Everything is Political

There is probably nothing that calms a family more than a football metaphor after their child has disappeared, likely forever, into a catastrophic flood. When asked if he would investigate to discover who was to blame for failed emergency warnings in Kerr County on the Guadalupe River, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott accused a reporter of using “the word choice of losers.” He transitioned to the sport of football and talked about its popularity across Texas and how winners find a way forward. Hell, I would not have been surprised to hear him use the mantra from Friday Night Lights: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

“Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we're going to win this game.’”

When football teams make mistakes, though, 300 people don’t die. And this was not a mistake. It was a choice. Kerr County officials and the state took turns avoiding the funding and implementation of a river flood warning system on the Guadalupe, and in one instance, the only rationale was because the money was from the Biden administration. In 2021, Kerr County was offered roughly $10.2 million through the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which could have been directed toward emergency infrastructure, including flood warning sirens. But they didn’t want no stanky Democratic President’s money. At a November 2021 Commissioners Court meeting, a 3–2 vote rejected using the funds for that purpose and cited political mistrust and fear of federal influence. Yeah, who wants Washington coming into our town and making it safer? The funds were described by county officials and some residents as “Biden money.” The general sentiment was, “We don’t want to be bought by the federal government.”

Kerrville is one of the most conservative communities in Texas and the surrounding county gave Trump 77 percent of the vote, which was 21 percent more than he earned statewide. The ill-informed populace was probably also oblivious to the funding opportunity from the Biden administration to help protect them from catastrophic floods like the one that just tore the heart out of the Texas Hill Country. A few months after those commissioners said no in November of 2021, they voted to accept the federal dollars in January of 2022. None of the money was allocated for a siren system on the river, however. The sheriff’s department got some and there were employee stipends handed out, but no sirens.

In the aftermath of the natural disaster, Governor Abbott, who should have been talking about state response, resources for the afflicted, causes for the high loss of life, and assurances that whatever failed would be fixed, instead, talked football and the magical power of prayer.

“The one word that I hear over and over again when talking to people here is ‘prayer,’” he said. “Prayer is what is bringing people comfort. Prayer is what is bringing people together. And prayer is what will carry us through this tragedy.”

A little bit a leadership and political sense might have made certain there was no such tragedy, and there is not one scintilla of evidence, scientific or otherwise, that prayer has ever changed anything, other than, maybe, the perception of the person doing the praying. Abbott, of course, was hiding behind the concept, implying that what happened was an act of God and prayer was needed to understand and accept, and he tossed in a little football philosophy to temper your sadness. He wants everyone in the state to believe nothing could have prevented the horror. God, however, had no more to do with causing the flood and the loss of life than she will with preventing the next tragedy, which, in the Texas Hill Country, is inevitable. Abbott believes that prayer kept the flood from being 100 feet tall instead of 50 and it miraculously stopped the water from rising further.

Prayer is Abbott’s fallback for every trauma inflicted on this state by his radical politics. After the El Paso slaughter at Walmart, he vowed to come up with legislation to prevent such a thing from ever happening again and put together a panel to study the gun crisis with legislators and law officers. His Texas Safety Commission did nothing, as was the plan, and efforts to increase gun safety by El Paso’s elected representatives were ignored. Instead, Abbott promoted and passed a permitless carry law for any kind of gun, including the AR-15, which destroyed those 23 souls inside the Walmart. Making guns easier to possess was his idea for dealing with a massacre performed with an automatic weapon. Less than three years after El Paso, with gun laws loosened, a disturbed individual walked into a Uvalde elementary school and murdered 19 children and 2 teachers. Abbott showed up to offer his usual prayers, but wouldn’t talk about gun control, and besides, he had to leave early to get to a political fund raiser and do a video appearance for the National Rifle Association meeting in Houston.

The metaphor man is once more making hollow promises that the Texas House and Senate will conduct investigations, though he has stated explicitly that it will not be about assigning blame. No need, of course, since blame has found its place already at the table of every conservative voter and politician in Texas. HB 13, which easily passed the Texas House in the most recent legislative session, would have provided $500 million for a statewide emergency warning network for floods and wildfires. The measure was killed in the Senate by the Lt. Governor, who didn’t like the price tag. Who knew saving lives could be so costly? Never mind that the state has more than $28 billion in a rainy day fund and could easily pay for such a project with political support from state leadership, and prevent the future loss of lives. Patrick is suddenly promising that there will be sirens along the river by next summer. Three hundred dead and missing was all it took to get his attention.

In the meantime, Texans get more prayers. Patrick described for FOX-TV a few hundred girls on the top floor of one of the camps, who held hands and sang Christian songs, and the water stopped rising. His God that was busily killing other innocents decided the singers were going to get a pass. Gov. Abbott said prayer was responsible for what led rescuers to find a woman clinging to a tree hours later down river. The implication is that all the little girls who were swept away just didn’t pray hard enough or weren’t sufficiently Christian. We know prayer had nothing to do with protecting the people of Comfort, Texas, just down river from Kerrville and Camp Mystic. Sirens were their savior. Comfort has a modern flood-siren system that provided timely alerts when river levels surged past safety thresholds, which led to evacuations. All the residents and campers in Comfort survived the 30-foot wall of water. The sirens cost around $60,000–$70,000, and were connected to a USGS gauge and triggered automatically to warn residents to evacuate.

The conservative politics that caused Kerrville leaders to reject spending on sirens came back to kick them in their collective arses, too, when they went pleading to the conservative government in Austin. The state was finally approached three separate times with a request to fund flood warning sirens and early-alert systems along the Guadalupe in Kerr County. The county had partnered with the Upper Guadalupe River Authority and asked for $1 million in state grant funding for a warning system with sirens. The 2016 application was denied. Two others in 2017 and 2021 were also rejected by the Texas Flood Infrastructure Fund.

Everything about this disaster was a by-product of conservative politics. The don’t- spend ethos is rank nonsense in a state that has enough money to solve almost any problem but leaves it sitting in an account instead of being deployed to help its citizens. Radical conservatives are pushing responsibilities down to local governments and if something fails, the political blame does not fall on the officeholder at the state level. A relatively tiny expenditure by the state or Kerr County to install sirens along the banks of that river might have saved hundreds of lives. Taxpayers have a right to expect a minimum level of cooperation between their government institutions. Instead, we get excuses and head fakes and misdirections, and people keep dying.

And it will take something other than prayer to stop it.