What a beautiful thing to see FEMA workers, Red Cross volunteers, and hundreds of individuals and businesses joining together to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey.
They deserve all the help they are getting because of one reason, they are human beings in need, period.
I only wish Texas politicians and the millions of voters who support them believed the same thing.
Sadly, tragically, they don’t. Worse, they believe any help they get is not because of the generous spirit of Americans or the good work our government does.
No, they think they deserve it.
That’s what several Texans said in interviews I read, including Carl Tepper, the former GOP chairman for Lubbock County. His view is, “If there’s some help there, if we paid into it and we deserve it, we’ll take it.”
I doubt Texans have paid or will ever pay into FEMA through taxes anything close to the tune of the $125 billion or more the recovery will apparently require.
But as strange as that way of looking at disaster relief is, it pales in comparison to the fact that most Texans don’t believe victims of tragedy outside of Texas deserve help like they think they do.
They supported Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, along with all but one member of the Texas delegation in the House, when they voted against emergency aid when Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast in 2012.
Cruz said aid for Sandy victims was “chock-full of pork.”
This way of thinking and behaving isn’t just random, though.
According to Eric McDaniel, an associate professor specializing in politics at the University of Texas, Texas conservatives are determined “to get as much out of the federal government as possible while giving the least.”
Conservative politics used to be better than this, but ideology has taken over the movement and corrupted it with an “us vs. them” attitude.
That is why they continue to try to slash government spending that helps people like disaster victims while supporting more and more tax cuts for the rich.
Of course, now that Harvey has devastated parts of Texas, cutting the FEMA budget as House conservatives and all Texas Republicans have proposed to help pay for Trump’s stupid wall doesn’t seem like such a good idea at the moment.
I can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had Texas not been in Harvey’s path.
Despite the level of hypocrisy Texas politicians and voters are showing at the moment, though, I believe in times of crisis the natural instinct of most people, and certainly most Americans, is to respond by treating others the way they would want to be treated.
That is what we are seeing now in responses to the devastation Harvey has caused, and there really is something “golden” about that ethic we all learned when we were children.
But I guess they don’t teach that in Texas anymore, at least not among conservatives.
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