I live in Longview, a city with a population of approximately 80,000 in the rolling hills and piney woods of East Texas, 90 miles due east of Dallas.
“Jesus" welcomes you to Longview in bold white print, followed by a large white period, on a huge red electronic billboard that towers at the entrance to the city. Similar red yard signs, along with others quoting various biblical verses are provided courtesy of the First Baptist Church and litter lawns throughout the city. This is the bible belt after all where people "cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations”, as President Obama once regretfully remarked.
A band of bearded cretins hoisting Gadsden flags and placards stands on the corner opposite the Jesus billboard as they smoke ... and chew, and spit — the Duck Dynasty clan?
Continuing along the main thoroughfare, is a parade of car dealerships where pick-up trucks on steroids, bulked up and jacked up with all manner of after market modifications, stand gleaming at attention. These same behemoths roar down city streets on tires surely intended for combines or earth movers, snorting fire and thunder from exhausts the size of howitzers and fill strip center parking lots where pine trees once stood.
Development here means razing acre upon acre upon acre of soaring loblolly pines and replacing them with concrete, a few measly saplings and perhaps a patch of grass that stand for landscape. Trees that take a generation to grow are mown down like weeds and another Walmart or Sam’s or Home Depot arises, their signs standing high above the cityscape, their parking lots shimmering in the growing summer heat, and brimming with SUVs and pickups. Amongst these outsized vehicles stands a lone Prius. On its bumper are affixed three stickers: “Wendy Davis for Governor”, “Don’t Tread on My Obamacare” and “Louis Gohmert is an Idiot” — "Dr. Livingstone" I presume, admiring this brave soul, this green shoot in the vast red desert. Louis Gohmert is our local representative and he is one of the biggest nut jobs in Congress along with his peer in the Senate, Ted Cruz. Longview also just helped elect Greg Abbott and previously Rick Perry as governor. Abbot is a supporter of “open carry” which he plans to introduce upon taking office.
Fast food restaurants proliferate in Longview as do signs and billboards. The local populace inhales a steady diet of extruded chicken nuggets, pink slime burgers, fluffy white chemical laden buns, fries and sugary drinks. One glance at the people of our Walmart shows the result.
A street preacher in a fedora stands at an intersection brandishing a battered bible. in his other hand, a yellow placard with “Jesus Saves” on one side and on the reverse, “There Is A Hell”. His belly hangs over his belt, his face is puffed and reddened by the sun and a prior life spent in the company of the bottle which was his friend before Jesus.
Longview is, for the most part, a blue collar town but there is money here too. Longview is also about as red as it gets, like most of the South and much of the swarth of red that spreads through the middle of the country. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of lovely people here: warm, friendly, well intentioned people full of Southern politeness with lots of “Yes Sirs” and “No Ma’ams."
What confounds me, however, is how these people can vote against their own interests. I know why they do — it’s that “guns and religion” thing: they are driven by their disdain for (and perhaps even their hatred of) an African American president whose foreign sounding name they spit; they want to continue roaring around in their monster trucks guzzling the last sips of petroleum fracked from rock hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface; heaven forbid that anyone should think that these folks don’t need an AR-15 to hunt deer; they don’t, however, want men marrying men or women marrying women; they don’t want women having abortions regardless of tragic personal circumstances including rape or incest; they don’t want “gubmint" in their business and yet they do want to impose their particular moral code on the rest of us — and Jesus loves every last one of them.
How quickly we forget. How quickly we forget a president who squandered the goodwill of the world following 9/11. How quickly we forget a president and his cronies Cheney and Rumsfeld, who conned the nation and our allies into an ill-concieved war that almost bankrupted the nation and upset the balance of power in the Middle East — and where did it get us? Is anything any better over there — or is it far, far worse? We and our children and even their children will be paying for this one for a long time. Whose sons and daughters fought this war, losing life or limb, or being left scarred physically and or mentally for life? Why, it’s many of the same right-wing, tea bagger, FOX watching, Limbaugh listening conservative voters who are now voting the extremists back in.
How quickly we forget under whose administration the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression erupted as a result of failures in financial regulation, lack of corporate governance, risky borrowing and a complete breakdown in ethics and accountability.
