed American public had to realize it for themselves when they kept seeing it day after day. The last thing that Bush wants is a rerun of that and he is doing everything he can think of to try and avoid that. Besides, there is a far more practical reason for him to be proactive this time too. In Katrina, there were a bunch of offshore oil rigs that got fucked up and damaged, and some are still not working right yet. Well, It seems that there are a bunch more of these rigs right off the Texas coast where Rita is about to hit. They are all now closed down or in the process of closing down and all of them shout be closed within 24 hours. That Is going to fuck up the oil supplies in America, and they have not been right in a month due to Katrina. In addition, these rigs might be totally obliterated by the storm and be out of commission for a long time. So Bush does not want any lawless shit going on or massive rescue efforts and shit so that the people that can fix these oil rigs and get them running again can get right in as soon as the rube starts waving his flag (maybe that's why he's staying, he is like a signal for someone) and make that oil flow again. There were gas stations that had to shut down for a day or two after Katrina, and that pissed a lot of people off, and Bush does not want them even more pissed at him, because the hurricane is going to be confined to the Gulf Coast area, but closed gas stations can reach all the way to where my man Stubby lives, the gas station by him ran out after Katrina, and that pissed Stubby off a lot, and when you multiply that by an entire country you have a lot of people upset at Bush, blaming him for all that, and if people start blaming him because the gas stations by their houses are closed and out of gas, they might just start criticizing the way he handles the war and such, and that would wreck everything for him, his entire stake is in that war, so he does not want another fucking hurricane to come and ruin all the grand plans that he has for the world. So he wants to get those rigs going again as soon as possible, so that the gas stations don't stay closed for too long or the prices don't Get too high because he has a lot that he's hiding from the American people and he does not want them catching on to that because now they have seen just how inept and corrupt the dude is. So he has sent the troops in, FEMA in, buses for the evacuees in, everything that he can think of to try and keep this from being as large a disaster as last month's was.
However, he or anyone else has very little chance of making that happen. This is going to be another monumental disaster in America, and there is no way that Bush and anyone else will come out of looking any better than they did last month. To start out with, there has been nowhere near enough time for Washington to get itself properly prepared for something like this to happen again. It was obvious that they did not know what they were doing with Katrina, and that they had to larn from their mistakes. Well, that scene is not even over yet, and they have another disaster to face head on. Washington needs years just to learn how to say the Pledge of Allegiance let alone how to prepare for another catastrophe like Katrina. Yet, here they are again, four weeks later, facing the same thing once again. Even bin Laden and the terrorists did not do this, they did their thing and have gone away for years now, and these hurricanes have hit America twice in a month. There is just no way that Washington could be ready to face this again so soon, and they aren't. They know it too, but if they said it publicly, that would cause a major panic in America, let alone more bad publicity, so they are putting a game face on it all. Everything that Washington, Texas, Galveston, any of these agencies do will be overwhelmed right away when Rita hits. Everything will be destroyed and flooded and so forth, just like last month. Once again, America is going to see that all that power that Washington talks about the country having is purely illusionary as that power crumbles in the face of Nature. Bush can send in every national Guardsman, FEMA dude, and truck of shit that he has, and he will still be utterly powerless in this issue. He is in a no win situation, because whatever he does, he will be looked on as a loser because disaster is sure to result from Rita. The media will make a huge deal out of it, showing the same dramatic footage over and over and over so that people think that it is about a bad a situation as it gets no matter how it really is. They will not factor in the variables that nature outpowers man every time or that America could not have learned lessons from Katrina this fast, they will just focus on the misery and suffering and destruction. That's what makes good TV and sells newspapers and such so that's what they'll do non stop. It will look as if America once again failed the test, but it will not be close to fair to say that, but most people will just believe how it all looks, not how it all really is. Once again, it will be the poor that bear the brunt of everything, and that is the place, the only place, where you could say that America failed the test again. For that will show that America is indeed a two pronged society, with a caste system that puts India to shame. The poor will lose so much because they are forced to live in such poor conditions, shoddily constructed and maintained structures and the like, that they are more vulnerable to forces of nature like Rita and Katrina. They will be the ones that have nothing to come back to except ruined rubble and have their lives shattered. That's Because they are the lower classes not because of the storm. There is the place where the likes of George W. Bush and Co. Fail the test every time, putting many in harm's way as the elite like them stay far away from such disasters. None of the dead in Texas will be politicians or big businessmen, just as they weren't last month, they will be the poor. Washington is directly responsible for that by setting America up in the way that they have for so long now. Now Bush has to worry about taking the fall for that again, even though it is a process that has been going on for far longer than he has been alive, since he is the frontman for that scene now, he takes the blame, whether he likes it or not. The inequality that made him what he is today is now coming back to bit him in the ass, as he is seen as the man that makes the poor suffer in hurricanes like this. It is class inequality that makes these things such a disaster, not the storms themselves, although they are powerful and destructive as all hell, as only the lower classes are devastated by these things so badly. Mr. Businessman only suffers by seeing his profit margin cut down a bit for a while, and then it's back to the party for him. The poor have their entire lives destroyed or even ended. Katrina made that obvious, and Rita is about to lay that bare for all to see. In that manner, America is going to fail this test miserably, and when you think of it, that is really the most important thing in all of this, and it is a shame that America fails on that count so badly. But fail they will, as the seeds for that failure were planted generations ago, and as the hurricanes are supposed to strike these areas so hard like this every once in a while to re-distribute water and energy more evenly throughout the world, so shall they also expose the inequality and evil of American society, and unlike the land that will be devastated by Rita, that society will not come back much better than before, and that's why these hurricanes are disasters for man, and not renewals like they are for the earth