Singing 9/11 blues of kumbaya and e pluribus unum

One had to admire local businessman Stan Parker’s resolve to hold an early morning 9/11 observance at Waco’s Lee Lockwood Library & Museum without the usual venomous politics on parade. As Tribune-Herald staffer Mike Copeland noted in his story advancing the event, Parker vowed the 20th anniversary ceremony would include “a moment of silence, remarks and the respectful playing of the national anthem by a local guitarist.” What would not be tolerated, he said, were partisan political demonstrations.

Certainly any event emceed by a retired TV weatherman aims to be inoffensive. And, indeed, familiar themes dominated. The police chief spoke of the hope and courage rallying Americans in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by Islamic terrorists on our nation’s centers of commerce, governance and military might that left 2,977 dead, including 343 New York City firefighters and 23 police officers. The local fire chief spoke of the daily sacrifices of first responders, all in line with those who rushed into the World Trade Center towers in danger of collapse. And, yes, the observance included appropriate (if predictable) remarks on global Islamic terrorism and how “never, never again should we let our guard down or negotiate with terrorists.”

Most interestingly, Ralph Jones, introduced as part of private security at Ground Zero in the aftermath, spoke of undertaking long personal security rounds of the New York City site those eerie nights before similar annual 9/11 memorial observances: “After spending the night in that big hole in the ground with all those gone-too-soon souls, I cleansed my tortured soul with the sun rising on the usually crisp mornings, knowing in my heart that God almighty is still in charge.”

Jones concluded his brief address by quoting John 14:2-6 about heavenly refuge, then offering a cryptic reference from an Army infantry journal: “If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up with him.”

Thus we had another traditional 9/11 observation, complete with bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace” and the increasingly obligatory electric-guitar variation on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” all played out against the backdrop of a massive U.S. flag suspended by Waco Fire Department trucks – a bit of feel-good hometown spectacle envisioned and organized by a man whose personal Facebook page greeted visitors thus: “The worst attack on American soil happened in the ballot box on November 3, 2020.” Another meme warned: “This is the government the Founders warned us about.” Parker reposted these memes after the 9/11 ceremony.

About the same time he posted the tenets of a good and worthy Mason – presumably befitting the imposing stone library and museum, recognized by some as “the last great Mason building built in America” – Parker on social media attacked “Dementia Joe” Biden for pressing a national vaccination mandate. One meme: “It’s not the government’s job to protect my health. It’s the government’s job to protect my rights. It’s my job to protect my health. When you trade liberty for safety, you end up losing both.” Perhaps most disgracefully given what he set out to do locally, Parker posted photographs lampooning President Biden and other prominent Democrats presumably paying equally sincere homage at 9/11 tributes elsewhere in our nation in 2021.

Given that these memes fall neatly in line with those memes posted before 9/11, one must ask: What did Stan Parker take away from the memorial observance he helped plan?   

In explaining his 9/11 ceremony’s intent to a reporter afterward, Parker broke down in emotion: “I’m sorry, but this is what it’s about, people coming together. America needs to come together, and this is about coming together and being Americans.” He stressed the importance of our history: “That makes us who we are. And the firefighters, and just the people of America, will go and help somebody they don’t know when they need help. And that’s a very American trait. And we need to keep that trait.”

Yet the proverbial cow is not only out of the barn but has prompted a stampede, as Parker’s divisive and misleading private posts prove. (For the record, I happened across these posts via a link on the Lee Lockwood Library & Museum Facebook page chronicling or advancing the Masonic institution’s public activities.) And while some of Parker’s posts were for whatever reason subsequently deleted, others remained, including this of Aug. 31, complete with a lean, muscled-up actress Linda Hamilton from “The Terminator” movie franchise loading an assault weapon: “Look around you. Appreciate what you have. Nothing will be the same in a year. There’s a storm coming.” This references a QAnon conspiracy divination about “the storm” – that former President Donald Trump will be restored to power to the delight of the masses and will then arrest for execution the enemies of the people. In other words, the leaders of the proud “deplorables” will eliminate fellow citizens deemed undesirable and their immigrant friends. Such sentiments have poisoned American society and made less likely any kumbaya amid the nativist rumblings and partisan vehemence. Indeed, as historians have noted, the national unity on display after the attack soon dissipated.

