Dreamrail

TEN - Wrong things are allowed when the government sees a buck.

I drive by smoke stacks on steel mills; smoke still bellows, the same black soot that we were told would be gone twenty years ago. It’s all OK. Those companies are required to pay fines, sometimes a fine for every day. That’s what I hear. How much of a fine I wonder? As a wise little man once taught us, “Just enough to make them go - ‘Whoa,’ but not enough to make them go - ‘WHOA !!’.” If the fine’s too steep, they’ll clean it up. Then they’ll stop paying the fine all together. Who wants that?

That may be just my opinion, but then this is my article. I’m entitled. Speaking of being entitled, who isn’t these days? The media entitles every one of us, and our politicians aren’t smart enough to figure out who’s yanking their chains. Have a disaster today, and what’s the story? ‘We’re entitled to better than this.’ That’s the story.

Forget about the disaster. It doesn’t count. You can’t blame nature. The government didn’t protect me, rescue me, feed me fast enough, move me, pay me, clean me. They owe me. Just ask Katie. She flew down here just to put a microphone in my face, tell me how badly wronged I’ve been, and then asked me what I think about it. I think it sucks.

The politicians came in, pointed at each other, and said, ‘We need a full fledged investigation into these wrongdoings. We owe these people answers.’ That’s politics. Four billion dollars later - oh wait, I’m not talking about that disaster, I’m talking about the pandemic - we’re going to prove that we can handle a disaster. Let’s get the press together and let them ask questions about the approaching pandemic.

The big question, ‘We have heard that seventy percent of the allocated funds have not been spent yet. Why aren’t you spending this money?’ They promised to spend it real soon. Can anybody tell me what a pandemic is? I missed the explanation. I’m sure it’s just me not understanding one more thing we all should be worried about. It’s not nearly enough to panic over an impending epidemic and the woes it will bring to all of us, our families, businesses, our health and quality of life. Now we have pandemics coming and the government got billions in special allocations. We better spend it quick or we won’t get more.

Remember hearing about jails being overcrowed? Even local jails were bursting at the seams. Patients laying in the hallways, not enough beds for everybody? Wait, those were hospitals. Forget that. I’m talking jails. Have you noticed that the talk of overcrowed jails has gone. Local governments realized it was good for business. Stop complaining. In fact, build a new jail on funds promised by bringing in prisoners from other counties, other states. Maybe we can put other country’s inmates in our jails some day for ten thousand a month. If it only costs forty dollars a day to house an inmate and the state next door will pay sixty dollars a day for our jail to take him, do you expect us to turn that down? Send us your criminals. We are a crime friendly state, and to prove it we’ll build a new jail for your prisoners to live in. The government makes money. What’s it do with it?

Obviously, we don’t really have crime friendly states. I recently followed a case where a young girl was raped and killed and for a week or so there were no leads. Then a neighborhood man was arrested. Turns out he might have done some harm to women before. Oh yeah, he had killed one and raped two. Been convicted of both. He was twenty-nine years old and somehow lived next door to the woman who died.

Can that really happen? Happens fairly often. Once would seem to be too much, but then again, we bargain crimes down. It costs a lot of money to go through with long trials and all. Who would pay? Would you? _______________________________________________