Watchin' The Ships Roll In

 I'm drinking tea and watching the Jackson City water lawsuits sail into port. After the judgment in Flint, they're becoming a popular hole to fish in. Jackson never had the resources of Flint, Michigan, though, and doesn't now.

We should offer t-shirts and barbeque for some of these guys because even if they win, that's all they're going to get. We should get one for Mayor Lumumba that says, "My daddy wanted to be mayor, and all I got was this lousy lawsuit." He could literally save orphans from a burning building now, and he'll still be known as the water crisis guy. It's not really fair. It was that way when he got here.

Most of these suits only list the last two mayors as defendants, which doesn't seem fair. They didn't create this, even if they did lowball how bad it was. Neither has very deep pockets, and I'm curious if their professional liability insurance covers this.

I have mixed feelings about class-action suits. I was part of involving Trustmark's auto loans once from a loan I co-signed with a girl (bad idea, huh?) and was awarded a massive $80. The money lasted longer than the girl. She never picked up her portion of the booty.  The firm in the delta who filed the suit couldn't tell me why I was in the class even though I never asked to be.  After arguing with him on the phone for over an hour, I asked what his billing rate was and informed him I had no intention of paying for the time I had just consumed.  

Like the suit I was in, none of this will provide much tangible benefit for the members of the class, and it certainly won't help the city of Jackson in any meaningful way.  It should help a few lawyers pay their rent though, while they hunt for more lucrative fishing holes.  

You Never Listen

 Southerners love to read, but sometimes they don't listen very well.

One of the first stories in the Bible tells of how enslaving a large population of foreign people ends up with a city full of frogs and the death of the firstborn.  You'd think that'd be a pretty good lesson, but the moment we saw the Spanish making some money on this African slave thing, we wanted in on it.  

Even after Nat Turner said he was inspired by Moses and operated on messages from God, we embraced slavery and believed we were righteous.  In the end, nearly three-quarters of a million of our firstborn lay dead, our homes and farms burned, our business destroyed, and our stores of treasure depleted or emptied, but the slaves were free.  We read, but we don't listen, and it costs us.