Consequently, the prospect of finding and enlisting gifted speakers with compelling insights worthy of 9/11 observances and other occasions becomes nearly impossible, especially as political and cultural polarization grows, egged on by those individuals to whom we might have otherwise looked for profoundly unifying thoughts. “Coming together and being Americans?” More likely question: Which Americans? Many of us huddle daily in intellectually barren caves, taking comfort and even delight as co-conspiracists and rumormongers in our ranks malign our leaders or figures of accomplishment who don’t mirror our every expectation in politics. Social media has obviously aggravated the problem, allowing some of us to burrow deep into echo chambers where our posted opinions, views and whims not only go unchallenged but garner knee-jerk praise, often in as few words as possible and sometimes with only smiley-face variations. Those who disagree with us we insult or humiliate online in ways we wouldn’t dare at the neighborhood ballpark, community picnic or workplace water cooler.

“One of the theorists I read and teach my students is Carl Schmitt, who was writing during the Nazi era and was himself affiliated with the Nazi Party for a time,” David Corey, director of Baylor University’s “Baylor in Washington” program and a professor of political science, said during an Oct. 9, 2021, forum on heady problems bedeviling America’s increasingly pluralistic society. “And he thought this just was politics, that the right way to understand what politics is is the identification of friends and enemies and the war is against the ‘enemy,’ whether they’re internal or external. So it is actually disheartening for me to see a theorist whose view of politics is in some ways in harmony with what the Nazis did to the Jews, and then to see Americans in effect practicing if not owning up to practicing a politics that looks very similar to that. I think the direct question that has to be answered is whether there are differences in our country among factions that are that serious we must make war over.” Corey’s observation is spot-on. It’s regularly been lamented that Americans who rallied, however briefly, against a foreign enemy in the wake of 9/11 now regard one another as more threatening than the Islamic terrorists, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter unrest and Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol – two events that defy easy comparison, given one was prompted by concerns over decades of racial injustice pivoting on the death of an African American at the hands of four police officers over a counterfeit $20 bill, the other incited by a vain, profane and unscrupulous man desperate to somehow cling to power over the land after a closely vetted election tallies showed he had clearly lost approval by a majority of the people.

One result of this societal whirlwind of toxicity and madness is an astonishing lack of figures in America to whom all of us can respect, at least to some degree. This explains the lack of political figures in Austin or Washington willing to earnestly seek consensus on major issues including immigration, health care and racial equity. America today lacks even a Rev. Billy Graham to rally different constituencies and citizens. “We no longer have consensus experts and trusted authorities that appeal to significant demographics of the population across different political ideologies,” Washington University (St. Louis) law professor John Inazu said during the recent Baylor forum on pluralism. “This is an interesting phenomenon that in the contemporary moment maybe we are seeing for the first time — the loss of those figures. I mean, they came [in our past] with good and bad. There were real challenges as to who conveyed and held that authority in past eras, [but] these people were there and they did important work to reach broad audiences. We’re just more fractured now in terms of who that authority is and who is trusted in those positions.” And amidst everything else plaguing our times, evidence of this truth can be seen in the challenge of finding worthy speakers for occasions such as the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Short-term but self-defeating solution: Smother the occasional commemorations and remembrance with crowd-pleasing pageantry, ritual and music – and keep any messaging innocuous but rousing. Something of this mindset was to blame when, upon the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Wacoans could only shake their heads in collective amazement at a 9/11 memorial project called Enduring Freedom. Proposed in 2002 but by 2011 drowning in indecision and incompetence amid constant changes, the local project proved that government doesn't have a monopoly on organizational failure. Originally undertaken by Keep McLennan County Beautiful, organizers planned to honor heroes and victims of Sept. 11, including police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel. However, in response to input from veterans, plans were revamped to pay tribute to veterans of every war and peacekeeping mission since World War I. Changes in vision and scope brought more and more delays and increasing loss of focus while causing the estimated cost to skyrocket to as high as $355,000. Keep McLennan County Beautiful president Shirley Blanton was among those who said she was proud so many groups wanted to be associated with the memorial, even as she acknowledged accompanying complications, including ever-changing designs to accommodate the memorial's growing scope. "We are bringing in so many different elements, ranging from different wars to different professions — even the K-9 Corps," she told me in 2009. "When we were originally designing this, we kept getting so many questions as to why this group was left out, or that group. It was supposed to just be 9/11. And we were getting some big offers, including banks and L-3 Communications, and everyone wanted to see it expanded." Result: A full decade after 9/11, the limestone slabs salvaged from the Pentagon rubble after the attacks and some 20,000 bricks purchased for the memorial lay unused in area storage facilities with no clear plans in place for completing the project.

