When I was there this past week, my friend Patrick showed me all around the city. "I look at this place as a post-apocalypse boot camp, the perfect apocalyptic training ground," he said. "Our infrastructure is rotting and there are abandoned buildings everywhere, making it the perfect place to find out how to survive if all systems fail. To survive successfully in some of the failed areas of this town even now, you gotta know more than just how to make your own granola."
Patrick showed me people who were living in boxcars. He also showed me deep sandstone caves under the city where you can keep food cold without refrigerators and which also act as natural air-conditioners. Eight stories underground, they could resist even an atomic blast.
"After our current energy supplies fail and unless we do something right now to develop new ones," said Patrick, "Americans will be forced to live like they do in the old-order Mennonite farm communities -- except that we'll be living here in an urban environment instead of out on the farm."
As we drove through the streets of St Louis, there was nobody out on the sidewalks. "You can see the cracks in America's boat here in St Louis," Patrick continued, "because 'corporate' influence is even greater here now than it is in Washington -- and has been for a much longer time. If there's a buck to be made, nothing in St Louis is sacred. They even tore down our perfectly good stadium and put up a new one that is 15,000 seats smaller and far less structurally sound."
Next we talked with some people who, without grants from big corporations or government, were developing ways to create alternative energy sources of their own. When the lights go out, these visionary young men and women will be ready.
Then we drove past more derelict factories, deserted buildings and boarded-up homes. Patrick then finished off his tour with a trip to the original "bridge to nowhere," an abandoned iron pier jutting out into the Mississippi where ships used to dock and unload their cargo. They don't do that no more. Both the ships and the cargo have all gone to China.
PS: In order to save money for my various trips throughout the world, I don't own a cell phone, live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bike a lot and don't subscribe to cable TV. As a result, I hadn't watched CNN in years -- so imagine my shock when I was forced to watch CNN for several hours in the press filing room at the recent Biden-Palin debate.
All the news, all the time? Bull-dookie.
Gossip, innuendo, rumor-mongering, opinions masquerading as facts and out-right lies? Yes. News? Hell no. CNN should be ashamed of itself for broadcasting such treif and actually calling it "news". And America should be ashamed for watching it.
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