I Pit My Selfish Rich Siblings (Hurricane Related)

The BBQ Pit
1

My sister buys houses like other people buy shoes. Actually, she owns more houses than I own pairs of shoes. She has about seven scattered across South Alabama, all of which survived the floods with little or no damage. They include-

-a beach house
-a turn of the century home on a river nearby
-a trailer on some property she owns in the country
-her dead mother-in-law’s hermetically sealed 1905 Savannah Whorehouse of a place (her mother in law grew up grindingly poor during the Depression and when she became rich decorated her house in what one of the Joad chirren would picture a rich person living like- if it stayed still it got gilded and ersatz Victorian crap everywhere)
-her dead grandmother-in-law’s Jim Walter home

All of these are in addition to the house that she lives in and the rental condos she owns.

There’s a chronic need of course for refugee housing throughout Alabama. I have donated my one (1) apartment for use by strangers while I’m gone on business next week (their integrity is vouched for by a co-worker). My sister has not pledged one single solitary bedroom to anybody.

I can understand not wanting to put up posters saying “Need a place? Come on over!”, but through her church or the Red Cross or various agencies she could find people in need who are decent but disposessed. It’s not like they’re going to steal her furniture- where the hell would they take it? Their house is gone!- and she’ll have their names/information, etc… It irritates me, but not as much as

MY BROTHER- he has a 4 BR lakehouse in addition to the McMansion he lives in, also in south Alabama. Not only would it never occur to him (an elder in his church) to offer it for the use of people who have NOTHING left, but get this- ooh chile you gone say I know he ain’t- this weekend he’s going to a football game. He has two rooms reserved, one for himself and his wife and the other for their pre-Yuppie turdlet spawn (the oldest is a 16 year old girl who got a SUV for her birthday and complained because she wanted a convertible). Now, the place where they’re going to the game is a city whose hotel and motel rooms are currently booked by, guess who? Katrina evacuees, but, as with most motels and hotels they made the refugees sign a waiver saying they knew they had to leave when the rooms were booked again. The motels/hotels have asked on air that people be understanding and that if they can they cancel their reservations so the evacuees can stay.

MY BROTHER’S NOT EVEN CANCELLING ONE OF HIS ROOMS! NOT ONE OF THEM! AND HIS OWN MOTHER LIVES LESS THAN AN HOUR FROM WHERE THE GAME IS AND HAS INVITED HIM TO STAY WITH HER BUT HIS RESPONSE WAS “THE KIDS WOULD HAVE TO SLEEP ON A COUCH.” BOO-FUCKING HOO YOU AGING YUPPIE SCUM ASSWIPE! YOU’RE THE REASON THAT PEASANTS REVOLT! CHRISTIANS LIKE YOU HAVE STOPPED MORE PEOPLE FROM GOING TO CHURCH THAN MUHAMMAD EVER EVEN TRIED TO DO!
AAAAAAAARRRRRRHH!!! I swear to God it’s like trying to talk compassion into Cartman. “No Starvin’ Marvin, that’s MY lakehouse! Screw poor people!”

I am just seeing purple.

At least I know my sister’s good for a fat donation to relief agencies and of the two she’s the one who might come around and let some souls crash in one of her (15) spare bedrooms. But I just don’t think either one of them grasps the fact that had Katrina turned east, their nouveau riche asses could be among the ones treading water up to their izod symbols. And yes I know, private property, Ayn Rand, “your need does not create a responsibility on my part” yadda yadda, but there’s also such a thing as just simple human compassion.

Oh well.

Rant out (but I am sooooo pissed).

2

Jesus. Man’s inhumanity to man and so forth. :frowning:

3

WWJD? Definitely not that.

Your OP made my blood boil, Sampiro. :mad:

“Well, yeah, thousands are dead and tens (hundreds?) of thousands are homeless, but I’d hate to see these football tickets go to waste. Plus, who wants to sleep on a couch?”