How quickly we forget whose Supreme Court appointments led to unlimited individual and corporate spending as a result of their ruling in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission. Corporations, Wall Street and Republican front organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, Crossroads for GPS with Karl Rove, The Republican Jewish Coalition with Sydney Adelson as its chair, bought the election under a cloud of lies as their puppets in Congress and state government were busy rigging the system gerrymandering districts and creatively excluding minority voters.
What have the voters done? They’ve put the FOX in charge of the henhouse as the Republicans become the majority of both houses: the party of “No!”; the “birthers” and “the Donald” (remember that nonsense!); the misogynists who would deny women equal pay and the freedom to make their own decisions concerning their own bodies; the party that denies clear and abundant evidence and science proving that man made climate change is being caused by the burning of fossil fuels; the haters who, along with their mouthpiece FOX news and its brethren in “conservative” talk radio, spout vitriol and lies; the party of obstruction that throws tantrums and shuts down the government when they don’t get their way. Are there two more miserable looking physiognomies in Congress than those of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell?
Get ready people, the party’s on! Drill baby, drill — gas is already under $3.00 per gallon. Let’s frack every last ounce of petroleum from beneath us, pumping the earth and our groundwater full of toxic chemicals. Groundwater — who needs it? We’re already pumping the aquifers dry to water our GMO crops. And why do we need GMO crops? So that they can withstand the toxic herbicides that we drench them with and later ingest causing untold damage to every human and animal organ and system. The genes that are introduced even include those from species such as bacteria and viruses.
Let’s drill the Arctic and destroy one of the last remaining pristine areas on earth. Who needs the Arctic anyway? Polar bears? — there aren’t many of those left as their habitat disappears due to a changing climate. Plankton? — only the whole marine food chain and half the world’s population. Seals? Penguins? Walruses? We’ve lost almost half of the wildlife in the world since the 70s, what’s a few more species? The gorilla in the room that no one even dares mention is that there are too many people in the world and we’re depleting the world’s resources and oceans of marine life at a much faster rate than they can regenerate — so let’s take contraception and education about family planning off the table when there’s nothing to eat. Famine? Wars? We haven’t seen anything yet.
Let’s build that Keystone XL pipeline. Let’s devastate Alberta’s Boreal forest, one of the earth’s largest intact ecosystems, digging up the world’s dirtiest oil — tar sands oil — and pipe it through America’s heartland to Gulf Coast refineries so that we can ship it overseas in the name of jobs and cheap gas. Each gallon of tar sands oil takes three gallons of water to produce — water which is then left in toxic tailing ponds full of cyanide and ammonia that seep into previously pure water supplies. Native people are being forced from their lands but not before experiencing rare cancers, renal failure, lupus and hyperthyroidism. Caribou? Who needs them. Tar sands oil production creates four times the carbon dioxide of conventional oil. 830,000 barrels per day would be pumped through the US with associated climate changing emissions equal to adding 5.6 million cars to US roads. 2,000 miles of pipeline that will destroy ecosystems, pollute water sources and put public health at risk. Our republican friends in Congress are already hard at work ensuring approval of the Keystone pipeline. Has anyone ever paused to think that oil in the ground is oil in the bank — the US bank, if there is ever such a time that we really must destroy what’s left of the environment for it. Jobs? How many jobs will really be created and what cost? How many jobs could we create if we devoted ourselves to rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and creating a clean energy future?
Let’s keep deforesting mountains before blowing the tops off them to dig up dirty coal to power our polluting carbon dioxide producing power plants, while we fill valleys with rock and the all toxic mining byproduct that is devastating the health of ecosystems and nearby communities — communities that are now experiencing 50% higher cancer rates and 42% higher birth defects.
Who is going to protect our remaining wilderness areas, our wildlife, our rivers, our oceans, our water, the air we breathe, our health and yes, our climate, from all this and much more as Republicans in Congress begin an all out assault on the environment and the EPA and its protections that have been, and still can be put in place? And for whom? Why for the corporations, the oligarchs and Wall Street that will benefit financially from environmental destruction. President Obama just won policy breakthroughs in China on climate change and the Republicans are already vowing to undo them.
