Republican Greg Abbott Creates a Living Hell in a Place Besieged For Months by 100+ Degree Weather. Claiming to be a state full of nice people, Texas is the state where they kill one another at the highest rate in the country, elect misanthropes such as Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott, pollute one another at the highest rate in the country, embrace hate speech from people like Alex Jones, ban women’s rights…..I could go on. If this is the definition of nice people, we need to edit the dictionary.
The people in Austin, TX remain confined to the air conditioned spaces for months, enduring record amounts of triple digit heat along with subtropical humidity. Having boiled their tap water because the water in Austin is highly polluted, they make their morning cup of coffee. They are grateful though, not to be living in the dirtiest city in the US, nearby Houston, TX. Time to start the day. It’s 91 deg F and the humidity is high. Braving to leave their air-conditioned homes, if they can afford one, and most can’t, they jump into their air-conditioned cars, only to sit in stifling traffic. As they sit in traffic, their hope is that the power grid doesn’t fail today so that they don’t have to work in a building that’s at120 deg F. That 120 deg F is for prisoners in the state’s prison. Nice people don’t air-condition prisons. It’s another way nice people in Texas can kill other people. Causing cardiac arrest in hot prisons is what nice people in Texas do.
Slowly making their way to their destination, the commuters observe the homeless people dumpster diving for food, something that these poor people can do before such time as they are arrested by Greg Abbott’s police state for being homeless. The Austin police are overwhelmed as a result. The city, and the state, are a mess. No one had to mess with Texas, they did it to themselves. Turn the corner, and what do the commuters observe. It’s another mass shooting. Texas is number one for mass shootings. Bodies lay strewn on the ground. Luckily, Austin is far from the border, and the residents don’t have to personally observe Abbott’s mean-spirited treatment of down-trodden people seeking asylum in the US. Women and children being maimed by Abbott’s razor wire at the border. The nice people of Texas support this. Kick’em while their down, Mr. Abbott.
Why is Greg Abbott so mean spirited? As a young healthy man, while jogging, a fallen tree hit him, leaving Abbott paralyzed from the waist down. That’s a lot to deal with. And, I’m sorry this happened to Mr. Abbott. I wish that upon no one. Has he dealt with his life-changing injury with anger? A displaced anger against those who don’t believe the same as he does, don’t look like him, or don’t have the same social status as he? No one knows, and surely Mr. Abbott doesn’t know, because these sorts of emotional thinking and behaviors often exist as sub-conscious, Systems 1 thinking.
Driving to their work place, where they’ll make $7.25/hour, the commuters observe the concrete jungle before them. This is where the corporations that were given money and tax breaks by Abbott created a now ugly city that was once the darling of Texas. Most of the city is made up of boring and unappealing structures, particularly the numerous contemporary apartment buildings. Growth is Abbott’s game. At any cost. Lousy schools, degrading infrastructure, bad roads, the most polluted water in the country, exploding chemical plants, and the number one state for pollution, it doesn’t matter for Abbott because he’s in pain. And he wants others to feel the same pain.
Factors like Texas having the highest number of uninsured residents in the nation, higher violent crime rates, a low number of primary care physicians per capita, a strict abortion ban and laws targeting LGBTQ+ people were part of what make Texas a rural backwater full of concrete. A reporter for The New Yorker recently wrote, “Austin is now characterized by stifling traffic and unaffordable restaurants.” Home prices in Austin have skyrocketed and become among the country’s most expensive. And $7.25 is the minimum wage. NBC recently reported, “Blistering triple-digit temperatures across Texas this week have the state rivaling the hottest locations on the planet, including the Sahara Desert and parts of the Persian Gulf.” Due to global warming, this will become worse.
USA Today ranked Texas as the worst state to live in. Among the reasons the newspaper gave were crime rates, the quality of the environment, the healthcare system, whether people had access to good childcare, and “inclusiveness in state laws such as reproductive rights, protections against discrimination and voting rights.’ CNBC recently named Texas the worst place to work and live in. Among the reasons, the analysis said, were healthcare and crime.
I see many cars with Texas license plates parked in front of technology companies here in San Diego. In this inclusive city, biotech is #3, and the fastest growing in the county and technology is #4, twice as large as that in Austin. Those who can, college-educated, employable people, are leaving land-locked hell for coastal paradise, San Diego. It’s not just tech and beautiful beaches that makes San Diego a great city. It’s a great college town, with one of the world’s top 20 universities, some of the best food on the planet, people have fun here in the beautiful weather, and the live music scene is one of the largest in the country, with 1,438 live music venues – much more than Austin, TX, but behind the live music capitol of the US – Los Angeles (everything from the best philharmonic orchestra in the world to the legendary rock music clubs on the Sunset Strip), a short drive from San Diego. And please don’t quote me census statistics from a census that was rigged by the Orange Man, Trump, that said the population decreased in California between 2010-2020. It didn’t. Trump exacted revenge on another enemy, the state of California.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 