Beyond the pristine streets and vibrant architecture of Old San Juan, and the walls of Fortaleza, Puerto Rico's citizens live in severe poverty.  You need look no farther than a quick internet search to find images of families huddled under cardboard roofs and barefoot children walking among heaps of refuse.  Recent studies show that "forty-four percent of the overall population lives in poverty, and the proportion rises to 57% for children."  To put those data point into perspective:

For the States as a whole, the average poverty rate is 14.6%.  The poorest state, Mississippi, has a poverty rate of 21.5%, still less than half that of Puerto Rico.

Despite being classified as a "high income country," the prevalence of economic hardship and wealth disparity, on top of infrastructure that echoes that of a third-world hellscape, makes Puerto Rico the perfect storm for socialist vultures in the media.

On September 20, 2022, The Atlantic published a piece by Puerto Rican writer Jaquira Díaz.  Her essay dramatically begins with the palpable and human experience of preparing for and living through a hurricane in the destitute landscape of Puerto Rico before she promptly — you guessed it — attacks President Trump.  Read an excerpt below:

[T]he people go to the big-box store or the Econo supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of water, a portable gas-powered how plate in case they lose power. ...

On September 20, the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving the entire population in the dark. ...

Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges collapse. ...

People lose family members. They desperately hunt for drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any other sources they can find. They endure President Trump, who spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament, tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are 'politically motivated ingrates.' They watch him toss paper towels at hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October — a performance before the world, meant as humiliation. Eventually he will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland.

Díaz then decries the slow response of FEMA and takes a jab at President Trump for blocking $20 billion in American taxpayer money to the archipelago — only a villain of the highest degree would do something so awful.

After that, Díaz veers off toward Crazytown and, you'll never believe it, galvanizes her identity as a journalist-who-runs-cover-for-Marxism and praises Oscar López Rivera.  During his heyday, Rivera held membership in a Marxist-Leninist organization that was responsible for acts of terrorism.  If you're wondering why that name sounds familiar, you might recall that shortly after Obama commuted his sentence, Rivera rode atop a float in a New York City parade as the "National Freedom Hero."

After all of the Trump Derangement Syndrome outbursts, and the lauding of Marxist guerrillas, Díaz's argument is this: "independence, not statehood, is the path" for Puerto Rico.

I love this idea.  Ideologically, I am very supportive of movements for political sovereignty, and the idea of unloading a burdensome territory from my list of financial dependents is sublime.  Puerto Rico receives massive welfare, despite not paying federal income tax — for the 2021 fiscal year alone, local entities received $65 billion in U.S. handouts, which amounted to nearly $20K per capita.

It appears quite evident that Díaz herself must be a Marxist, as she touts "the people" over and over.  If only the big, bad, exploitative, colonizing Americans would let us go, we would be fine!  But then she says this:

Puerto Rico had been plagued by a debt crisis that would soon be worsened by ballooning pension-fund liabilities, losses from the state-owned power company, and a mass migration of taxpayers and workers to the United States. ...

No one provides an argument against government like a dimwitted Marxist who loves big government. ...

Ballooning pensions? Losses from a state-owned company? Fleeing taxpayers? That sure sounds like a lot of problems with the local government if you ask me.

When I crunched the numbers, from 1965 until 2022, Puerto Rico has been under the leadership of a Republican-type governor for a little over nine years.  The other 49ish years have been under Democrat rule.

Puerto Rico is truly a social experiment under Democrat rule.  No wonder it's collapsed.  If Díaz possessed a healthy degree of intellectual capacity, she'd realize that the real solution for Puerto Rico would be independence from Democrats as quickly as possible.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.