Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home, and your comfort zone is hardest to leave at a time of great discomfort. Seems only the well-off can find comfort wherever they happen to be. The poorest among us can only find comfort deep inside the box a rich man's refrigerator came in. To get them to evacuate, you pretty much have to set fire to the box. To evacuate an island full of rich condo dwellers, simply give notification, then get out of their way.

Emergency managers and disaster responders wish everyone would evacuate a threatened community, and do it in an orderly manner as soon as possible, then return only when power gets restored and conditions are safe. That would make their life-saving jobs so much easier. Mandatory evacuations would actually seem to be mandatory, but the poorest among us know they are not. Authorities have no authority to force a person to leave an address called home however humble and hazardous, but that`same person attempting suicide`can be stopped using leathal force.

Evacuation for the rich is easy and often enjoyable. A mandated evacuation is an unplanned vacation, usuaslly a flight. All the stuff left behind is over-insured, and the`vacation is tax deductable. Flight for the poor is wingless and pitted with pitfalls that require money to get over or go around. What they return to was uninsured and the only way to avoid paying taxes is to avoid spending. The only way to insure stuff is to sit on it. The have-not scumbags who didn't evacuate are sure to get what was abandoned.

Evacuation is a luxury that costs taxpayers a large fortune when giving the poor this luxury would cost a small fortune. We could have sent all of the poor from Louisianna and Mississippi on a very slow world cruise and paid far less than the billions spent housing them in hotels for over a year in some cases. Here it is nineteen months after Katrina and we are still housing them and giving them free utilities, food, and health care that we refused to provide before the storm. Katrina wiped out thousands of homes and somehow ended homelessness in the affected areas.

Poor people aren't stupid. It pays to stay, but it shouldn't. If it didn't, you can bet your sweet taxpaying ass those no-tax-paying, indigent, peasants, peons, and the meek would find a way out and settle there to be a burden and a blight in that place.

I am opposed to nationally subsidized stupidity, so opposition to FEMA is a given. In general, I oppose evacuation as much as FEMA promotes and supports it with debt my great and grand children will curse me and my generation for. Those who choose to live and work in disaster-prone areas should remain there to deal with the problem their being there created. They need to build homes and businesses that can stand up the the local environment and take shelter in local shelters. They should clean up their own mess and share a common loss in proportion to their investment. The rest should be pure charity from the private sector.

If the victims can't get private sector sympathy, they are just SOL. Live and work elsewhere. America is a free country with plenty of high and dry land, but don't make the Americans who are on it subsidize your carefree swamp lifestyle. It is fair to make them want to keep you there, and it does look like tens of thousands of New Orleans survivors have embarked on this effective strategy. I think there will always be a New Orleans. I'm not sure there will always be a way out.

Evacuation on a mass scale such as is now the case on our coastal lowlands simply is not practical in the time that a hurricane usually gives. The larger the storm and the more eratic the track, the less practical a mass evacuation becomes. Evacuating one large city is challenge enough, but when they all want to hit the highway and then find lodging what you have is a mass clusterfork that spreads ever outward like a tumped-over pail of creepy crawlers and slitherines. The problem is the same problem the New South faces with Yankees--some stay.

Alternatives need to be explored, so lets explore some.

Stay and pray. Not all homeowners, renters, and dwellers need to evacuate. Those who don't should be identified well ahead of any storm. Mandatory evacuations toss the babies out with the bath water, but these babies in a blind panic are in cars towing trailers filled with consumer crap and pets that clog evacuation routes and motels all along the way.

Build local shelters and encourage their use. All schools, libraries, and civic buildings should be storm shelters on high ground. Every community should have the ability to temporarily house the entire community or at least that portion that would otherwise have to evacuate. That should be mandated by the state. The feds should make states do it. "WE the People" should make the feds do it, but to make the`people do it, we need to mass evacuate Dade County Florida or any part of coastal Texas.

All steel reinforced concrete buildings are safe places to shelter healthy people and should be open to anyone seeking shelter. They can be made even safer by mandating the use of smart glass and steel shutters, and be more user friendly with care and`comfort supplies that are kept under stupid glass. Downtown high-rise buildings can allow for vertical evacuation. Houston should have gone up for Rita, and the po folk herded into the Superdome should have taken over the downtown hotels.

Evacuate by bus to a community that plays host to a busload or trainload, planeload, bargeload, shitload. Coastal communities`need big brother towns and cities, and inland cities need a homey little place to take the kids to the beach, a place they can call kid sister or that little bitch on the`coast, whatever, but it would be nice to go someplace far away and`scary as a group that shares expenses with a host that helps to keep those to a level of minimal exploitation.

