A while back, I wrote a message to those people I lovingly call “the [expletive] douchebags from St. Louis County”. I compiled a list of totally true facts about city living for their consideration.
Well, now St. Louis is vying for Amazon to relocate here. I think there’s actually a very compelling case to move here, but it seems highly unlikely to happen. Still, we’re living in a world where a reality TV star with no political experience can get elected president. Anything is possible; you can’t just take things for granted.
I do love St. Louis. However, there is that issue of the aforementioned douchebags from St. Louis County who keep moving in and making the place unaffordable for people with functioning personalities who want to work less than 80 hours a week. And given what I hear about the soulless sociopaths who infest Amazon, I really can’t imagine things getting any better if those people start moving here.
So I have revisited and modified my list from previously. These are True Facts about St. Louis, which I encourage everyone at Amazon to weigh carefully. If anyone has Jeff Bezos’s email address, please forward this to him and then tell him everyone in St. Louis thinks he’s an asshat:
- Police gun down people on a daily basis.
- You can pretty much count on getting robbed once a month.
- Aggressive panhandlers demand spare change at all hours of the night. Some will even break into your house and stand by your bed asking for money for bus fare or a “car that ran out of gas”. The police are too busy gunning people down to stop them. You’re better off just giving them whatever money you have.
- There have been riots going on nonstop for the past five years*.
- Rats! Rats! Rats!
- Relatedly, there’s been a typhus outbreak. The corpses are piling up and beginning to smell. It’s only going to get worse.
- The public schools in the city are a complete mess. Alternatives to the typical public schools are expensive or difficult to get into. Or both. If you don’t make the lottery for the school of your choice, you’ll have to make some hard decisions.
I’m sure the people at City Hall have been telling you all kinds of wonderful things and the amazing, vivid shade of red they’ll use for the carpet they’ll be rolling out for you. However, please know that every elected (and most appointed) officials are either a criminal or developmentally disabled, and usually both of these things. The only thing that keeps them from screwing the place up any further is that they’re also wildly incompetent**.
If they somehow end up getting handed an Amazon-sized increase to the tax base, I shudder to think of what a disaster this would be.
You know how you hear about some yokel from rural Arkansas who wins the Powerball and manages to blow through all the money in two years buying himself things like a gold-plated Corvette, a snake-skin suit, and a diamond encrusted belt buckle with his initials on it and is later found dead in Vegas having overdosed freebasing cocaine with a pair of Ukrainian hookers?
It would be like that only worse.
Please, people of Amazon, do yourselves and us all a favor and move to some other city.
* Actually I think this one is not an exaggeration.
** God help us if a competent criminal finds a way into City Hall.
