Last night, one of my closest friends, a woman who has lived in small-town Texas all her life, whose late husband is buried in her town, who has many ties and memories and friends here, told me she’s thinking of leaving Texas. She just can’t stand the politics. I sympathize but I can’t—or won’t—leave. I am too old to start again, my beloved family is all in Texas, my career has been built on writing about Texas. Where would I go? I like living here—except for the politics, which are horrifying. My big thought about all that is that it is terrible what Republicans have done to my beloved adopted state.
By now
many of you have discovered I spend too much time on Facebook and too little
time writing brilliant fiction. Many of my friends are disparaging about FB—it’s
too vitriolic, it’s a time suck, you can’t convince those you oppose, only old
people read it, etc. A long list of objections. I am not here to defend Mark
Zuckerberg. In fact, I think he does a lot wrong, from pushing advertising to
censoring. But still, I find it informative and useful.
I
think you must be discriminating—click through the gossip, the accusations, the
conspiracy theory folks, even the advertising. Underneath all that, you can
find some cogent political discussions, and these days, that’s what I’m looking
for. No, I do not expect to convert a trumper by my words or even a lifelong
Republican who doesn’t realize this is not your father’s Republican Party. What
I hope to accomplish with my posts is to bolster those who think like I do, encourage
them that we can win against the Republican gargoyle that has Texas and the
nation in a stranglehold, spur them to action.
I know
how to pick and choose the posts I read. I ignore obvious right-wing extremists
and conspiracy theorists, but I learn from posts by rational conservatives and
progressives. And every little bit of knowledge helps me understand what's going on. I am sometimes moved to action, as I am now with the terrific walk-about by the
Texas Democratic legislators which, at least for now, killed the draconian
voter suppression bill. I intend to write my state senator and representative
tonight to express my outrage over several of the measures passed by the Texas
legislature in the session just ended—the harshest anti-abortion bill in the
nation, the “constitutional carry” gun law, the law which allows carrying open
liquor containers out of restaurants, the unbelievable law that restricts what
teachers can say about American history. A history of racism? Us? Oh, no, you
must mean another country. Talk about blindersl
But
the voter suppression law is perhaps the most egregious, clearly racist to the
point that no Republicans dare deny that. The bill is praised for ensuring safety
of elections against fraud—but absolutely zero fraud was found in an analysis
of the 2020 election in Texas (and precious little in the nation at large).
Still, Republicans are terrified by the rising tide of blue votes. So they wrote
a law that was clearly aimed at persons of color—who coincidentally mostly vote
Democratic. The scariest part of that awful bill is that it allows a judge to
overturn the popular vote. Whoa and wait a minute—wasn’t this country founded
on the sanctity and privacy of the individual vote? It is, as President Biden
said, an attack on democracy.
Gov.
Abbott, the emperor who has no clothes, will call a special session to push
this voter bill through. Those of you who join me in horror at it must actively
fight against it—write your senator and representative, speak out on social
media, do whatever you can. Democracy is too precious to lose it to a bunch of
power-hungry old white men.
Sorry
for the political rant, but it comes from the heart. Tomorrow I’ll get back to
telling you about the goings on in my small world of the Alter/Burton compound.
Not much happened today anyway—too rainy and dull.
Stay safe—and
think about righteousness in this crazy world.
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