Nisstyre's Corner

We are falling deeper into chaos, I hope you've noticed that. It seems like the 21st Century for America, and I'm sure most countries has not been a good one. Right off the bat we get stuck with Baby Hewey in the Office, I'm not overly a fan of Family Guy, at times I enjoy them and other times they just go too far with things, like Peter after hurting his knee making "sucking air through your teeth" pain noises for ten minutes, I mean WTF. But in one of the recently new episodes the scene started with "Mr.Gritith, the president" and Peter puts a red clown noise on, steps in front of Bush's desk and jumps around and goes "booga booga booga" and Bush just starts laughing and clapping like a baby, then something glass rolls off the desk and breaks. Perfect pause between the two and Bush starts crying like a baby.

This is bigger than 9/11 sadly, and I think 9/11 will remain "worse" in people's books because that was a foreign attack, and not just "a natural disaster". I wish there was a word bigger than disaster, cause this is what it is. Everyone should take a moment to think about this, more or less America has lost an entire city, get the eraser and delete it from all the maps, and not just a city, New Orleans, one of our highly cultured and famous cities, a place I wouldn't have minded to go chill in for awhile. Yes it will be rebuilt, but it will never quite be the same. And I personally feel that America has dropped the ball on the recovery, I'm not sure who is to blame, the Government having all our troops overseas, FEMA and Homeland for not getting of their chairs quicker, but waiting four days for something to happen isn't right. Its kind of like Bush waiting 9 minutes or whatever to get up on 9/11, waiting means people will die, and that will be shown in the "death toll count" when its done, probably a year from now.

Yes people should have been evacuated, but to those who say its their fault for not leaving, think about trying to remove a shitload of people from a city, and yes, alot of poor people. Its one thing I noticed on all the news footage, its the black population that seems to have been left behind, and yes being the South I'm pretty sure they're making half the wages us white honkies make. Yes I can see the argument "Well they knew they were living below sealevel" but that's the same as people who live in the Torando Belt, Florida or California. Its living in an area where there is a chance this could happen, but I know I'd personally be like "It will never happen".

I've been through a "Natural Disaster", of course as most nothing like what we see here, but I spent about a week without power in the dead of winter, and here in Northern NY our winters are extremly cold, most of last year it was below zero. Its called "The Ice Storm" of 1998, more or less two weather fronts, one hot, one cold slammed into each other over our heads. So instead of cold snow or warm rain, we got ICE, rain that instantly froze to whatever it landed on. And we got anywhere from 3 inches to a foot of this freezing rain, meaning that is a foot of ice on everything, limbs, powerlines, houses. I didn't have it the worse, most people were without power for at least a month, my town was lucky because we have the only municipal power corperation roughly in the state, everyone else is on Faceless Corps like Niagra Mohawk and Con-Ed.

A treelimb fell and slammed our outside powerlines going from the poles to our house. It snapped one of the three wires wound into this one powerline. You have a POSITIVE, A NEGATIVE, and a NEUTRAL wire, that is a powerline. Positive and Negative are easy, just like any plug, battery, etc etc. The Neutral Wire is the Kind of them all and keeps the other two in check, keeping a constant 440 volts going to your house, which in your fuse box gets changed to 110 and 220. This line was broken, we didn't know it, the power had been going on and off for a few days now. Its power, hurry, cook dinner. Coffee pot was on, so I turned it off. The lights dimmed. Now as a geek I know this is not right, when you turn one electricity type thing off, the lights would get brighter being more free power in the lines. I turn the pot back on, the lights get bright, brighter than before. Then someone switched the dining room light on, small 40 watt candle bulbs, KER-POW, they all blow. This caused us to have seven days of no power.

So I know what a disaster feels like, seven days of no power and probably two more days previous to the power-outage of the power going on and off. Right before we were about to abandon our house due to it going into a deep freeze, power somewhat restored to those still with good powerlines and power, once and awhile. In the end we string about 200 feet of extension cord from my uncles house next door into the basement, to run our furnance and one other thing....the TV! We were one of the last people to get our power-line fixed, somehow our names got lost in all the others, and sadly our neighbor was the Manager of our Municiple Power, luckly his wife stopped by to talk with my old man plowing with an open air front end loader, and was shocked when she heard we had no power. Hour later ze truck was here.

But that holds NOTHING to New Orleans. This is history in the making, and once again it has shamed our country I think, reading the news it seems like the other countries are now sniggering and whispering about us. God Damn it America, its getting harder and harder to say I'm American, I'm going to have to resort to telling people I'm Canadian, fuck, border is only two miles from my door and most people very south of here thinks that just from how we speak, and no I don't say Ey or Aboot.

Then we have everyone going on about the fuel, even people up here on the northern border of the country, rushing to fill their tanks in fear of a shortage, then getting hostile over the price. I'm sorry you cannot fill your big giant gas guzzling SUV, its your fault that you bought it, so don't bitch about it. The people of my area have a right to bitch compared to others, if you have a Mass Transit system then you don't need to be bitching, in my area there is no train, no bus to take you anywhere. There are three buses I believe that take people from town to town in our county, the LARGEST county east of the mIssissippi. But its not Mass Transit, we need our vehicles, but I don't feel sorry for the SUV drivers. I personally take the right to bitch about fuel prices because it dictates my job. As I always love to say, I am a Trucker, who currently drives a 26 Ton International Ice Truck that burns 7 gallons of diesel per Mile. There are truckers called "Owner-Operators" which means they own their truck and pay for everything, they are paid more from the company because its not their truck. They have to pay for their own fuel, and I"m talking about people who are going coast to coast in a Semi. Its happened before and if the government doesn't keep at least the cost of diesel in check, they will be sorry as 50,000 tractor trailers will decend upon the capital. I will just state for the record that being a Truck-Driver does place you into a Brotherhood of people, most truckers greet each other on the road, almost anyone I pass will give this one finger wave from the wheel, cause yes you can see each other even when doing 65.

Relief should have came sooner, that is my opinion. Only on Friday did my company get the call to help out, and we're shipping roughly 22 tons of ice out every other day (6270 bags at 7 pounds a bag) and only being sold for .13 cents per bag, which at wholesale its .75 bags for my company. It should be free but companies gotta at least cover the cost to make the stuff. And we're not the only ice company, more or less there is now a chain of ice houses which will be shipping ice down via some government trucking network. If the company had to ship it down themselves I would have been more than happy to do it, being the only "Class A" driver in the company. But I get the feeling my boss wouldn't have bothered otherwise, creepy pollock.

So keep New Orleans at mind, which doesn't mean watch CNN play the same story over and over.