As a mere special education teacher, I am not in a position to advise candidates. I’ve thought about running locally before, but definitely don’t have the money to do it. If I were to advise Democrats (since I’m definitely not a Republican) is that they should run on a platform of “competence in government.” The planks are fairly simple and have been on full display here in Texas the last two plus decades.

I vividly remember Bill White (then mayor of Houston) and Rick Perry standing on stage following Hurricane Ike. Perry was fumbling about and was told live on camera that it was his job to take federal funds and distribute them to localities that needed them. You could see the urge to kill on White’s face as he realized the governor was sitting on cash and didn’t know what to do. Both men walked off stage. Only White returned.

We’ve seen the electrical grid crumble before our very eyes. We’ve seen senators flee the state during the ice storm. We’ve seen a governor do nothing and be out of all ideas. At the national level we have seen a pandemic completely mismanaged. We’ve seen the economy bungled time and again. Each time Democrats have to be elected to fix these things.

This is not to say that every Republican is an idiot. Ed Emmet did a good job as county commissioner when he held the post and worked well with other county and city officials. Lina Hidalgo might be doing an even better job. In general, Democrats just do the job better. We aren’t talking policy here. We can have policy debates and certainly we always do. This is simple barebones work that government must do on a day to day basis.

A hurricane has hit the gulf south. Over a million people are without power as I write this. Governor Abbott doesn’t seem interested in getting the work done. How do I know this? He’s not even in the country right now. He left on July 5th when everyone knew the storm would land somewhere in Texas. We didn’t know who would be effected, but we knew it would be Texans. Thanks Governor.

So, when will the rest of the folks get power? Would they get power faster if state officials actually gave a shit about doing their job? We will likely never know. What we do know is that Republicans are more interested in getting the job, keeping the job, and enriching themselves off of the job than they are actually doing the job. This is practically a universal truth.

In Washington, representatives and senators certainly write bills, attach pork for local projects, and grandstand with great regularity, but there are hundreds of things they do for constituents that no one ever hears about. That is unless they are too busy grandstanding and ass kissing to do that job. Beyond the policy debates and ideological nonsense is the simple day to day responsibilities of being in state and national government. This stuff matters and it matters now for people in the gulf south. It sure would be nice if people in Austin cared about doing it.

When we were kids, we often played a game where we took everything liquid in the fridge and combined it into one cocktail. The whole idea was to dare each other to see how much anyone could consume without losing their lunch. These activities were usually connected to a game of truth or dare and everything was in good fun until our gag reflexes kicked in.

Apparently, the anti-vax community is doing the same thing with drugs. The Ivermectin treatment is so yesterday. There is a new experiment sweeping the land. None of us seriously thought we would die when we consumed a combination of milk, juice, ketchup, mustard, egg, and chocolate syrup. Most of us also abandoned that sort of behavior when we reached adolescence. I suppose the mere prospect of digestive pyrotechnics and the chortles from most Americans wasn’t quite enough.

Irony may officially be dead. It’s dying along with the hundreds of fools that put a bunch of random crap into their body in lieu of an FDA approved vaccine. Therefore, we reach the conundrum of a dying age: are these deaths COVID related or do we simply classify them as “death by idiocy?” Inquiring minds want to know.

It falls back into what I discussed last week. We will call this “the experts vs. Uncle Sal”. Yes, I know most of us don’t have an uncle named Sal. Sal will represent the person in our family or circle of friends that really isn’t an expert on anything, but people seem to listen to for whatever reason. He projects confidence. It just seems like he knows. He’s “done his research.” Yet, as people around here know, Sal is full of crap. The rest of us just see Sal as entertainment. Unfortunately, some are putting their lives in Sal’s hands.

See, what all of these imbeciles fail to realize is that none of them had heard of Ivermectin or any of these drugs. So, when they say they aren’t sheep and they don’t blindly follow anyone they fail to make the connection. SOMEONE told them about these drugs. SOMEONE told them they would cure or block the Covid. SOMEONE told them they would be perfectly safe. So, it isn’t really a question of whether we choose to follow, but who or what we choose to follow. Are we going to listen to the experts or Uncle Sal? Our very lives may depend on the answer to that question.