Posts Tagged → catastrophe
Hurricane Helene says No Such Thing as White Privilege
“White privilege” may be the most racist thing you will hear anyone say or allege in your lifetime, probably from the most racist people on Planet Earth, white liberal Democrats, but that has not stopped this fake social construction from being pronounced and bandied about like it is actually real.
Well, Mother Nature herself has recently descended from the heavens above to demonstrate that in reality and in the natural world too, there is no such thing as “White privilege.”
In the form of Hurricane Helene last week, Mother Nature inflicted huge devastation and destruction upon eastern Tennessee and northern North Carolina and the regional demographic there. It is a group of people I have had a lot of life experience with and who I maintain intense admiration for, white rural working people.
That there are a lot of white liberal Democrats in Asheville folded into the mix of Hurricane Helene victims does not mitigate or reduce my sympathy or hope for everyone’s full recovery there. Everyone is equal before the law, everyone is created in the image of God, and we are all Americans who should be caring for one another, regardless of our political opinions or religious views.
So Hurricane Helene destroyed billions of dollars in built infrastructure, including homes, towns, villages, farms, rural roads and interstates and bridges and schools and hospitals, stranding hundreds of thousands of largely white rural American citizens without power, water, or food.
And so just to demonstrate that white people can be victims and actually have no racial privilege whatsoever, the federal government response to Hurricane Helene has been… almost silent. Like cavalier and ignoring the huge mess of human misery. Like on purpose.
Recall that to our elites, Appalachian whites are the deplorable, disposable, ignored, maligned, forgotten Americans who nonetheless mine the coal that gives us most of our electricity, serve as the roughnecks on oil and gas drilling platforms that run our vehicles, fill up the special forces and combat infantry positions in our most highly motivated and patriotic high-risk fighting forces, who log the forests that provide us with high grade lumber for our fancy kitchens and furniture, who work for the railroads, and who drive trucks across the interstates that bring Amazon Prime to your home super pronto.
In every one of these professions, these (white, rural) people are taking big risks that almost always exceed their expected financial return. Why? Because they are proud to work hard, and they love America more than they love themselves. And they are devoted to America because there is no other nation anywhere that will give them the same freedom and opportunity.
White rural working people are the people who disproportionately make America work and run and give you, dear reader, the comfortable lifestyle to which you have become all too accustomed. And now that these people need a lot of help to get through this natural catastrophe, it sure appears that they are being abandoned by the same federal government that is simultaneously giving away unlimited taxpayer dollars right and left to border-jumping illegal migrants and to the porous demi-government in Ukraine.
I am hearing mostly consistent reports of aid efforts from acquaintences, friends, and family in Asheville and eastern Tennessee (some of their own photos are below; one of my family members from there is now in a hotel in South Carolina). Last week a friend of mine from Harrisburg loaded up his work van with bottled water and food and drove seven hours to the literal end of the paved road in eastern Tennessee, where he followed signs to a Baptist church. There in the church parking lot he was met with tears of fear and appreciation, and many needy hands as entire families sought shelter there with their sole remaining belongings: Their clothing on their bodies. (Some of his own photos of this are below).
Radio personality Glenn Beck reported his unbelievably negative experience with a sole FEMA crew instructive example of No White Privilege To Be Found Here.
Plenty of political fallout has resulted from apparent Biden-Harris government failure, or even willful blocking of aid efforts. While checking his email at a FEMA post, a partisan leftist Democrat in my family there said this is all politically generated misinformation, but I don’t know if I can accept that. The damning reports and real-time online videos are overwhelming and seem irrefutable, while politically partisan mainstream media outlets appear locked into a defend-Kamala Harris-at-all-costs posture, instead of having their crews on the ground recording what the citizens journalists are capturing.
Tons of on-the-ground reports are pouring out of the region, showing a complete lack of federal interest in helping, and a complicated mix of local territorialism, miscommunication, petty power flexing, and even theft of supplies. And even when the Biden-Harris Administration does speak publicly, they are actually saying sorry, we have no money for your disaster relief.
Because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ALREADY GAVE AWAY all the unsustainable taxpayer money to illegals and the endless war in Ukraine.
Folks, not only was there never any such thing as White privilege, but when there was an opportunity to demonstrate that American Whites get treated at least equally with everyone else, both American citizen of color and illegal border jumper alike, the point is made by our current federal government that American White people come last, if they get any help at all.
Harrisburg City: One Political Party’s Complete Catastrophe
Harrisburg City is a complete catastrophe.
By any measure, my beloved city and the home of my father’s family in an unbroken chain since 1745, is now a non-functional wreck. A shambles. A disaster.
Our combined city millage rate is an incredible, unbelievable, phenomenal record of 71 Mills! See the official Dauphin County millage rates below. Harrisburg City is at the bottom.
Those readers who do not understand what millage is, it is the local tax rate for public services like fire, water, police, sewers, and sometimes schools. Most Pennsylvania communities have a millage rate of about 6-10, total.
Millage rates are supposed to reflect the quality of public services that taxpayers receive. After all, we are paying these incredibly high tax rates for a reason.
But here in Harrisburg, we taxpayers have no such illusions or expectation of receiving much of anything in return for our hard-earned money. Most of our city taxes are squandered by unaccountable bureaucrats and politicized mayors who come and go, come and go, spending all the way. Our city council is completely non-functional, filled with bitter personality disputes and zero achievements for the actual people underwriting the bills.
And then there is the Harrisburg School District, a study in unabated and completely open incompetence and corruption. Our city school district has been run by the state, only to be set aside and allowed to fester and rot, for the whole public to see. And still nothing is done to fix it. The school children here, mostly black kids, suffer the worst, because for all their time spent inside four classroom walls, they actually get very little education.
And now the latest example of just how badly Harrisburg is run is revealed in a lawsuit by Michael Brenner, owner of the building where the Harrisburg City Public Works Department is housed. Brenner has leased the building to the city for many years, and he is owed $717,000.00 by the city in back rent, unpaid taxes, and damage to the building that the city cannot or will not fix.
For those readers who do not understand what a city Public Works Department is or does, it is the one place where taxpayers expect to see something happen, because it is all about the roads, streets, sidewalks, potholes, etc. No matter where you go in America, the city’s Public Works Department is the place where the can-do guys work, the guys who know how to fix things, weld things, bend metal, pour concrete, and operate machinery to get snow plowed and fallen trees out of the roads.
Except here in Harrisburg, it seems our city Public Works employees don’t do much of that kind of work on their own building. And it turns out the city won’t pay the owner the rent the city agreed to pay.
Folks, this is a failed government. This is a failed city. When the government cannot or will not pay its most basic bills, or properly run its most basic departments and school functions, then we have a failed government. Plain and simple.
And like almost every other American city with high taxes, poor services, failed schools, and bad government, Harrisburg shares the distinction of being overwhelmingly Democrat, black, and poor. And yet… black people run very few of the city’s functions! Those jobs are reserved for the oh-so-sophisticated White Liberals, who lord it over their Democrat plantation serfs like they are running one of their old Democrat plantations back in the 1850s Deep South.
This abject failure is the price of having just one political party in power, endlessly and forever. That one political party is the Democrat Party.
At some point, city residents will begin to ask the simple question: “What have I got to lose by voting for a different political party that has different ideas of how to run things?”
To my black city neighbors, all I can say is that the solution to this bad situation is fully in your hands. You are the majority of the voters here. If you want things to change for the better, and we know you do, then you can start voting differently. Vote for candidates who represent different values and behaviors than the same-old White Liberals who have led you down this proverbial garden path for how many decades….