Texans, this is my Number One Issue. Because, as important as all the other ones are, we’ll never have a prayer of addressing any of them without Democracy.
If there’s anything on which most of us can agree, it’s that our politics are broken. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will all acknowledge that our political discourse has become divisive and extreme — to the point of precluding solutions to the challenges we face. Those who vote and those who do not can agree on one thing: it doesn’t seem to be working. The will of the people is being thwarted.
But there’s an enormous peril lurking in the perception that our politics aren’t working. There are those with such lust for power, they would leverage that perception into the claim that democracy itself does not work. Notions such as this cannot be allowed to take root. Disaster has befallen every society where it has.
Let’s be clear: democracy works, but only when me make it work. Republican democracy is not the default setting for human forms of government. Authoritarianism is. Democracy is a thing that we have to do on purpose. Democracy — self-rule — requires extraordinary vision to establish, and steadfast vigilance to sustain. Once lost, it may not again be recoverable for centuries. Ronald Reagan used to say that America is never more than one generation away from the demise of liberty. My fear is that today, it is even less far off than that. It is imperative that we fix this. The good news is that I totally believe we can.
If there’s anything in which you would not want your state to excel, it would have to be in the mass murder of innocent people, especially children. But here in Texas, this is where we find ourselves. I offer the following citations to refresh the memory:
- 2023 Allen Premium Outlets shooting (AR-15), 8 dead, 7 injured.
- 2023 Cleveland neighborhood massacre (AR-15), 5 dead.
- 2022 Uvalde ISD, Robb Elementary School massacre, (AR-15-style), 21 dead, 18 injured.
- 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting (WASR-10), 23 dead, 22 injured.
- 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting (Remington 870, Rossi .38 caliber), 10 dead, 13 injured.
- 2017 Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church shooting (Ruger AR-556, Glock 19 semi-automatic, Ruger SR22 semi-automatic), 26 dead, 22 injured.
- 2017 Plano shooting, domestic violence (AR-15), 9 dead, 1 injured.
- 2016 Dallas shooting of police officers (Saiga AK-74, Glock 19 Semi-automatic handgun), 5 dead, 11 injured.
- 2014 Spring shooting, familicide (9mm Springfield Armory XD semi-automatic pistol), 6 dead, 1 inured.
- 2014 Fort Hood shootings (.45 caliber Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol), 3 dead, 14 injured.
- 2012 College Station shooting (Vz58 tactical semi-automatic rifle, .40 caliber SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol), 2 dead, 4 injured.
How, in the name of all that’s holy, does an entire political party refuse to take action in the wake of this kind of slaughter? I find myself perplexed by it, but I have a theory. Maybe — just maybe — we have a political party whose bread is buttered by the gun lobby. And it makes little to no difference how many innocents must have their lives cut short, so long as that gun lobby keeps raking in the riches.
I must beg your indulgence for my tone here, but this eviscerates me. How can any political party which proclaims so vociferously to be “pro-life” give so little a damn about the butchery of our innocent children? However much Republicans may protest that they’re “the party of family values,” it’s clear from their inaction that they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of our children in service of their gun lobby’s demand for profit. Family values, my foot. It’s beyond shameful, and it demands their ouster.
Let’s face it, petroleum built the Texas we know today. My own father was a petroleum engineer, and the oil business put me through Texas A&M, where I earned a BBA and an MS in Finance. In the twentieth century, energy-dense fossil fuels powered a burgeoning human population to heights of achievement and development unimaginable just a century earlier. And Texas went from being a nearly bankrupt republic to one of the wealthiest economies on the planet.
But just in my lifetime, the global human population has doubled. That’s four billion more humans than there were in 1960. And every one of those humans engages in the activities that give rise to climate change. The lowest range growth projections have us adding yet another billion by 2050, and let’s not kid ourselves. The burning of fossil fuels has emitted carbon residues into our whole environment that will not be recaptured for centuries by natural means. And those carbon emissions continue today, almost unabated. Progress on reducing emissions is being made, but I fear we’ve run out of time.
In 2023, humanity endured the earth’s hottest year on record with brutal extremes of weather worldwide. After that global experience, if anyone still remains unconvinced that climate change is real, here, and now, then I see no way of reasoning with them. We must do more to develop and expand alternative energies, develop new methods of carbon-capture at scale; and we must do it much faster.
