When I moved to Texas from New Mexico nearly eight years ago, my friend Doc Potter, a college professor in Santa Fe, sent me an email suffused with horror. "Don’t you know those people are the worst kind of backwards?" he asked. "Racists, sexists, Republicans, neanderthals! You’ll be a couple of hours away from Crawford, for Christ’s sake!"
"I ain’t scared," I said, and meant it. I worked for the National Park Service at the time and had transferred to Big Bend National Park in far West Texas, in a ruggedly handsome desert county the size of Rhode Island consisting of more cows than people—only about 10,000 bipeds inhabit the area. Most of those people had family living in Brewster County since before the turn of the Twentieth Century. Most have guns, pickup trucks, tobacco plugs, drawls, boots and hats, and most can deliver a calf or weld a busted bull rack when called upon to do so. But there were also others, I reasoned. A neo-hippie hamlet on the border, a highfalutin art colony blossoming in Marfa, an influx of retirees and twenty-somethings from the outside world.
I was proud last November, if a little surprised, that Brewster County went blue. There are plenty of Confederate flag-flyers and jaw-droppingly knuckle-dragging bumper stickers here, not to mention the sly prejudices half-articulated in the barns and shops of my town’s respected citizens. Sometimes they’re more than hinted at.
As my precinct’s Democratic Party chair, I got a call last week about the upcoming town hall meeting about healthcare, featuring Representative Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX 23). "We need as many Democrats as we can get to be there," I was told. "Be prepared for some noise, though."
I couldn’t make the first half of the meeting and by the time I got to the abysmal Mexican restaurant where it was being held, it had gone beyond standing room only, the crowd spilling out into the entry way and the patio, people jammed in to every nook and cranny, some sitting on the floor.
I wove my way into the room and skinked back to a corner, where miraculously an empty chair awaited me next to a booth full of a ranching family. The gentleman with whom I was soon in close proximity was around seventy, with a florid face crowned by a bristling white crewcut, his straw hat on his knee, in a starched white shirt and suspenders clipped to his town denims. His boots were scuffed and he exhaled the heady odor of pipe tobacco and leather.
On the other side was our perpetually elected, redoubtable county sheriff, in full regalia with his sidearm on his hip, leaning against the plate-glass window to our backs with his felt hat in one hand, arms crossed over his chest.
When I was settled I looked around the room and saw that its demographic was about two-thirds over sixty, with the remainder some hipsters, some hippies, some young ranchers and blue-collar workers. Mothers comforted restless children out in the entry, their husbands occasionally sneaking past Rodriguez to bring them water. It was about 95 degrees in the room.
I recognized many of the faces—about a third Hispanic, two-thirds white—and noted that many of them were not of the left-leaning persuasion.
It was hard to get to that seat, not because folks were reluctant to let me through, but because it was a bit embarrassing. When I entered there was a silence so profound that the buzzing of a fly on the window across the room was clearly audible in the pauses of Rodriguez’s speech.
He stood in the middle of the room pressed in on all sides by the crowd, pacing an area about eight feet square that was free of bodies, occasionally sipping from a water bottle. He spoke uninterrupted for nearly an hour, devoting about half of that time to healthcare, the other half to issues ranging from immigration to energy independence.
He touched on national security and how bills are treated in committee, natural resources and the importance of public dialectic. He railed occasionally against politicians of both persuasions and their methods, to general approval. He explained that he had grown up on the South Side of San Antonio, under the thumb of that city’s political machine, which had given him a life-long horror of anyone telling him how to vote.
He is not perhaps the most eloquent speaker off the cuff and sometimes rambles away from his point, but his audience was patient and forbore even murmuring comments to its neighbors.
When Rodriguez finally meandered to a close, there was a faint stirring through the crowd as he sipped his tepid water and opened the floor to public comment. "Is this it?" I wondered. "Will it start now?"
A gentleman seated on the floor was called upon, and without rising he projected his voice through the still-silent room. "Sir," he said to Rodriguez, "Your job description is legislator. It seems to me that the two greatest ideals of this country that need to be better legislated are those of peace and justice."
A brief round of applause interrupted him, after which he continued, "As far as peace goes, it seems to me that we ought to be defending ourselves when we’re attacked, not when there’s something we want out of somebody. As for justice, I’d sure as Hell like to see justice brought down on those people who’ve tried their best to ruin this country. I think any person that’s been shown to break the law, whether it’s a banker or a politician, they ought to be prosecuted and brought to justice."