Let’s also undo the Affordable Care Act. It’s had its bumps along the way and it is far from perfect, but it is working — much to the Republicans dismay, and their every attempt to sabotage the act, people who were uninsurable and with little access to healthcare (other than the emergency room where we paid for their visits anyway) now have coverage. People now can receive preventative care and do not have to be bankrupted by illness. How civilized are we as a nation when we cannot take care of our frail, our ill and our elderly? And speaking of elderly, get ready for an assault on Social Security and Medicare. That’s on the Republican agenda again for the benefit of their sponsors in the very, very wealthy few and the corporations that are buying the elections and expecting their payback from their Republican puppets in Congress. A fair minimum wage? Forget about it, the Republicans are ready to do away with a minimum wage altogether. An equitable tax structure? Not likely. Working people will continue to shoulder an undue burden as those at the top laugh their way to the bank.
Let’s continue to subjugate women. Why should they be paid the same as men? Why should they have equal opportunity in the workplace? Why should they be protected from violence and abuse? Let’s keep gender barriers in education. Let’s ensure that women no longer have the right to choose when it comes to their own bodies. Is a zygote a person? What about the unfertilized egg that passes each month? No one wants an abortion but women’s lives don’t need to be ruined or even lost because they don’t have access to one. Rather than inflicting their particular moral code on others, these extremists could devote their energies to educating teenagers and ensuring access to contraception — that will reduce the number of abortions far more than preventing access — and Hobby Lobby and the contraception mandate on the basis of religious freedom. Really? Is that going to prevent unwanted pregnancies?
We’ve put the damn women-haters in charge when it’s probably women we should put in charge. And minorities? The right-wing justices on the Supreme say that discrimination no longer exists and that the time for affirmative action is behind us. Tell that to Ferguson. LGBTs? Why should they enjoy the same right as the rest of us to get married and enjoy the associated fiscal benefits? Live and let live, people — is that not the Christian way?
As for schools, let’s continue to undermine an already mediocre school system that places the US in only 17th place in the developed world. Hell, we graduate kids who can barely read, if at all. How are these kids going to pull themselves up if we don’t educate them properly? How are we going to build our country’s future on them? And why should we focus on proper nutrition to fuel these childrens’ school day and provide what may be their only meal of the day? Michelle Obama wants to raise a healthier generation of kids — so the Republicans are against it. Let’s continue to let the food industry run rampant fattening and sickening an already obese nation. Let’s also take fact out of our text books and replace it with fiction as the Texas State Board of Education would do as they try to force textbook publishers to rewrite history and emphasize the influence of Moses and the “Judeo-Christian tradition” on our nation’s founding and on Western political traditions. And let’s deny the science of evolution as we do climate change despite ample evidence or rising temperatures, rapidly retreating glaciers, shrinking polar ice caps and rising seawater!
Yup, they’ve done it. They’ve put the nutters in charge. They, with their “Conservative”, “Christian” (two terms that I am beginning to dislike more and more) agenda have done it. They’ve given all the power and the money to the corporations, the oligarchs and Wall Street Those who have bought the election will call in the favors. The rich will continue to get richer and the bottom 90% of the country will get poorer. The Waltons already possess more wealth than the bottom 42% of the country. How much more do they need as their workers face poverty wages and cuts in benefits? Does all this really benefit the right wing voters and their children? Do they really not care about the world’s future, their own futures and their children’s futures? Are they so blinded by their “conservative” beliefs?
Instead of being a progressive leader in the world, America will continue on its path to becoming a second tier country and the enmity that exists towards us in the rest of the world will only grow.
The system is broken and the right wing has broken it. This isn’t "government of the people, by the people, for the people". This is government by corporations and oligarchs for the corporations and oligarchs. This is not what the Founding Fathers set out. The system has been rigged and the only way to fix it is for a Democratic clean sweep of the House and Senate, and Presidency in 2016. Perhaps then legislation can be enacted to undo the insidious acts of voter suppression by the extremists. Perhaps then we could dismantle the electoral college system and implement a popular vote.
Why should I care? I care because I’m a husband and a father. I care about the world we live in, and all its creatures and all of its beauty and majesty — and the world that my daughter will inherit and raise her children in.
That’s why I’m seeing red and feeling blue. How about you?