The Silence
Photos by the author.
The most chilling detail yet to come out of the Uvalde massacre, clearing an almost inconceivably high bar, is the silence of those charged with protecting the school. Children called 911 from classrooms, pleading for help that failed to arrive. As details continue to emerge, explanatory, if not exculpatory, Texans may detect in the silence a disturbing familiarity. Silence from our alleged leadership at decisive moments has become routine, and increasingly deadly. Greg Abbott’s response at the press conference the next day felt like scarcely more than a shrug: “It could have been worse,” he said.
It’s soul-grinding to watch conditions in Texas get ever worse, even as its leadership becomes crueler and more careless. Life here lately feels like a bad dream where nothing makes sense, and no matter how loud you try to scream, nobody can hear you. Could there be anything more devastatingly surreal than police officers preventing distraught parents from entering a building where their small children, lovingly dressed that morning in their awards-day best, were literally shot in the face? Now we endure press conference after press conference where old white men sit behind skirted tables and tell the rest of us how it’s going to be. And how it’s going to be is never better, always worse. They tell us why we can’t vote; why we can’t have reproductive health care, or any health care, if we aren’t people of means; why we just have to trust the hearts and intentions of random 18-year-olds who for some reason (we aren’t allowed to ask!) have a passion for owning weapons of mass death. The message behind the message, every single time, seems to be, we’re in charge now, and there’s nothing any of you can do about it. They issue their proclamations and then fall silent.
When the lights went out during the Big Freeze of February 2021, we heard nary a word from our governor for days. Five days after the cold swept in, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told an incredulous news anchor he hadn’t heard a peep out of the Governor. In the same interval, Senator Ted Cruz famously fled to the Ritz Carlton Cancun, only to weasel back across the border after being caught out. These are the actions of men who have abandoned the project of representing their constituents specifically, and perhaps of public service as a whole.
There are other, silences, too, more subtle but no less deadly. This week, District Judge Janis Jack announced plans to levy “substantial fines” against Texas for failing to comply with her orders to fix its troubled foster care system, in which children have been abused, trafficked, and even died. This even as the Texas legislature promotes the protection of children from predators (read: public school librarians) as a marquee moral cause. Then there’s the grim quiet surrounding Operation Lone Star, the National Guard members called up without warning and mostly without recourse, forced to leave jobs and families to patrol empty borderlands; at this very moment down there scrolling their phones and staring out at the empty desert. Some have even died by suicide. Did Abbott take heed, clarify or adjust their mission, call them home? He did not. Silence. Add all this to the confounding silence towards teachers, parents, students, and staff as they returned to school on the midst of a global pandemic, no guidance from the governor except assurances he would’t lift a finger to protect them. Educators only hear from Abbott when he’s blaming them for something.
One way to indicate in the parlance of 2022 that somebody has, metaphorically, stepped in a big giant cow patty, is to note that they’re trending. Boy howdy Greg Abbott is trending. The reporters and citizens of our fair republic are getting a look under the hood of state governance like never before, and is it ever ugly, the world become witness to Abbott’s craven hollowness. I bet the folks on the ISS can probably feel the suck of it from space.
Abbott’s a quiet nihilist, delivering death-dealing platitudes with a banal and listless delivery. He lacks the energetic smarminess of Cruz, the gee-whiz trollery of John Cornyn. He lacks the bravado of Dan Patrick, whose zealous advocacy for “door control” might tempt audiences to imagine for a single second he believes what he’s saying. When Beto O’Rourke interrupted his Uvalde press conference, minions confronted the interloper while the chief executive looked down and shuffled his papers, as if therein might be found directions out of the moral corner he’d painted himself into.
The stun of silence pervades his profoundly meaningless press conferences: mendacious, somnambulant, mostly featuring excuses or fantastical, unworkable plans such as the memorable promise to “eliminate all rapists,” on which no salubrious updates have yet been issued. The day he averred, “It could’ve been worse,” it became painfully clear how much at a loss he was for anything remotely approaching truth to say. One might have been forgiven for imagining he was talking not about the humidity in South Texas, not the murder of nineteen schoolchildren and two adults, a crime so grisly that only the night before parents of missing children were asked to submit DNA samples so they might be identified.
Amid this escalating misery, Texas Democrats have been plagued with an inertia born of learned helplessness and over-calculating caution. The lege and the blue cities continue to churn out prospects who’ve so far been unable to rise to statewide power, or unwilling to even try. Former Houston Mayor Bill White’s candidacy was way too even-keeled for anyone to pay much attention to. Former State Senator Wendy Davis, she of the pink tennis shoes and rousing, late-night filibuster, ran a gubernatorial campaign with a moral compass flexible enough to endorse the open carry of handguns. Then there were the Godot-candidacies of former San Antonio prodigies the Castro brothers, for whom we waited and waited until we mostly forgot about them.
Yes, Texas Democrats are a downtrodden bunch. In order to recall a time when it was not thus, one must be a person of a certain age. During the early-90s, Ann Richards swept into the State Capitol with her cowboy hat, tall confection of a silver coif, and armful of yellow roses; down south, close pal Molly Ivins held court with her famous “Can’t Say That, Can She?” bravado and weathered cowboy boots and her dog named Shit. Hell, we even elected a woman US Senator, Republican though she was. Then, in 1994, cruel vicissitudes of nepotistic fate resulted in the commencement of the W. years. Ann died of cancer in 2006, Molly in 2007, marking in retrospect, our entrance in earnest into our modern political dark era, since which the plausibility of Texas Republicans being the “values party” stretched ever-thinner but never seemed to snap.
The massacre at Uvalde took place the week after George W. Bush emerged from his artist’s garret on Turtle Creek to guffaw with an audience at SMU — oops haha I did war crimes, lol — and then retreated, presumably to spring upon us in several years’ time like a war-haunted jack-in-the-box. Upon such moments, Texas liberals are apt to rend our garments and cry, “What would Molly Say?” This is a question to which we have a fairly certain answer. The W. presidency, like our current moment, was characterized by abject disregard for loss of life, cloaked in vacuous moralistic pablum. During her illness, in late 2006, Molly made a video urging Americans to go to Washington, D.C., to protest W.’s “surge” in Iraq. No longer in a condition to travel, she urged Americans not to be silent in the face of arbitrary, unnecessary death:
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous….If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!’
What Molly had, and what we need now, is clarity—moral and otherwise. Especially when it seems the actions of Abbott and “his merry band of psychopaths,” as I once heard an author put it from the dais of a literary panel discussion in Austin, have been thought up special to dispirit and overwhelm us. The mixture of confusion, outrage, fear and grief is a thick one, and tough to wade through, like that quicksand we were constantly warned about in the eighties. And it does feel like that. We’re sinking, he’s silent, none of this can be real. But it is, and Abbott’s miry pit of disdain and neglect will swallow us all if we just keep standing still.
