The Horror That Is Venezuela

It's easy to sit here in the rich and stable USA and use what's happening in Venezuela as some kind of morality tale. Yes, it's a living story of socialism in all its glory. Yes, it should be instructive to the socialist enablers in the media. Yes, it tells you a lot about the Secular Left that they are learning nothing from the suffering. They care about power, not people and it's as plain as the nose on your face.

So what?

In yesterday's post, I shared the Twitter stream from the NYT reporter in Venezuela who had tracked down the problems with the power outages.

What caused the Guri failure? Corpoelec union leader Ali Briceño said it was brush fire under the 765 KV trunkline which caused a surge in the system and caused Guri to shut down. There are no skilled operators left there to restart it.

Therein lies the horror. It's not going to get better because there's no one who can repair things. It's only going to get worse. The water supply went out yesterday and now people are trying to get water from a polluted river. Cholera is inevitable.

Worse still, this is already a decimated population. Most of the folks who are good at life - the ones who are wise enough to predict the future and deal with crises - have left. That's evidenced by the fact that no one is around to fix the power or water systems. The ones getting water from the sewage-polluted river are the average to below-average ordinary folks. They're hosed in so many ways.

And tomorrow will be worse. The next day will be worse than that.

Pray for them. Whether or not they were foolish enough to choose the unicorns and rainbows promised by the Secular Left, they are still people and they're going through an apocalyptic event of the type seen in zombie movies.

Addendum: When you think about it, the people of Venezuela are living through the chilling ending of Atlas Shrugged. You will need to click on the image to read the passage.