Don’t Mess With Texas

There are those who have described Houston as a concrete lid on a swamp.

Recently we all learned what happens when you dump 50 inches of rain on that lid.

And the lid has always flown in the face of all rational land use practices.

But regulation is anathema to Texans: “let us have our head and we we will lead the way and we will create endless masses of jobs and etc. etc. etc.”

That’s fine.

But Harvey has showed that there is a bill attached to Texas’ prideful independence (remember when Ranger Rick said that Texas was considering seceding?) and refusal to employ anything – anywhere in the state, not just Houston – resembling rational zoning and land use planning.

I personally don’t give a shit what Texas does, including secede.

But two tenths of a trillion dollars that include my tax money is a pretty big bill.

I would prefer to spend my share – and I would guess the whole West Coast would concur in this – of a huge amount of money that before the politically expedient necessity of keeping Texas happy raised its ugly head was unthinkable to our “conservative” republican Legislature in D.C, on housing the homeless.

And now we are going to go through the same drill, financially, with Hurricane Irma.

So do we get to spend another two tenths of a trillion on the same republican resistance to regulation and zoning and land use planning?

In Florida?

While eleven thousand people live in tents – the lucky ones of that population -  in Seattle?

What I am not saying is that I want revenge on my fellow Americans who have, due to nothing they have ever done, suddenly fallen prey to a property and infrastructure destroying natural disaster; send them their –cumulatively – four tenths of a trillion dollars; great (I only hope that that money is actually there in some form).

But what I am saying is, when politically expedient states force all the republican bullshit artists to drop the bullshit and actually rise to the financial needs of being a real country, I want everybody to benefit.

I want the dollar munificence of Harvey and Irma to be applied to all of us.

And I don’t want it to be only applied in the event of disaster.

I do want it to be part of a whole new view of us Americans.

We are a tribe.

Pretty socially and technologically sophisticated, and pretty large, but nonetheless, a tribe.

And the tribe takes care of all members.

I want a new Convention Of What It Means To Be An American.

Not a new Constitutional Convention.

We have the best Constitution ever written.

We just need to get the Executive and the Legislative branches defined in it to do what the Twenty First Century requires for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

We are,after all, irrevocably, linked to France.

But any way…

I want a blank sheet of paper to be put on a table and a whole new set of applications of the Constitution to be promulgated.

Maybe even we need an Amendment that says that Americans will never be serfs.