That they’re taking up two rooms for three people is just the icing on the shitcake.

4

Maybe, jsut maybe, they’ll see sense when they properly realise how bad things are?

(THat was my hopeful and optimisitic remark for 2005, that was) :frowning:

5

Given what you’ve been telling us about your family, does all this surprise you? I don’t think they’re evil or anything, they’re just clueless and egocentric and can’t see other people’s suffering even if you shove it in their faces. It fits in what I’ve heard about your family up to now.

6

I have to say that as high-strung and theatrical and downright spooky as she can be, this is why I love and respect my mother more than I do my siblings. She has nowhere remotely near their money, not a minor fraction even, and she hates to use her credit cards, but she was on the telephone making donations immediately and is wondering how she can find a single “decent” elderly woman who needs a place. (Being 70 and living alone that’s the only demographic she would feel comfortable having in her house, which I completely understand.) Having been without many times herself, and having been through hell in the late 80s with seemingly nowhere to turn, she’s extremely empathic where things like this are concerned.

My brother and sister have been broke in that “just starting out, didn’t manage money well, had some unexpected expenses, so things are really tight and I’m keeping the Master Card at the ready until payday” kind of way, but they’ve never been broke in the “unemployed with no money, there is no money coming in, we have nobody to borrow money from, and we have bills that are majorly past due and everything of any value is in the pawnshop” sort of way, and there’s a HUGE difference in those two types of broke. When you’ve experienced the latter (which my mother and I have- I learned a lot from it but I hope I never get any CEUs) and can easily envision being homeless or at best on the charity and sofas of relatives, I think it makes you a bit more appreciative of the situation of people who aren’t bums and who work hard and now have absolutely nothing to show for it and nothing to go back to. Or maybe they’re just selfish.

7

My mom told me about the poor NO family who were staying in a Tuscaloosa hotel who were having to leave because of the AL football game. These people have lost everything, except their lives, and they are having to evacuate for football. I understand other people booked their hotel, but in a situation like this, I wish people, who have other options, would stay elsewhere.

8

I wish the hotels would have the balls to deny football reservations and simply say, “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re now unexpectedly fully booked and can no longer honor your reservations. Perhaps you could try the hotel down the street.”

I wonder how these selfish pricks will be able to look these refugees in the eyes as they ride the elevators and walk through the lobbies of these places, without feeling utter shame at their greed in taking something of dire need to people who have absolutely nothing. I’m utterly disgusted by the callous disregard for human suffering I’ve been hearing about by my fellow citizens these past few days.

9

A-fucking-men! I cannot BELIEVE these hotels are kicking out refugees and survivors at a time like this!

It blows my mind. What the FUCK is wrong with people?

10

That presumes they can even see these people in the first place. I don’t think they ever make it past their filters.

11

You think they’ll even notice the refugees? Truly, you are an optimist.

12

I daresay some of these selfish pricks will be well-to-do whites with plenty of practice at not noticing destitute blacks, who appear from the video coverage at least to be the great majority of the New Orleans refugees.

Then again, well-off selfish pricks can be equal-opportunity ignorers of the suffering poor too.

Please note: This is not yet another Northerner assuming Southerners are a pack of racist troglodytes. I have no doubt that an equal number of selfish prick residents of, say, Sherborn and Dover would be oblivious to the misery of refugees from Roxbury. I’m just sayin’, race and class divides may well be co-toxins at work here.

13

I’m worried that this may be an issue on Monday here in Tallahassee, also. The Miami at FSU game is Monday night, and right now our hotels are full, too. I think that after this storm, the attendance might be smaller than it would otherwise, but still the prior hotel reservations are going to result in a similar potential displacement.

On the flip side (i.e. it’s not all bad tidings) – this article on the local paper’s web site is encouraging – to see that there are some coordinated efforts to help match refugees with people who want to offer rooms in their homes.