My friend Bill Mahon, a Vietnam veteran with a remarkable record of civic leadership who helped save the Waco Veterans Affairs Medical Center from closure by the Department of Veterans Affairs, stepped forward after others abandoned the memorial project in frustration and embarrassment. He led area veterans to project completion and dedication, albeit on a smaller scale – and not at the sprawling Extraco Events Center in Waco amid the pomp and circumstance originally envisioned but in a modest but dignified ceremony in the neatly manicured Veterans Memorial Park in the nearby town of Lacy Lakeview a few days before the 12th anniversary. Pentagon 9/11 attack victim and Republican state Sen. Brian Birdwell was present to help with the ceremony, noting the memorial commemorated not only “what happened to the nation but also how the nation responded. It takes a special heart to run into a burning building or to go overseas to defend the country.” Possibly telling of our times by then, Joe Phipps, owner of Phipps Memorial, who acquired and offered for inclusion in the 9/11 memorial those pieces of the Pentagon building that broke off during the attacks, ultimately declined to include them in the scaled-down memorial, supposedly owing to its proximity to a Confederate soldiers memorial in nearby Bellmead that had been vandalized in the past. This concern, if earnest, raises questions about how 9/11 was perceived even a decade after the event – and whether some of us actually viewed a proper 9/11 memorial as comparable to a poorly tended Confederate soldiers memorial several miles away – a spectacle complete with Confederate battle flag that telegraphs certain local sentiments to motorists approaching Waco on Interstate 35. (Because of traffic ferocity on the interstate, I’ve found that many motorists don’t even notice it; their eyes are focused on the road and other vehicles.) And lest anyone blame plodding efforts to plan, fund and erect a proper 9/11 on procrastinating, quick-to-placate local bumpkins in Central Texas, it’s relevant to recall the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center was similarly delayed by, to quote a damning 2012 Associated Press investigative report, “ambitions to build a bigger, better memorial than any other in the land.”

Even by then, 9/11 ceremonies and perhaps late-blossoming memorials demanded more in the way of messaging – not necessarily more honorees and more sacrifices and more pageantry but words and thoughts and reflections that made sense of what we had experienced and how it changed us and how it all still challenged us as Americans. I remember a letter we received at the Tribune-Herald and published on occasion of the 10th anniversary: “As I watched the 9/11 anniversary ceremonies this weekend and remembered how the United States was united after the evil and monstrous attacks, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to us? When we look back at the past four years, many of our leaders and citizens have acted like spoiled, arrogant, selfish jerks. Just a few examples include: Republicans who said they would do everything possible to see our new president [Barack Obama] fail; the tea party when it said it was eager to see America default on its debt; and Democrats who said their Republican counterparts were Nazis. If we are to survive as a nation, we have to quit the political and partisan rhetoric and mean-spirited actions. We need to truly work together in the very same spirit that we had as a country after these monstrous attacks by our enemy 10 years ago. That should be our hope and prayer.” Such sentiments remain in conflict 20 years afterward. Wars warranted, as our invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 surely was, or unwarranted, as our invasion of Iraq in 2003 surely was, beg deep political thought and meditation and debate by the very nature of their impact on commercial and global trade, the national security of our allies and ourselves, budgetary matters that impact our taxes and debt, personal freedoms possibly compromised in efforts to better detect terrorism in the United States and, above all, the precious lives of U.S. service members. And, yes, our layered, tumultuous history makes all fair pickings.

