Welcome to the pariah state of Texas
Greetings, all newcomers to Texas.
Please accept this can of off and pistol as a welcome gift.
As we learned from the U.S. census last week, there are many of you – nearly 4 million from 2010 to 2020, making Texas the third fastest growing state in the nation.
Are you settled in? People friendly enough for you? Have you found the HEB that best suits your personality and lifestyle?
And the heat, right? At some point, a leather-skinned Texan will tell you to wait about 10 minutes if you don’t like the weather. Don’t wait outside or you will die of heat stroke.
On ExpressNews.com: Jefferson: A reckoning day for one of San Antonio’s worst ‘economic development’ deals?
So I’ve got some good news for you: Texas still doesn’t have a state income tax. Yay.
I sense that you are feeling uncomfortable, like you are afraid that I will bring bad news. I am. But because I’ve lived in San Antonio for more than two decades, I’m very slowly getting to the point.
What is it: They nested in a pariah state. I’m sorry for that.
Each of the following statements is as true as the other: Big Bend is a gift from God, barbecue sauce on brisket is a sin, and Governor Greg Abbott worships power for its own sake and will do anything to keep it in his hands.
If that means the delta variant can roll through the state – in the name of the freedom to decide whether to mask it – then so be it. What’s a full-blown public health emergency with hospitals reaching capacity and a new wave of COVID deaths versus a potentially sensitive Republican area code in 2022?
On May 18, Abbott announced its decision to stop local governments and public schools from imposing mask requirements. “Texans, not the government, should decide their best health practices, which is why masks are not required by public school districts or government agencies,” he said.
Sure, many of us were drunk in May with the belief that the crisis was over, that we could finally get on with our lives. Abbott did not appear to be a ruthless radical at the moment.
This is what he looks like now. Indeed, he is a ruthless radical, even if somewhere in the dark depths of his soul there is a part of him that knows better.
With Texas in the teeth of the Delta variant, not only has he not changed his position, he and the indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton are fighting the just lawsuits of San Antonio and Dallas Counties to overturn the governor’s executive order banning masked mandates.
On ExpressNews.com: Jefferson: Tunnel with Teslas – coming to San Antonio soon?
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins want to do the right thing – require masks in public schools and government institutions. Abbott and Paxton want to keep doing the wrong thing.
Here is an excerpt from Paxton’s Aug. 11 statement about attempting to put down the preliminary injunction Jenkins won: “I am confident that the outcome of any lawsuit will come with freedom and individual choice, not mandates and encroachments . “
We all know what Abbott and Paxton mean by freedom. You are free not to wear masks. And there is no doubt who they are talking to. It is not the majority of Texans who are in favor of wearing masks as protection against the coronavirus. It is the GOP hardliners and MAGAs among us who show up to a primary during a hurricane and believe that wearing masks in school for children is synonymous with child abuse.
These are many of the same people holding onto the toxic fantasy Donald Trump won. To them, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party are the greatest electoral fraudsters of all time. That’s the only fun part of this deception – thinking that the party’s moderates and liberals could quit long enough to orchestrate such a crime.
Abbott, Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick take their orders from this sliver of the electorate.
Counterclaim
Well, you might object to my calling Texas a pariah state and making this reasonable argument: pariah are shunned by others, but you and many other newcomers have hugged Texas for many reasons.
The blessings of the state include its low taxes and number of regulations, its affordable housing (sorry, new Austinites, I’m not talking to you) and land available, its abundance of jobs, whataburger, etc.
All true.
But consider the following:
As newcomers, the overwhelming majority of you live either in or near the Texas Big Four – Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Because of this, the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas led the country in growth from 2010 to 2020 according to census data, and San Antonio’s population grew by 8.1 percent to more than 107,000 residents for a total of 1.4 million.
Few of you have come here to enjoy all that Muleshoe town has to offer.
Abbott’s anti-mask mandate crusade does the most damage in the state’s urban centers, the most densely populated places. Hence our current headline: “Big cities in Texas are in open revolt over Governor Abbott’s ban on wearing masks.”
The same goes for the electoral restrictions advocated by Abbott, Patrick, and most Republican lawmakers. Under the guise of combating the widespread fraud they invented, their target is being cut into the voting power of Black, Hispanic and left-wing voters. Big cities in Texas have a lot of these.
On ExpressNews.com: Jefferson: The winter storm controversy gives City Hall a chance to get on the trail of the public utilities
These facts are key to their campaigning: Trump won Texas with 52 percent of the vote, but lost in the state’s five most populous counties – Bexar, Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Travis.
Think of Texas as a human body today. His immune system, which is supposed to fight off infections, has gone crazy and attacks the most important organs of the body. These are large, diverse cities – organs of job creation, prosperity and cultural diversity.
Please take a moment here to step back in time when you considered moving to Texas.
If you had known that the most powerful politicians in the state would actually try to prevent local governments from protecting their citizens from a deadly, highly contagious virus (let alone taking the responsible steps themselves), suppressing voters and going to war lead against Texas. urban centers, would you come?
Big corporations, same question.
And that doesn’t even take into account the attacks by leaders on transgender Texans and women’s reproductive rights.
Some of you would still move here. Maybe a lot of you. But some of you recognize a pariah when you see one and would avoid our state despite its strong economy.
We like to say that if Texas were a country of its own, it would have the ninth largest economy in the world. It would also hang out with the authoritarian regimes of Hungary, Belarus, the Philippines, and maybe North Korea.
But Texas didn’t get the nationality. And his best friend right now is Governor Ron DeSantis and his great state of Florida.
greg.jefferson@express-news.net
[ad_1]