But again, let’s be real. Depending on the spot price of oil, the value of proven petroleum reserves worldwide can vary from 100 to 200 trillion dollars. The owners of all that wealth are not simply going to walk away from it, and this is the force humanity is up against in our fight for survival. And yes, I do believe that’s what it is. But in a capitalist world, law and policy makers can’t simply ignore these powerful interests. Western economies are never going to abandon capitalism. And as critical as I am of Wall Street greed, I still conclude that a midfield balance of capitalism and socialism is the best economic model ever devised, and that prosperity has spread most widely when we’ve pursued it.
Now a state as wealthy as Texas can contribute much to carbon mitigation efforts. The good news is that great ideas are being researched and promulgated all over the world. We have it in our power as a democracy to encourage investment in these efforts and so we should. One plan being promoted is for oil and gas drilling companies to apply their existing technologies to tap into geothermal sources. With some encouragement and political fortitude, there’s no reason we can’t pursue solutions like these.
During the Trump Administration, there was an advisor on his staff named Stephen Miller. Miller had the very bright idea of ripping babies out of their mothers’ arms and separating migrant families at our border. (That’ll show ’em!) Months and, in some cases, years passed before these families were reunited. These children will be emotionally damaged for life because of this cruel trauma. It was nothing short of an atrocity.
Today, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his cohort lace the Rio Grande with concertina wire which will, assuredly, injure and possibly kill more migrant children. Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton childishly pride themselves on defying the federal government over matters of immigration. But this dog and pony show does nothing to address our very real immigration challenges.
Currently, the mass of migrants reaching our border — with legally valid pleas for asylum — originate in Venezuela, a nation under U.S. sanction. This traces back to the Trump Administration and remains U.S. policy today. While sanctions may have a desirable effect in overseas states like Iran or Russia, they have a different impact in the Americas. That’s because nations like Venezuela are connected to the U.S. via land. And the people of that country are suffering under both the sanctions regime and the cruelty of their government. Because no ocean separates them from us, they can, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “vote with their feet” and come to the U.S.
These are, in the main, decent human beings who have the same rights as us to a dignified existence. But Texas Republicans have found a more nefarious political use for these refugees. In what constitutes nothing less than a mocking political stunt, Greg Abbott and his friends have trafficked these human souls to far flung corners of the land, most of them having no idea where they’re even going. Abbott doesn’t want to end the border crisis; he wants the crisis! He benefits from it as a political tool. He’d never let this good crisis go to waste. Under his regime, there will be no genuine solutions to the border crisis.
But, to be sure, the crisis is real. And if Texas government genuinely wanted to pursue solutions, they’d seek to partner with our federal government rather than fight it. That’s what honorable people do, even if they generally disagree. They come together to hammer out solutions to problems rather than making political hay out of them.
We Texans deserve better than the bullying and adolescent behavior of Republicans — in our state and elsewhere — when it comes to such intensely vulnerable human beings.
The right to the free exercise of religion, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, is one that should be enjoyed by all. But this is only possible when we all understand what real religious freedom is. While for some this means the right to worship the deity of one’s understanding in the fellowship of a like-minded community, for others, it means being free to pursue an unorthodox path, or not to worship at all.
But in recent times, a disturbing movement has emerged wherein some adherents believe their right to religious practice includes the authority to enforce their own orthodox imperatives upon others, up to and including the whole of society. Some Republicans go so far as to demand that their manner of Christianity be enshrined as the official state religion. This is plainly wrong. It’s obvious on its face that enforcing a set of beliefs onto others who do not share them is a violation of religious freedom, not an expression of it.
For example, in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Hobby Lobby, a privately held corporation — a separate, legal person that only exists because our laws say it can — could enjoy a religious right to deny its employees contraception under its insurance plan, even when it cost the company nothing financially. In plain language, the arguments put forth and the opinions issued by the court made it so that an unnatural person — a corporation — could enforce the religious beliefs of its owners on employees who do not share those beliefs. This is a clear violation of those employees’ First Amendment rights, and it’s appalling that in America they’ve been forced to endure it.
Similarly, in Texas, laws enacted to outlaw access to certain needed forms of health care have been solidly — I’d even say exclusively — based in religious invocations and rhetoric. Folks, our government is supposed to be secular according to constitutional mandate. But in Texas, the government is now enlisted as the enforcer of the religious beliefs of one segment of our society. This is flatly wrong on First Amendment grounds, and it must be repealed.