Unfortunately, growing politicization of everything has not only fueled societal tribalism but set off a mad scramble in which cherished American symbols such as the national anthem and U.S. flag are commandeered by opportunistic politicians seeking to influence us, glorify themselves, score political points and excuse decidedly unpatriotic behavior. When a president literally wraps himself in the U.S. flag (as President Trump has famously done at Conservative Political Action Conferences), when insurrectionists seeking to prevent Congress from its constitutional duties drape themselves in flags while running amok in the U.S. Capitol (as local winemaker and Air Force veteran Christopher Grider did the afternoon of Jan. 6, draped in a yellow, American Revolutionary Gadsden flag, complete with coiled timber rattler poised to strike), prospects for the meaningful unity that Stan Parker laments at least one day a year become quicksilver. As conservative S.E. Cupp noted of Trump’s fondling of the flag during his 2019 CPAC theatrics for the gullible and the worshipful, “Many conference attendees called it one of his best performances. But Trump’s ‘best’ performances are almost always at the nation’s expense. They are ‘best’ because they are memorably divisive, unfiltered, often profane and seething with animus for enemies perceived and real. And they are all about love for him. Manhandling the American flag was a perfect representation of this dichotomy. Half the country likely saw it as a fitting metaphor for his presidency writ large: an assault on our most cherished values. He took what was not his, robbed it of all its virtue – and then presumably moved on to his next conquest.”

Nowadays, whenever the U.S. flag is unfurled or the national anthem is cued, the wary, well-informed and discriminating American braces for another hijacking of such symbols, much like those four airliners were hijacked on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The more discerning among us brace for prostitution of such symbols in service of incendiary, fact-free rhetoric, rants and ravings, all designed to appeal to patriotic instincts and gut-level emotions but not our powers of deduction, reasoning and healthy skepticism. Granted, there’s a fine line between citizen reverence for the U.S. flag at campaign rallies and party functions and such affairs as the Conservative Political Action Conference where the flag is drafted and transformed into a cheap political prop. What remains of flag etiquette and the Pledge of Allegiance preclude too many spectacles such as a grown man fondling the flag with all the grace of a drunken lout performing a pole dance on the stage of a stripper joint. And certainly many Americans were offended by those self-envisioned patriots who used flagpoles, with flags still attached, to beat into submission duly sworn police officers charged with defending duly sworn lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Some of these lawmakers later claimed the protesters jailed in the Capitol violence were “political prisoners.”

A viable solution to increasingly irrelevant occasions such as those commemorating the sacrifices of 9/11 is not so much in making a political point but doing so in a thought-provoking, nuanced, unshowy way – one that respects the differing perspectives of a racially, ethnically, politically and intellectually diverse America, even as the speaker appeals to higher ideals and promises societal and historical epiphanies for some of us. Stan Parker may well have seen this as too tall an order in a society that regularly settles for speakers who don’t challenge audiences so much as pander to them. Considering his own sentiments online, his wisest move might have seemed keeping some ham-fisted politician from turning the occasion into a shallow partisan event mirroring his own political proclivities. Possibly he overcorrected, settling for the bland, the predictable and the unthinking.

For the record, Baylor University’s 9/11 ceremony a day before the Lee Lockwood Library & Museum event also played it safe, despite the many on its faculty who might have offered some deep messaging worthy of the occasion and our times. President Linda Livingstone dutifully saluted first responders (and offered another where-I-was-during-the-attack testimonial), presented framed decrees of appreciation to the police chief, fire chief and head of Baylor security, then allowed Sen. Birdwell to say a prayer. Happily, Birdwell was not allowed to deliver his divisive talk on who loves his country and who doesn’t – one that he delivered last year in a local church and in a fiercely partisan context that should have caused every Bible in the sanctuary to burst into flames. After the Baylor 9/11 ceremony, Sen. Birdwell returned to Austin, there to further aggravate America’s racial and partisan strife. This included helping forge redistricting maps that, despite U.S. Census figures showing that 95 percent of Texas’ population gain over the past decade came from Hispanics, Asians and African Americans, ultimately added two white majority congressional districts to the mix of maps. Birdwell’s remarks in that church and his work in the Legislature making voting harder for minorities in growing urban centers and fueling fights over the teaching of our nation’s racial history in school classrooms, placed alongside Stan Parker’s thoughts, ultimately summon up John Inazu’s legitimate fears that “we’re prone today to jump to the conclusion that everybody who doesn’t believe what we believe is not only wrong but evil.”

