This will be a little long-winded before getting to the point.
Back in 1985, I was working with an entitled little guy from the suburbs of Chicago in the cold northern winters and was telling him about how I wasn't running the furnace and just using a space heater in the bedroom at night. I wasn't doing it all winter, just for maybe 6 or 8 weeks after most people turned their furnaces on. I said something like it's kinda cold when you get up and get out into the rest of the apartment, but I get through it. He turned around from his desk and screamed at me, "I'm running my furnace; I want to be warm!" End of conversation. It was "Morning in America". I was doing the same thing about 20 years later but had a better way to do it, having picked an apartment with a sliding glass door that faced south. Got a knock on the door and it was the power company rep sent out to investigate why I was using so little gas. I took him on a tour and showed him how. He enjoyed it and, as he left, said, "More power to you!" Idea being this was so unusual they had to come out and take a look. In Austin, Texas from 2014 to 2016 the freon ran out in my car. I had a 45 minute commute during the hottest part of the day (about 5 pm here) and finally got it recharged the week I knew I'd have to take my boss somewhere. My thought had been that sweating a little bit at the end of a day in an office isn't a bad thing. Aside from a few oddballs like me, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expect to be comfortable in America. That was illustrated at the end of my semi-fictitious story about Dale, the mobile auto mechanic who charged Ron a ridiculous sum of money to fix his AC in a suburb of Cleveland, with the note at the end of the story observing that as of 2023 it is not even possible to buy any model of car in America that does not come with air conditioning. That's the extreme we are at, at what could be the highest probability point in time that some years down the line Americans are junking their very last cars because they can't afford to fix the air conditioning or can't get the parts.
So I'm not Monday morning quarterbacking Abbott for his decision to transport the illegals in style to Martha's Vineyard or wherever he sent them or, for that matter, Trump for his promise to build a wall rather than use some other method to secure the border. It's what would be expected from any politician in present day America, as it appears to be the only politically expedient thing to do. How else could it be done in a country where everyone expects to be comfortable and, as Navigator observed in one of the write-ups on his site, "None Should Ever Die":
The contrast between the government response in the 1950’s and the response to the Covid epidemic today couldn’t be more drastic. During the Asian flu epidemic, people were told to use common sense (stay home if you are sick, cover your mouth when coughing, wash your hands), and that was about it. Today, as we all know, the government has shut down most of the economy, and quarantines are imposed for weeks if not months at a time.
The contrasting responses are due to a dramatic shift in the culture of the Health Care establishment, which, in turn, is mirroring a change in our national cultures. The change is in how we deal with death.
https://comingstorms.com/none-should-ever-die/
If Abbott had sent the illegals to the east coast in a bus without air conditioning or a boxcar and even one of them had arrived passed out or, perish the thought, dead, probably news outlets of every stripe would have descended on the scene and there would have been a national uproar. Abbott may have been labeled the next Derek Chauvin or something like that, snuffing the life out of an innocent fellow human by not providing air conditioning. Similarly, after my comment about not being vaxed for covid, I looked up the statistics. Current statistics say that 95% of the people in my age group (50-64) in America have been vaxed. I'm aware of what can happen in the small percentage of cases where people are seriously ill with covid, and it's not fun.
https://www.wmur.com/article/pediatrici ... d/36373770 This was not an acceptable risk to ~95% of the people in my age group (I realize some had to take the vax to keep their jobs while some who didn't get the vax believed the whole thing was a hoax). An untested vax with unknown side effects at that. Given what was known at the time, throughout the long expanse of history, that percentage would have almost certainly been lower.
Having said all that, the manner in which Abbott is handling the border is a big jump in the needle. I didn't expect it at all. I thought he would just keep grandstanding, like all politicians do nowadays, without doing anything different or significant. Same with the bill that's been introduced in this legislative session for a gold backed digital currency issued by the State of Texas. Does Greg Abbott know or understand something that few others do? I wouldn't bet against him.
