Troubled by Texas

I have been a Texan for almost exactly 48 years. My bride and I moved here from Michigan in 1975 and lived on the border for several years in Edinburg, McAllen, Pharr, and then up the river to Laredo. This was a huge cultural transition for persons raised in a suburban factory town and on a dairy farm in the Cass River Valley. Always fascinated by Texas since I was a boy reading books about adventures across its western landscape or watching TV serials on cowboys and mythical heroes, I was excited when an opportunity arose to move south, though I understood I was always to be an outlander. A true Texan must be born over the sacred soil.

I was returning from a job interview in Peoria, Illinois, and got caught in a snowstorm on I-96. By the time my buddy Gary and I pulled into a truck stop, the snow was a foot deep and blowing and drifting to three feet. The phone booth I found had snow over my knees as I dialed my in-law’s farm to tell my wife I was going to be sleeping on the floor of a truck stop restaurant that night and would be back when the roads were cleared.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you okay, though?”

“Yeah, fine. It’s just a mess, that’s all.”

“Well, can I tell you something?”

“If it’s good.”

“It is. A guy from a radio station in Texas called and said he listened to your tape and said that you can have a job doing the news at his station.”

“Where in Texas?”

“Some place called McAllen. It’s down by Mexico.”

“I’ve never heard of it. What else did he say?”

“He said he was going deer hunting but that he had a cottage in an orange grove we could rent and that it was sunny and 78 degrees.”

The weather was difficult to imagine in the cold and snowy dark of Southwestern Michigan, but it sold me.

“Did you get the call letters, and his number?”

“Yes, he said to call him back if you were interested.”

“Please call him right away. Tell him we will be there in a week.”

In 48 hours, we had loaded our rickety Opal Kadett station wagon with wedding presents and our minimal belongings and were rolling southward toward Indianapolis, bound for Texas. I had not spoken to the station manager who had offered me the job, sight unseen, nor did I know how much I might earn, or, more importantly, if I were able to trust a voice on the phone that had spoken to Mary Lou. But I was out of options. None of my ads in the trade magazine were being answered and the broadcasters I mailed tapes and resumes were unresponsive to my limited experience, and probably my flat, teenaged voice.

When I finally met Charlie Trub at KRIO, he offered me $160 a week to work a split shift, signing on the radio station each weekday morning, writing and reading the news from 6:00 a.m. till 10:00 a.m., recording commercials, and then returning in the afternoon to perform the same tasks from 3:30 to 6:30. The cottage, a modular quonset hut, was set on cinderblock brick piers and had plastic green astroturf for interior carpeting. The rent, just coincidentally, was $160 a week. When I asked my new employer about the community where we were settling, he was blunt to the point of being terrifying.

“I’m not gonna lie to ya,” Charlie said. “The Valley is the kind of place where you can have somebody killed for $25 dollars.” He paused, I’m sure, for dramatic effect. “And for another $25, they will never find the body.”

I hoped he was kidding, but in the two years I spent reporting on the valley from Rio Grande City to Brownsville, I discovered there was more than a germ of truth to Mr. Trub’s assertions. People were desperate. The Valley was the poorest place in America. On one of our first trips to a grocery store, a national news magazine on display near the checkout had a cover story describing it as, “America’s Third World.” The stats were depressing, and included the lowest per capita income in the country, highest rate of illiteracy and unemployment, worst infant mortality, most outdoor privies, lowest percentage of college degrees among adults; a series of socio-economic damnations that were horrifying.

The conditions were also a rich environment for a reporter to learn his craft. I’d had some experience at small town radio stations in Arizona and Colorado, but I had been as much of a disc jockey as a journalist, and that changed when I arrived on the border. There was a constant stream of stories, many of them simply called into the newsroom, and others with injustices and corruptions that were acutely obvious, even to a young man whose worldly experience was mostly limited to hitchhiking around the country. My goal had been to become a novelist and write books of great import, but we had gone without much while growing up in Michigan and I loved the idea of a steady income. Journalism would teach me to be a fine writer, I thought. Dreams often required compromise.

The next twenty-five years moved quickly. My first real political story was when candidate Jimmy Carter landed in McAllen and spoke to a huge crowd in a downtown park beneath the palms. Although I had been a Vietnam War protestor, marching several times on the streets of Washington, D.C., and was actively involved in advocating issues during high school, I had never thought about covering politics. Carter energized me, though, and when I left radio for television in Laredo, I began looking closely at economic disadvantages and abuse of power in public lives. That choice led me to Austin and covering the state legislature, governors, U.S. senators, and presidential candidates. I worked for two Houston TV stations for a couple of decades, wrote a bestselling non-fiction book on a president and his political consultant, traveled on numerous national presidential campaigns, and became a paid contributor and on air political analyst for a cable network.

What I have always enjoyed the most, though, was wandering Texas and doing stories on the people who live here, the history and culture, the intoxicating and varied landscape, endless roads and long horizons, the dreamers and cons, and the individuals working to build productive and rewarding lives in an environment that is almost equal to its mythology. I have been down thousands and thousand of miles of Texas highways, learned issues and history, and met characters whose real lives transcend those of the grandest writers of fiction. My experience has included discovering natural resources in abundance, unbounded creativity, and transformative energies.

Which brings me to the paradox of Texas.

With all of the exciting dynamics that exist in this state, how in the glory hell did Texans decide to let it become a punchline? Since 1994, radical conservatives, (and yes, I include George W. Bush among their number), have held every damned office in Texas. Those elected jobs are presently occupied by Republicans, obeisant to Trump, and equally dangerous to democracy. The governor, who masquerades as a human being, has spent around $12 billion of the taxpayers’ dollars to string razor wire and spread shipping containers, state troopers and soldiers along the border, and he has asked the legislature for another $1.5 billion. While he brags about the number of illegal immigrants arrested with his militarization of Texas border towns, there is zero indication his crackdown has had any impact on the numbers of desperate families approaching the Rio Grande from the south.