Putting aside the matter of what sort of leaders we dispatch to the corridors of power, the question of occasional observances in polarized times deserves reflection: Is there a proper balance at the mighty lectern between the coldly ceremonial and heatedly divisive? Sure – and for occasions recognizing lives lost and sacrifices made involving an event as presumably transformative as 9/11, ceremony sponsors should spend more time doggedly seeking those among us who can add to our understanding of 9/11 and, yes, one another. This could dwell on how 9/11 touches upon our national psyche, our conduct of two “forever wars” or even whether America is all it can be in these times. This is rich and challenging intellectual terrain that might help us better orient ourselves in dizzying times. Baylor faith and culture expert Greg Garrett, for instance, argues it “shouldn’t surprise anyone that an event that shook our sense of security and our identity would be reflected in every aspect of American life.” Even so, what most surprised and alarmed Garrett “is the degree to which 9/11 continues to shape our attitudes about race, religion, immigration and the Other, whether that Other is in Afghanistan or just across town." The scholar talks of how country musicians like Toby Keith “leaned into militant songs about American greatness and righteous revenge,” while the top-selling Dixie Chicks were “drummed out of country music for their public stand against going to war.” The TV show “24” reflected the “growing darkness of America’s extra-legal approach to that war,” including acceptance of torture as U.S. policy. He suggests public fascination with zombie movies and TV sagas, of all genres, reflected a 24/7 sense of encroaching menace, arguably more evident today than in 10 years ago: “You could fight all day every day against this menace, these creatures who look like humans but seek your destruction. And then the next morning, you still have to rise and confront it again.”

In a wonderfully edifying Sept. 11 Washington Post column on 9/11 and our society’s search for heroes emulating and even eclipsing the courageous passengers who rushed terrorist hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, Alyssa Rosenberg suggests the post-9/11 world explains our cultural preoccupation with superheroes: “Instead of relying on the self-sacrificing courage of the passengers who tried to reclaim the cockpit of United Flight 93, superheroes could take on such burdens without putting themselves at risk.” But the post-9/11 days of superheroes may be closing; such cultural investments fail to stack up against the clandestine pockets of domestic terrorism with which our nation now deals, including those dedicated to overthrowing our government or inciting civil war between citizenry. “[O]ther threats have entered the pantheon of American anxieties, and superheroes have little to offer in response,” Rosenberg writes. “You can’t punch out a pandemic virus or an opioid epidemic; Bruce Banner would be more useful right now as a brilliant scientist than as Hulk in smash mode. The U.S. military can’t invade to prevent a domestic insurgent movement. What we need is Batman in his original incarnation as a detective, not as a one-man military.”

And if zombie apocalypses and superheroes galore seem over the top at dignified 9/11 remembrances, consider for a moment the reality and the surrealism of our era: Some lost souls among us now divine their truths at the QAnon oracle, which in its mythology has claimed that cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles consisting of prominent Democrats and entertainment elites control the so-called "Deep State” steering American governance. QAnon regularly provides dates of when Donald Trump, savior of the masses from this subterranean devilry,  will be rightfully restored to power over his subjects, the better to round up for arrest his enemies; one prediction of his restoration surfaces as soon as another is dashed like “Whac-A-Mole.” Only weeks after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, actor Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in director Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” encouraged the faithful at a QAnon-affiliated “For God & Country: Patriot Double Down” conference in Las Vegas to “join St. Michael and all the angels in defending God and sending Lucifer and his henchmen straight right back to hell where they belong.”  Caviezel spoke directly of a coming development to which Stan Parker earlier alluded, however unwittingly: "We are headed into the storm of all storms. Yes, the Storm is upon us." No less than a Catholic bishop based in Tyler, Texas, subsequently urged his flock to heed the Hollywood Jesus’ prophecy.

