perfidy

In an AP news dispatch from about an hour ago, as I type this, I expected to get the straight poop in a story entitled "Nearly 2 Million Flee Hurricane Rita".

Much of the article contained information I had already gotten from my neighbors and friends in town, or on the non-stop local news coverage of the impending storm. But it also contained nuggets like this:

"This is the worst planning I've ever seen," said Judie Anderson, who covered just 45 miles in 12 hours after setting out from her home in the Houston suburb of LaPorte. "They say we've learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina. Well, you couldn't prove it by me."

As one who looked at the prospects for evacuation 48 hours ago and decided the best answer was not to do so, for a variety of defensible reasons, I'd hope my response to Ms. Judie Anderson doesn't come across as too harsh.

Boiled down to its essence, it goes like this: "I'd be shocked, ma'am, if I could prove anything by you, other than that one needn't have an IQ over 60 in order to be given a driver's license in TX, or to be interviewed by the Associated Press. You've clearly either lost your mind, never driven in Houston, or are incapable of comprehending the implications of the number 2,000,000. Oh, and blow me, you stupid twat."

She and her fellow complainants, who seem to think that, during emergencies, the local superhighways simply expand like water balloons to accept all of the additional flow in a way that they're somehow not capable of doing at any other time in Houston (like, say, during "rush hour"), are representatives of a special breed. That breed? The cadre of mentally and otherwise challenged whining bastards who expect "the government", whomever the hell that is, to simply make all problems, no matter how nasty and intractable, disappear from view.

Houston's officialdom has so far covered itself with glory in the process of preparing the city for what could be a catastrophic event, and while I understand the frustration of those who expected magic pixie dust to be available to free them from the shackles of reality and spirit them to safety (and, by extension, to ensure that hotels were both available and reserved for their use, I'd guess), I don't share that frustration and I wish that such folk would keep the irrefutable proof of their own idiocy to themselves. It's funny, in a cartoonish sort of way, but it's about as helpful as the ability to burp the names of the items in the periodic table of elements. Cute though immature at the beginning, really tiresome at all points thereafter.

As the always-eloquent Velociman put it (sorry, Maps!):

...only the foolish, the impudent, the fucking dumbasses are left.

But he left out one class of folk, the realists like me (although I'm also impudent). There's only so much you can do, and leaving the available road and hotel space to those who indisputably needed to evacuate (those from Galveston, South Houston, and East Houston down by Galveston Bay and the Ship Channel) seemed and seems a reasonable and realistic choice.

And if Rita up and slams my part of town, that'll just be a lot of tough shit, but it won't change the fact that I believe I've made the only logical choice. It sure seems to beat the hell out of a 24 to 36 hour drive from Houston to Dallas or points north, and the fact that drive takes so long has less than nothing to do with some failure of planning on the part of some nanny governmental agency, local or otherwise.

Oh, and for one of the other complainants in the story:

"I've been screaming in the car," said Abbie Huckleby, who was trapped on Interstate 45 with her husband and two children as they tried to get from the Houston suburb of Katy to Dallas, about 250 miles away. "It's not working. If I would have known it was this bad, I would have stayed at home and rode out the storm at home."

I'd suggest she should have had a look at the tee-vee to learn that she wasn't the only one leaving town. I'd then have suggested getting to a library if need be and using a computer. There's at least one way from Katy to Dallas that doesn't involve more than 3 miles of highway, dear, and it only adds 50 miles to the trip. But I suppose that's "the government's fault", too.

Welcome to the physical world, ladies.