Identify those homes in your community that are safe and could host one or two local families from homes or places that are deemed unsafe or threatened. Marry these people up in good times so that when bad times hit the community, neighbors help neighbors. That is the American way. Our colors don't run, so why encourge our people to.

Building codes should encourage storm shelter housing and discourage or ban the death trap type that usually becomes debris that does even more damage. Homes and businesses that are up front, on the front lines, waterfront properties MUST be indestructable structures that form a community's first line of defense. These buildings must not fail and should be good as shelters. If they aren't, evacuate everybody, because everybody is threatened. You can't even consider a stay strategy unless your front line is secure and trustworthy. All else depends on this front line holding and blunting the raw brute force assaulting the community.

Hunker down and ride it out, because there is no safe place that you can drive to. Hurricanes kill all along their path, and some kill more inlanders than coasters. In some cases you can go from the pan into the fire, so make your pan safer and mock the chickens who are bugging out. While they are away, ransack and loot their stuff. When they return, tell them a ransacking hoarde of raping maniacs did it. Share your horror stories. Hopefully, they will bugout again, but odds are they will eventually settle elsewhere and your community will be the better for it. Much better if they take their mutts with them.

Evacuation in the face of a weather event is so un-American as to be Communistic, although I know Communists won't move on account of weather, even when it rains 750lb bombs. Sprinkle on the heads of stadium entrenched Americans, they are up enmasse and headed for their SUVs. None-the-regardless, when I see the American flag flying over the rubble of a destroyed home, I see the mark of an idiot, a loser, possibly a chickenshit Commie bastard. What it says to me is, "Look how stupid I am!"

American flags should fly over the homes that stood and mark the place where the defenders of the community stood their ground. Those are the heroes we should all be praising. Instead, we mock those who stupidly stay and praise those who wisely left. We make no defense and it looks it.

We pay and we pay, but the emergency managers like it that way and will forever say, "Evacuate...evacuate! Everybody evacuate!" I will continue coming to your community to ride out your storms. I would like more company. If you'd like to try it, get in touch with me. I will show you how to make your home a safe shelter. If I say it is safe, I will ride any storm out with you, then be there for the flag raising. If all goes according to plan, you will need no insurance and will require no disaster relief.

That is the goal, but to accomplish the goal, your neighbors need to be signed on. Should any of their structures fail, the plan comes into jeopardy, which is true for any collective defense. In a perfect coastal community, all pull together toward a common goal, all for one and one for all. The flag, when it gets raised, flies over the whole community that can take pride in what they collectively did. For one brief emergency, they stood like frozen communists in a bread line.

There are no perfect coastal communities, and it is possible there never will be, but I do believe there can be perfect neighborhoods that survive well amid total destruction and thereby serve as a model. We do need a model. What we don't need but will get are more evacuation lanes and evacuation orders with teeth. God help us, because our federal government is determined to help.

The stupid idiot masses demand they do something. Government will ALWAYS do something. The challenge is to get a government to do nothing. Had the`government done nothing all along, not only would there be no problem, there would be nothing on the`coast a hurricane could destroy. I am quite certain the`coast would be as popular and as populated, but by painful evolution, tenacity, and hard work.

What governments do that is`so disruptive and`destructive is create`dependencies while frostering independence from friends, neighbors, churches, and other natural support groups. Government will try to be your everything and do it with your money and your debt. While it tries, things will get worse as people find they don't need each other. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. People who need a government agent are just pathetic, like the once free and mighty tiger that can no longer feed itself and must do tricks for a master.

Your government says, "EVACUATE!" Your Hurricane Man says, "Stand your ground!"

Food for thought: The asshole is for evacuation.

Don't be an asshole. Use your head and stay. If you get out on the highway, you will be hemmed in by assholes on all sides, all of them in a great hurry and going nowhere. Hurricanes are nothing but exciting, and they are not at all dangerous or deadly to those who know hurricanes and use their heads. Ignorant assholes get into all sorts of bad trouble and really should evacuate. I am all for rectal evacuation, but I see it like hemeroids. If they go up and stay, no problem, but if they return, they become a pain in the ass.

I think I have said enough on the`subject of evacuation, but I can't close without acknowledging that there are times, circumstances, and people that should evacuate a threatened area, especially as things are now. We are still building with future debris. Until that stops and the`coast is`clear of all debris and potential debris, the risk to the ground`standers can be too great and those who try may be`called foolish and ill-advised. I could be called`an idiot and/or asshole. I hate when that happens, so I will close by saying, "Use your head to save your ass, and if you can't see for shit, guess where your head is?"