Our fading memories don’t help. On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Trib newsroom colleague Cindy V. Culp wrote a story about Baylor University neuroscience professor and memory expert Charles Weaver that sparked some outrage. Weaver’s research pressed project participants to record their memories of 9/11, beginning within 24 hours of the terrorist attacks, then again three months, six months and a year later. Questions included where they were when they heard about the attacks, what they were doing and who they were with. Numerous people said in later accounts that they had watched real-time TV footage of the first airliner hitting the World Trade Center, even though the only footage of the first plane assault didn’t emerge till days afterward. Similarly, when people were asked to recall what emotions they felt, some said they were angry and wanted revenge on terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, even though few actually knew who bin Laden was at the time.

Among readers voicing anger at Weaver's research was one who cited it as inappropriate for the Sept. 11, 2011, edition of the Tribune-Herald: "Whether Weaver’s findings are accurate or not is not for me to say. But I would rather spend this anniversary reflecting on all the lives that were lost and pray for the friends and families that are left to celebrate their lives. Leave me with my memories." (Interestingly, another reader took offense at the paper's publishing on the 10th anniversary of the attacks a column by Al Siddiq, the mild-mannered leader of the Islamic Center of Waco, concerning treatment of Muslims in the United States since 9/11: "He ought to be glad that Bush and not Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during the terrorist attacks. FDR probably would have interred [sic] Muslims as he did the Japanese following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. I know that many good Muslims have died fighting against Muslim terrorists around the world, but I would like actions and not just words from Muslim leaders." Siddiq, among other things, is an immigrant from Pakistan who served six years in the U.S. Army. And then there was the aforementioned embarrassment over the local 9/11 monument lost in indecision, a situation Cindy Culp also doggedly reported: “As a member of a family that has served in all major military conflicts, I say with conviction that this memorial should have no connection to any other ‘cause.’ To read that veterans groups wanted to be part of the recognition process is a travesty. We veterans are recognized throughout this city, county, country and world in countless places. This memorial should be dedicated to those directly impacted by 9/11 only. Anything else is simply self-serving and deplorable.”)

And if social-media inventions, cultural preoccupations and cognitive lapses that evolve into something more than genuine memory are inappropriate fodder (even if they aren’t), other studied offerings invite occasional reflection. On journalist and author Fareed Zakaria’s “Global Public Square” – easily the best hour of TV for those disposed to intelligent debate on geopolitics – former British prime minister Tony Blair on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 argued that radicalized Muslim groups such as those behind 9/11 have perverted Islam, turning it into a political ideology with totalitarian aims. The discussion is relevant in numerous ways in America that go beyond Islam. Other subjects relevant in a 9/11 context: The complexity of the wars we pursued (including the Sunni and Shia conundrum that often determines the success or failure of long-term military objectives and presidential policy); the militarization of Afghanistan in stabilizing ways employed in Korea (as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has suggested); and why the national spirit that 9/11 observances seek to rekindle is missing in our struggle against a viral killer that in the week leading up to 9/11 observances this year took far more American lives than the concerted, four-pronged 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet many of us don’t bat an eye at this widespread and needless loss of life. 

In short, our 9/11 observances moving forward risk becoming bloodless, perfunctory affairs without  thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting moments, whether uplifting and unifying or inflammatory while still respectful and inclusive. What use is a ceremony commemorating loss and sacrifice unless it offers insight about where we were as a people on Sept. 11, 2001, where we are as a people now and where we should one day be as a nation? And if the speaker engaged for the occasion has spent his or her efforts in public life aggravating our political and cultural differences, if he or she has worked to marginalize some of us, then don’t expect Americans to “come together” beyond certain demographics. Don’t expect “e pluribus unum.”

