"Water under the bridge," said Steve Vanek, West's mayor pro-tem, referring to decisions that allowed homes and schools to be built near the plant.
"It was an accident, and accidents do happen," said Jean Smith, 66, whose home lost most of its roof and sustained structural damage.
The attitudes of local residents partly reflect the character of a small Texas town. "I mind my own business, and that's what a lot of people do around here," said Jeanette Karlik, who writes a column for a local newspaper.
But the views are also part of a long political tradition in Texas of shunning heavy government regulation despite some of the worst industrial accidents in the nation's history.
Forget about party over country, these conservatives pick party over family, friends and neighbors. George Orewell said this:
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield"Basically he's saying once people around you start dropping the bullshit comes to an end. This may be true of people who are not psychopaths. But not, it seems, Republicans. Some kind of red state psychosis. They will sacrifice everything, including themselves, for the movement. Kim Jong Un over there in North Korea would be proud.
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