Another burst of applause, with much nodding and murmuring to neighbors, and Rodriguez replied with something wan and boilerplate, too unmemorable for me to recall, other than that it was about as volatile as custard. He called on another gentleman across the room, who rose from his chair brandishing a paper.
"First of all, sir, your job description is as a representative, not a legislator. You’re supposed to represent us."
"I am a representative, but what I do is to legislate," Rodriguez said. There ensued a noise of protest from the man, and the word "semantics" tripped lightly around the room until he gave it up and got down to brass tacks. The sheriff shifted his weight and the star on his chest caught the light.
"Well I looked at your website, sir, and it says that you’re pro-abortion. You may not choose to call it that, but that’s what you are. You’re pro-abortion." He glared balefully at Rodriguez, who waited silently with the crowd, and then continued: "Now, I’m a pastor of a Hispanic church, and all my parishioners are legal. They tell me that it only takes six weeks to get a permit to come to this country legally, as long as they take the time to do the paperwork." At this there was a ripple through the crowd, and I saw a lot of heads shaking. The good old boy in the booth leaned over to me and whispered, "Sure, if they got a few thousand pesos in the mattress." Rodriguez murmured, "Well, they must have all had a miracle worker as an agent."
He then proceeded to speak briefly about his views on abortion, stating that while he personally found it morally wrong, he was not so arrogant to think that the government should make so agonizing a decision for an individual. "I’m a politician," he said. "That sort of thing is between a family and their God." There was a brief outburst of applause, and the rancher said to me, "Too right it is. Would to God I could keep the government out of my kitchen."
The preacher had one last thought to share, about the sanctity of marriage and its protection through the law. The rancher snorted and muttered, "And out of people’s bedrooms, too." The preacher sat down and was still.
All through this the crowd sat, stood or leaned quietly, sometimes turning to whisper briefly, only to hush as soon as a speaker opened his mouth. There were a few other comments, one from a sixty-something lefty who asked that the government stop subsidizing unsustainable agricultural practices and start subsidizing clean, wholesome ones. The crowd seemed to be with him until he said, "I’m lucky. I’ve lived on a limited organic diet most of my life, which is why I don’t have any of the diseases most of you people have." The disbelieving chuckle that followed this pronouncement nearly drowned his addendum, "If everybody ate like me we wouldn’t need healthcare reform."
The old rancher shifted his bulk and said, "Skinny little guy. Maybe he oughta eat like me." The sheriff grimaced and whispered something about tofu.
There was the owner of the local McDonald’s, an Hispanic woman around thirty-five or forty, who told the crowd that her forty or fifty employees cost her $1800 a month to ensure, with them contributing $60 per month. This seemed miraculously cheap to me, but she indicated that for her it was a hardship and she was afraid of further government-induced hardships to come. She ended her comments by saying, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have," which was greeted with great hurrahing by the audience. But another woman across the way rejoined, "Like clean water and roads and public education and defense and the national park where my husband works!" which was also applauded boisterously, and more or less by the same people.
Rodriguez was on his way to Marfa for another meeting and had to go. Folks proceeded to clog the only exit, bottlenecking cheerfully and greeting neighbors as they inched forward. Outside, waiting for my ride, I saw Democrats making dinner plans with their Republican friends, once outside the doors all just Big Benders again. I heard groups of like-minded people speaking their arguments to each other, still reasonable, still using full sentences and asking troubled questions and occasionally repeating catch phrases, amongst which "death panels," "socialism," "Nazi," and "Hitler" were conspicuously absent. The words "taxes," "hospital," "poverty," "economy," and "politicians" took their place. I realized suddenly that I had not heard Obama’s name the whole time.
Maybe the remoteness and the smallness of this corner of Texas makes its residents trust each other more—listen to each other respectfully, be prepared to accept the sanity of those who are different from us, because in day to day life we see each other working and playing and worrying and supporting our community. Maybe we know each other well enough to listen, and this is what makes it possible to get so many in such a small place, crammed in with such an explosive issue, and see things in shades of gray instead of black and white—or blue and red.
My old rancher got into a dually that still bore a W sticker on the back window. Not only had there been no shouting or violence, but everyone had seemed to agree at least partly with the basic facts of the issues—we have a problem. Everyone has more or less the same problems. What we disagree on seems to be more about how we get to the solutions. That didn’t prevent my neighbors from talking to each other like neighbors.
Not for the first time, nor, I wager, for the last, I was proud to call myself a Texan.
Howdy again- I just wanted to thank all of you for the mightily kind words- I'm still at work and it's a busy night but I'd buy you all a round if I could. You've truly made my evening. Thank you so much.