SUPPOSE

Suppose.....You were raised in a town principally populated by people connected with the arts: painting, music (both classical and modern), sculpting, selling and showing of art, small business, real estate offices, stock brokerages, insurance offices, doctors, lawyers, skilled labor, good schools, small police force with little to do because the crime rate is very low, and where the biggest problem is the ocean pollution caused by your own system of septic tanks instead of sewers.

Suppose there was a disaster in your artsy fartsy urban paradise; every home destroyed and under water and you were forcibly transplanted with thousands of your societal peers to a refugee center where you were all crammed in together with nothing to do and noplace to go. No money. No jobs. Cut off from everyone. What do you think would happen? Would you turn to crime, rape, murder, and other activities? Or would you begin to paint, write poetry, form little music groups playing hand made instruments and stuff, keep diaries of your experiences and wait for things to sort out? Most likely.

But suppose

You were raised in a town where corruption was a way of life? Where the police are on the take and murder is routinely overlooked; in fact you live in a town in which most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- it is a place where 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors; a place where violence is so prevalent that the middle class long ago stopped reporting crimes to the corrupt police and the murder rate was the highest in the country, so high it is called the Murder Capital of the United States; an urban Paradise where you bribe public officials to get what you want, bribe union officials to get jobs, and bribe cops to beat traffic tickets and avoid compliane with other laws. A town loaded with prostitutes and their pimps all of whom pay protection; a town where prostitution and pimping are glorified by song and T-Shirt slogans. A town where rape is a right of passage for young males, and getting drunk is a way of life. In fact, public drunkenness is a lifestyle looked upon with admiration in the nation’s press and your town holds a yearly forty day binge that attracts more than two million drunks each and every year. Suppose this urban paradise also has a public educational system that is one of the worst in the United States? Suppose you live in a town that elects public officials on the basis of race and where new cops must be residents, a code for race based hiring?

Suppose there was a disaster in your criminal urban paradise and you were forcibly transplanted with thousands of your societal peers to a place where you were all crammed in together with nothing to do and noplace to go. No money. No jobs. Plenty to steal. And especially plenty of women to have sex with, whether they wanted to or not.

What would you do? Honestly lay around all day every day writing poetry and painting pictures til somebody handed you something new? Or would you begin to look for opportunities like you had where you came from?

Look for the crime rate in Houston and other refugee cities to soar to heights never before seen.

Houston, you've got a problem.