Retaliation

by Duckman GR

7 am and you could already feel the heat, the early morning sun glaring through the kitchen window as I ate. On the teevee, Robin was giving news just as hot, border tensions cranked up because of a running gun battle between DHS agents and unspecified Coyotes, started by DHS strike teams blasting assembly points along the Arizona fence line. Mexico was sure to retaliate, but when and where was the big question, hopefully not during my commute, I thought. I was on a fine line thanks to the bankruptcy laws and a day of lost wages could be the last straw for my creditors.

I was lined up at the freeway meter, admiring the Freeway Bloggers latest, when there was a distant rumble of thunder, a rumble that rolled on for a bit. Then the lights went out. Great, now it was every car for itself, as the line roared ahead onto the freeway.

The XAir America was getting jammed, so there wasn’t any real news on the radio, as I struggled down the rapidly gridlocking “freeway,” worrying if my battery charge would last, wondering what the hell was happening to my sleepy little Navy town since bushco had pretty much ruined everything, cursing the fates that had birthed me to a normal middle class family instead of one of those CEO family’s.

The day was soon to get even better, as the sun beat down on my little solar array roofed car. I had advanced towards Mission Valley, could see the 8 / 805 interchange shimmering ahead, a haze making the 805 overpass dance to the motion of the air.

Only it wasn’t a mirage, it was the bridge, as Mexico began to retaliate in earnest for our cutting into their labor exports and their currency imports. The ground shook 3 miles away as the huge span crashed to the ground under the impact of 500 pound bombs, a huge cloud rising from where a number of business parks and restaurants now lay ruined. And there was more to come, the radio suddenly full of news, none good. Chinese-Mexican-Venezuelan forces were slamming our infrastructure to teach us a lesson for a variety of sins, the latest being the deaths of 14 illegal’s and their 3 government agent shepherds, killed by a DHS rocket that struck their van as it was traveling well inside Mexico towards an immigration assembly point.

I was stuck, with hundreds of thousands of my fellow San Diegans. Smoke was rising all around the horizon, the radio full of claims of Miramar and Lindbergh fields cratered, the Trolley lines cut, the approaches to the Coronado Bay Bridge blasted into twisted piles of concrete, rebar, earth, and mangled cars. Casualties were briefly mentioned without specifics. Damn, I have friends that work at Dave and Busters, right under 805, no jobs left for them..

All around me was chaos and death, and for what? To prove a point, to thump their chests? Who was to blame for this, was it Mexico and their Conservative government, China dangling their debt holdings before a beholden US Government, or was it the Republicons who created this environment in the first place, by refusing, in the name of short sighted greed, massive to be sure, but short sighted nonetheless, to address our real issues with Mexico and Venezuela and China when solutions might have been possible. Sure, they might have had to deal with people they didn’t like, people who had embarrassed them, people who had thumbed their noses at the bushies own ignorance and hubris and racism, their underlying inferiority and insecurity. Instead they had chosen denial and projection, and later, when someone came to power inclined to try to deal with the problems, they found walls, not bridges.

So instead my beautiful city was paying the price for bushco’s failures at the hands of a Third World country and a bunch of Chinese plying the civilization game at my expense. Standing there, watching the black clouds spiral up, billow out, reaching out for me, the rage boiled up. How could these bastards do this, how many innocent lives were snuffed out, the city crippled like never before, not even from the Cedar Fire. I remembered when that crane had shut down the 5/805 merge, half the city was late for work that day, but that was nothing. This was devastating, and someone was going to pay for this.

Blowing up our bridges is supposed to make us like China and Mexico, is that what they think? That killing friends and families, that making it impossible for us to work is somehow teaching us a lesson? That punishing average Americans for the crimes and failures of past politicians is going to move current leadership towards negotiation and compromise, towards anything but anger and retaliation?

It was hot, and getting hotter.

Note: This is a hypothetical story based in part on geography. Who else could inflict the kind of damage Israel is inflicting on Lebanon and Gaza, that we are inflicting on Iraq, that has the proximity needed to do so? I'm not bashing Mexico or China or Venezuela, so don't try to make a case that I am.

It's just a shoe on someone else's foot. The fit sucks, doesn't it.