I have argued, in fact, Greg Abbott is probably increasing migration because word has spread that he offers free bus rides to northern cities. Nothing makes it easier for undocumented workers to melt into the general population and avoid court dates at distant jurisdictions. The governor is not trying to solve a problem and instead is making it profoundly more complicated and acute. His goal is to prove a political point, regardless of the number of babies entangled in razor wire or drowned in the big river. One federal court has ordered the removal of his deadly floating barrier near Eagle Pass, a decision under appeal, and another judge has recently issued an edict that Border Patrol agents can no longer cut the wire unless a life is endangered. Both of those findings are scheduled to be reheard by judges appointed by conservative presidents.

Meanwhile, the governor’s focus on his pet project of giving public tax dollars to private and Christian schools is robbing Texas teachers of a pay raise. In the fastest growing state in the nation, with overcrowded classrooms and parents crazed by phony culture wars, a teacher earns just over $58,000 on average, a figure that ranks them 26th in the U.S. Students are not as fortunate in their category of funding per pupil. The legislature provides $6,160 toward the education of each child in public schools, which, depending on the analysis you read, puts the state from 43rd to 46th in per capita spending in 2023. The financial commitment has not increased since 2019, and it will not unless Greg Abbott gets what he wants first.

The governor has relentlessly pushed an idea to give taxpayer money to private and Christian schools to pay tuition for students whose parents opt out of public education in the state. His campaign has played semantic games calling the concept an “Education Savings Account,” which echoes Karl Rove’s idea to give Social Security payments to Wall Street and allow workers putative control of their investments. Utter nonsense, of course, to let high risk traders make decisions about how your protected retirement is invested. Abbott’s idea will also take your tax dollars out of public education and give them to non-state interests, religious and private schools that have no accountability to the government. In his statewide promotional tour to pitch this idiotic plan, the governor did not bother to visit public schools because he knew the inevitable reaction.

The greatest resistance has come from rural Texas. In small towns, schools are often the largest employer, and sports teams the source of community pride. Their already constrained spending, caused by the state’s refusal to fully and properly fund education, would be further harmed by handing out vouchers to families that did not want their children to attend a public institution. Abbott plans to give each abdicating child’s parents an $8000 dollar voucher to take to any school they prefer. If enough students depart, the schools will still have to pay transportation and teachers for those left behind, and the costs will not change. Economics might force closures, which does not matter to Abbott who likes to say, “It’s time for parents to have a choice.”

Upper middle class and rich parents might have options to use vouchers. But most private and Christian schools cost well over $8000 annually, and many considerably above $20,000. The idea becomes a discount coupon for people whose children are already enrolled outside of public education, and is likely to have its greatest impact on urban campuses where lower income families will have nowhere to go as the resources for their schools get drained by departing students. Further, private and Christian schools can decide whom they allow to enroll, which means there will be quiet discrimination against students dealing with disabilities. What motivation does a superintendent have to admit the handicapped when their voucher won’t even begin to pay a special education teacher’s salary?

And big numbers of students don’t need to flee public schools for big money to fly off into classrooms where prayer is mandatory. One analysis suggests that the first year funding of $500 million will quickly balloon to a debilitating figure draining public coffers. A use of vouchers by 5 percent of Texas’ 5.5 million students would cost the public educational system an estimated $2.2 billion. You can trust neither the people nor the ideas involved in this project. Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy Devos, as far out on the edge of the conservative ice floe as a soul can wander, is down in Texas using almost $2 million dollars of her PAC’s money to push this educational injustice because she wants to “advance god’s kingdom.”

What does that kingdom look like? Not very pretty according the National Coalition for Public Education. It estimates that only about 1 percent of public school students will become beneficiaries of vouchers and those that do are already enrolled in private schools. Why, then, is this so important to Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and the hard right with soft brains? The answer is probably religion. These people are Christian Dominionists who want to put an end to secular public education and make your student sit in a school room, paid for by your tax dollars, while the sweet lord baby Jesus whispers in their ear about the Second Coming.

There is probably no better example of the failure of education vouchers than Arizona. Lawmakers fell for the program when they were told its cost was only $2.5 million annually and would benefit every student in the state. Instead, since vouchers were instituted in the Grand Canyon State, their cost has created a $319 million dollar chasm of its own in the budget and has ballooned to $943 million as an annual expenditure to taxpayers. The most stunning fact is that Arizona’s Department of Education estimates that only eight percent of students are receiving fifty three percent of spending.

The only way Greg Abbott and Daniel Patrick (nee Goeb), the Lt. Governor, can overcome the evidence against their idea is with political blackmail. A coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the House has not even given a hearing to the Senate bill on vouchers, and are not expected to take up the matter. The petulant governor, who, if he were a heart surgeon, would be using a chain saw for a scalpel, has decided to hold teacher pay raises hostage along with increased per pupil funding. If that doesn’t work, he plans to run primary opponents against them in their districts as punishment for failing to follow orders, his version of Texas democracy.

In the context of my lifelong experience under the Lone Star, only the tiniest bit of this is believable. I don’t get it. Who does? How did we arrive at this junction in our history that an angry white male or two can turn state institutions over to their religion and mix tax dollars with religious organizations? Trump can be partially to blame but the Tea Party movement was initially ascendent in Texas, and maybe that’s why our insanity is front running much of America’s. Perhaps, I’ve missed the point somewhere along the way. Maybe it’s not you, Texas.

Maybe it’s me.