I love Texas. I love the Fort Stockton mechanic whose hunger keeps him from scrubbing all the grease from his hands before lunch at the diner. I love the Houston Fifth Ward parents working two jobs each so they can save enough for their three kids’ college. I love the crusty old wildcatters. Got my name from one, Glenn McCarthy. Musicians, artists, teachers, saloon keepers, nurses, firefighters, boot makers, longshoremen, linemen, and Friday night high school football announcers — I salute them all, and whatever little I’ve done in politics and journalism I’ve done for them.
Today’s Republican leadership in Texas has betrayed them all, and it’s time to quit reading tea leaves, playing for personal advantage and holding our fire for days of a sure thing and a safe bet. It’s time to get down and throw the bums out. “This train is leaving it’s rolling down the tracks and there ain’t no turning back.” The Parlor Mob sang that. Not a bad anthem for the times.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn votes to give corporations such super-human rights that a merely human rape victim is denied her day in court. Gov. Rick Perry covers up the decision-making that may well have led to the execution of an innocent man. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst says he and his cronies could have balanced the state’s budget without the $12 billion in federal stimulus money they took to balance the budget. This Dewhurst did to help Perry cover-up his transparent lies to his own teabagged base.
Cheering on the teabaggers with cries of “Hands off Texas,” Perry pulled his pockets open for the very feds he was name-calling. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s been named “porker of the month” for her profligate earmarking, you know, the practice John McCain said would be the ruin of us all. Texas House Speaker Joe Straus only wants to get along with the rest of the gang. There’s no hope there, given the company he keeps and all.
The hypocrisy and mismanagement have reached levels the word failure doesn’t quite capture. All the while Texans work hard and accept responsibility for their lives and the lives of their children. They do what Texans have always done in a pinch: worked harder and faced the future with an unblinking gaze that gets it.
When our public schools succeed it’s because of the commitment of teachers, parents, students and local supporters who care enough to get involved. State government has turned its back on public education. We have more kids without health care than any other state. We have more uninsured people than any other state. Our highways are crumbling. College is out of reach for many Texans.
We are in a serious tight. Too often, so-called political sophistication is the enemy of courage. The future is what we make it. Good times are not going to come around on their own and wait for our passive endorsements of our luck. We have to build a just and prosperous Texas future.
Durn near everybody in Texas who knows anything about the state of our state knows that the current leadership has looted the treasury, trashed the infrastructure necessary for a healthy bidness climate and tested our children to death while trying to replace science with superstition and history with right-wing idols. We have the best medical facilities in the world and most of our citizens are locked out of them, victims of an insurance industry that owns the Republican leadership. This ain’t no revelation. Everybody knows it. Some shrug it off, others think it will expire on its own. I wish it would, but it won’t.
If Rick Perry had been in charge at the Alamo Santa Anna’s family would still own all the Texas toll roads and Perry himself would have lived to a ripe old age proud of how he mortgaged Texas independence to save his own ass. I can hear him now, railing against the meddling government in Mexico City as he fills his pockets with gold coins emblazoned with his own well-coiffed likeness.
Texas is coming back. Are you?
People get ready. The late Curtis Mayfield:
Or, as the Parlor Mob sing, “This train is leaving it’s rolling down the track and there ain’t no turnin’ back.”
Let us know when you rejoin reality.
Hey, Eric. Good to have you in the Canyon. We’re gonna argue forever about politics, but I’m still glad you stopped by.
“…whatever little I’ve done in politics and journalism I’ve done for them.”
Wait – you’ve done something in politics or journalism?? WHO KNEW??
Thank you for expressing so well my own feelings. I chose to move back to Texas for retirement, to the amazement of friends that anyone would deliberately choose a place with such a barbaric and corrupt group of politicians in charge (well, technically I chose Austin, but I still have to put up with the troglodytes for everything beyond local level; and the place I was leaving, Pennsylvania, has its own political problems). To a great extent, it is a matter of the affection and respect I have for most of the people here, even if many of them would have done a better job of voting if they had thrown darts at a wall while blindfolded (that’s the ones who show up to vote at all). And yes, I hope eventually to have a state government that’s worthy of those people.