Also, I talked to a friend this evening who told me about a local hotel she heard about – the proprietor was offering rooms at a discounted rate for people from the affected zones. And he was also calling up people with reservations for the football night and asking them if they would please try to make arrangements to stay with friends if possible. He wasn’t forcing them to give up reservations, but my friend said that he had managed to free up 10 rooms or so. I hope other hotels will follow suit. At least being a Monday night game, maybe we won’t have game traffic flooding in for the whole weekend – hopefully just the one day.

14

(Puts on flame-retardant jockstrap)

How exactly have you tried to talk “compassion” to them? Have you told them exactly what you think of their actions, and told them exactly how hypocritical it makes their religiosity, or are you bitching here in leiu of a healthy and morally justified controntation?

I won’t quote Ayn Rand, but I will paraphrase someone: “all that is required to ensure the triumph of evil in the world is for good men to refrain from telling their brothers what self-centered shitstains they are out of a misplaced sense of decorum.”

Shame can be a powerful thing.

15

It’s a sad situation, but hotels are especially relient on keeping promises for their livlihood. If you went past a Denny’s and it was closed, you wouldn’t think twice. But if you showed up tired, travel-worn and with nowhere else to go at a Super 8 and they turned you away for whatever reason, you would probably never step foot in there again. Reservation are like gold in the hotel business. They can’t function if there isn’t trust in them. As a desk clerk, I was taught that if a customer didn’t have a room for whatever reason, we were to move hell and high water and pay any amount of money to make sure they had a place to stay. If every place in town was sold out, we’d put them up in a five star hotel at no cost to them.

In tourist areas especially, hotels make their entire years’ profit over the course of a few weeks. My 25 room hotel regularly only had one or two rooms occupied during the winter- not even enough to cover housekeeper’s salary, much less franchine fees, maintainance, payroll, taxes and other expenses. To lose a week- especially in the last couple years as budget hotel tourism is way down- would be to give up the business. They only had from Labor Day to Memorial Day (both critical weekends where the rates were 6x as high as the winter rates and full capacity was expected) to make enough money to cover expenses for the year. Most small hotels are owned by families who live on the premises. I’m sure it hurts them- most hotel owners I know are very religious and come from India where natural disasters are no stranger. But it does nobody any good for another family to lose their livelihood.

16

There was a piece on CNN that showed some tourists stranded on a roof top in fear of their lives. Their hotel had evacuated some of the guests but for whatever reason stopped. Some of the remaining guests had their SUVs with them, which they filled with their own luggage, refusing to give rides out of the danger zone to the ones left behind.

17

A NO hotel clerk was interviewed tonight on NBC News. She has opened her tiny home to strangers who have lost everything.

OTOH, her employer managed to order up a caravan of big SUVs to ferry their very rich customers out of town. When the hotel clerk asked hotel management why these SUVs (which could carry a dozen people or so each) were only carrying one or two people and all their suitcases out of town, she was told only those with selected credit cards were being offered the service. Other hotel guests and ordinary folk did not make the cut.

I have a feeling that clerk is going to be out of a job tomorrow. Compassion loses out to cash.

18

I think the truly noble move would be for the Alabama to postpone the football game and tell all the fans to stay home so the refugees could stay where they are. But then again in the South football is a religion whereas I could take it or leave it.

Sampiro, I’ve met many “Christians” like your brother. At least (as I recall) your sister doesn’t claim to be so observant. I think this is what compassionate conservatism is all about. “It’s really too bad it’s their fault that bad things have happened to them.”

19

Fuck you, you odious little toad.

20

For what it’s worth, University of Alabama officials have called on Alabama fans to give up their reservations for the weekend, and many are doing so. There was a story in the Tuscaloosa News today about a man who called the hotel to see if his reserved room was needed for evacuees … when the hotel told him they could use it, he gave it up. According to officials, many fans are doing the same.

Not exactly the ultimate sacrifice, but there are large numbers of folks who are allowing the evacuees to stay where they are in Tuscaloosa.