One More Bible Lesson, Then on to Flint

The fruit that Adam and Eve ate was not a real fruit, it was an allegorical fruit: "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil". The whole original sin argument comes crashing down if you consider that, before they ate the fruit, they didn't know the difference between good and evil, so no court in the land would have convicted them of sinning. The big question is, why didn't God want them to know the difference between good and evil? Maybe He did want them to know the difference, but He wanted them to figure it out for themselves instead of relying on some higher power to spoon feed it to them. Maybe God was tired of babysitting those two and wanted them to grow up and take responsibility for their own destiny.

The reason I mentioned the riots is that some people blame them for the decline of the cities. While it's true that Detroit never really recovered from the Riot of '67, it was shortly afterwards that the good jobs started slipping away. While the riot may have driven out the many shopkeepers who chose not to rebuild, the really good jobs were in the auto industry, and I don't think the rioters trashed any of the auto plants. The auto plants left for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the eternal quest for cheap labor. Now, you can say it that way, or you can say the unions drove the auto plants out, depending on your point of view.

I'm not against helping poor people, I'm against bailing out corporations, school districts, municipalities, counties, townships, and states. The CEOs, school administrators, and government officials are certainly not poor people, and every dollar that goes to them is one less dollar that's available to help the poor. Of course, there's no guarantee that the money saved would be redirected to the poor, it might be squandered on some pork barrel project, but it's still money that's not available to help the poor, assuming that somebody wants to help them.

The Flint water problem is a direct result of the Emergency Manager law, a law that was soundly defeated by a vote of the people, and then reinstated by some devious political chicanery. Now our RINO governor wants the feds to come bail him out. That's what happens when you reward incompetence, it just encourages more incompetence. If you really want to help the poor, give them good paying jobs and the training required for them to qualify for those jobs.

I have heard bad things about FEMA, but I don't know whether or not they are true. Be that as it may, if my house blew down, it wouldn't do me a bit of good for FEMA or anybody else to give money to my township, county, state, or the paper mill that laid me off 25 years ago. Either give the money directly to me, or get out of the way so I can rebuild my own damn house.