WHOSE GONNA PAY FOR THIS MESS
White Nationalists
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
WHOSE GONNA PAY FOR THIS MESS
by Adam Carroll Draper
Ten or twelve years ago, my dad gave me his old 1995 Dodge Dakota after he and mom had to get a truck big enough to pull their travel trailer three miles down the road to a park where they like to camp. Think about that one for a second. My parents are something. I still have that truck. It’s got nearly 235 thousand miles on it, but it still passes inspection. I had to put a new transmission in it after Jordan and some dude she was dating drove it like they stole it (back when she was twenty or something), but it still runs. Better than that, you can’t make it stop running. The air conditioner and heater still work. It’s a good old truck.
As you might recall (if you’ve been reading these missives for a while), Stef and I fixed up our house and finally got it sold last year. We moved into town and now we live an old Victorian that was built in 1885. There’s a porch around three sides of the house, which is my favorite part; and we can walk to all the restaurants and bars in downtown Winston Salem (well, we could when they were opened – before the tyranny of microbes). The only problem is that we don’t have enough room in our driveway, which has a little parking area behind the house, and the truck has to live out front (as Jordan would have said when she was a kid) on a fairly busy street.
Then came the rioting. Fortunately, Antifa must not think Winston Salem is important enough to come here to destroy buildings, tear down stuff or turn over people’s cars, smash them or burn them. There have been some protests, but not a bunch of burning, looting and rioting. I thought that there might be a couple of times, and each time I told Stef I was thinking about moving the old Dodge over to my office (which is not near downtown or any hooliganism). Stef would ask me, “Why?” I’d tell her that the truck is in the street and if some mob decided that they wanted to start “participating in some anarchy” (like in the Sublime song), that truck is going to be a good target.
“Well, we have insurance on it,” Stef said.
“Honey, we don’t have comprehensive coverage on that old truck. It’s not worth it. If it gets torn up, we’re not just out; we’ll have to clean up the mess and have somebody haul it off to the junkyard. And beyond that, I’ll be pissed. My dad gave me that truck.”
Stef had never thought about that. Now, this is where I realize that being a lawyer has made me a fundamentally strange person. When normal people see rioting, they worry about people getting hurt and they are sad when businesses that people have worked their whole lives for get looted, smashed and burned. I feel that way, too – but I can’t see it without having one of those moments like that old TransAmerica commercial when the Fay Wray looking character stomps on King Kong’s fingers as he’s hanging on the top the Empire State Building, and yells,”Hey, ya big ape, whose gonna pay for this mess?” (OK, they probably can’t run that commercial any more, and I guess I’ll get banned from Facebook in fine Orwellian fashion for remembering it).
The truth is that we don’t know who is going to pay for all this burning and looting. Insurance may cover some of it, but there are all kinds of exclusions. If all this is considered insurrection or revolution, insurance will not cover it. Think about Bill DeBlasio telling the police to surrender Manhattan to the mob. Or how about the Mayor of Seattle and the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest Area (CHOP). If all that damage is determined to have been caused by acts of insurrection, insurance is not likely to cover it. Do we all pay for it after the mayors ordered the police to let the mob tear everything up. I know my answer to that. “I’m sorry, but no!” (But that refrain is from another story).
I have just decided to sell the truck rather than run the risk of it getting destroyed. Is anyone else thinking like that? When business owners have to move out of the war zones created in our major cities, will that make them racists? Now that New York has gone back to being “the most dangerous city in the world” (as the opening to Late Night with David Letterman used to say), what do you think the people who don’t feel like getting attacked in the street are going to do? And when everybody moves out of New York and Seattle and Minneapolis (and they all look like Detroit), will the socialists recognize that they might have acted stupidly?
No, once the squalor the socialists have created fully sets in, they’ll blame it on the deplorables who fled for their lives.
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, share it (if you dare) and/or comment. It helps. I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to read it.