Texas…and the Texabani
I woke this morning to the fact that Texas now has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the nation, and some of the least restrictive gun laws anywhere. An Uber driver might go to jail for taking a pregnant woman to the airport (where she might catch a plane to, say, a blue state for a termination). But, you can walk into any McDonalds in the state with a howitzer without any blinking an eye.
I am resident of Texas. I wouldn’t be if my kids and grandkids weren’t here. My son and daughter-in-law were among the many young professionals who found themselves with jobs in the ever booming Austin economy.
But I am not comfortable here and sometimes I worry how long I will be able to stay. It is an unpleasant thing to realize that you are living in what amounts to an authoritarian state run by a minority group, many of them reactionaries and some of them outright Fascists, which govern by largely ignoring the needs or wants anyone by themselves.
What happened, of course, is that Texas is dominated by its thinly populated rural areas, which are vastly over-represented in state government. Urban areas, which tend to vote center right, moderate, or even (in places like Austin) liberal, are meanwhile under-represented. Which is what is happening to the whole country, and why the GOP has been so successful even as it loses the popular vote time and time again. It is able to control what few votes there are in the vast empty spaces, where the population is otherwise disenfranchised, has not participated in the economic rewards of booming population centers, and is understandably bitter about that fact.
Thus, my state is run by a kind of local version of the Taliban…let’s call them the Texas Taliban, and invest a new word for them: The Texabani. But, as with the Afghan counterparts, I’m not sure they don’t have some rather serious problems in store for them.
The reality is that Texas needs its cities, and its urban professionals, and all the rest of it. The state cannot really go back in time and run itself as if it were still 1950, or 1850 for that matter. It needs a modern technical, social, and economic infrastructure…but it is alienating the people, corporations, and institutions which could provide that infrastructure.
Which means, I suspect, that eventually…maybe not soon, but in time…the contradictions inherent in the state’s current governance will prove too much. Just as the state’s power grid — which had been managed, or rather, non-managed according to fine libertarian principles — proved incapable of dealing with the shock of an ice storm in 2021, so too will the state government eventually come to a point where it cannot deal with some crisis, or even just the day to day stresses of everyday life.
What happens after that…is unclear. There is no reason to think that whatever’s coming will be necessarily better. It could be quite a bit worse…
But, I’m guessing that eventually the Texas GOP will discover that it cannot be both the Party of the Dead Past, and the inheritor of any remotely possible future…
Copyright©2021 Michael Jay Tucker
Please visit my webpage at: https://www.michaeljaytucker.com/
#Texas #Taliban #Texas_Taliban #Abortion #Pro-Choice
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