Former President Trump gets that, at least in one sense. While other former presidents attended memorials, Trump made surprise stops to visit New York police and firefighters, using the occasion to attack President Biden’s “surrender” and withdrawal from Afghanistan (under unfortunate terms, it should be noted, that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban), to claim once again he’d won the 2020 presidential election, then to playfully tout his possible 2024 presidential candidacy. Trump finished the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by speaking to a conference organized by Hak Ja Han Moon, widow of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the famously controversial Unification Church, where he took credit for peace in the Korean peninsula. He then provided boxing commentary for a pay-per-view fight extravaganza featuring 58-year-old Evander Holyfield, former heavyweight champion. During the fight, Trump took another jab at Biden. Holyfield got pummeled. Trump got press.

Former President George W. Bush gets all this, too, though in another sense. Of all the 9/11

addresses held across the nation, of all the remarks appealing to our patriotism and better angels and demanding deeper reflection about the state of our union, his ranked at the top – appropriately, considering that he was president at the time of the terrorist attacks and initiated two wars in its wake. He spoke at the national monument erected in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed after its passengers, mostly strangers to one another, voted on a plan, then forcefully prevented hijackers from crashing the airliner into its reporter target – the U.S. Capitol. Nimbly addressing the “anger, fear and resentment” of today’s politics, Bush stressed “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

If one of these tributes offends you and the other doesn’t, welcome to America, which has always been as deeply rooted in snake-oil salesmen, rainmakers, Bible-thumping frauds and flimflam artists as in the inspiring words and ideals of Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Hamilton, John Jay and Tom Paine. The problem for Americans then and now is separating which is which, sorting out blood-pumping but selfishly manipulative rhetoric from deeply grounded truths and soaring calls of selfless citizenship, differentiating between Barnum and the circus of American scoundrels from those who demonstrate leadership, insights and guts. And for those who miss the unity too briefly shown in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it's possibly useful to recall how no less than Rev. Jerry Falwell and right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club” on Sept. 13, 2001, agreed the 9/11 attacks were evidence of a god angry over abortion, feminism, homosexuality, secular schools and the American Civil Liberties Union. (Ironically, Robertson later sought to distance himself from Falwell's comments.) Maybe Weaver is right about our memories concerning 9/11 and a lot of other events at home and abroad. That doesn’t mean e pluribus unum isn’t an idea worth encouraging long after the bagpipes, electric guitars and oversized U.S. flags have been put away.

The ringing of bells honoring cherished dead, the sounding of sirens acknowledging the heroic

spirit of first responders, the patriotic cries to be on guard for threats from abroad have properly conveyed gratitude, grief and vigilance at observances in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks. Yet the passage of time and sweep of history demand far more of us in the succeeding years. Such events lose resonance and relevance if no one refocuses on the critical context of ever-changing eras. One senses on so many occasions now the absence of a dynamic orator such as Daniel Webster, someone among us capable of rousingly transformative insights. Such is found most often in newspaper opinion pages, even as the newspapers seen as so fundamental by the Founding Fathers wither and die. Washington Post columnist George Will acknowledges a certain satisfaction that only the learned now read newspapers, that he can thus argue finer points of history, law and principle with a willfully informed readership. He’s right in one sense. Yet this leaves the rest of us to a mix of rituals, gestures and sloganeering, too often manipulated by politicians and their lackeys, very often signifying little but benefit to themselves.

Exceptions do step forward on occasion. During the 9/11 observance near Shanksville, Gordon Felt, a special education teacher and the brother of Flight 93 victim Edward Felt, suggested the question 20 years out is not so much how reverently we honor the fallen of 9/11, the brave passengers of Flight 93 and those who lingered in the twin towers at their peril to help strangers and co-workers, “but rather the question to be considered is: Are we worthy of their sacrifice? Are we worthy?

"Do we as individuals, communities and as a country conduct ourselves in a manner that would make those that sacrificed so much and fought so hard on September 11th proud of who we have become? Do we share the same willingness to sacrifice for others in little ways as well as large, to act when necessary for no other reason than to accomplish a noble goal, egoless and without other motivation than to do what is right?”

In an age when so many Americans refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks to safeguard neighbors, co-workers and loved ones from the suffering and death incurred by a highly contagious killer virus, when some of us excuse violent behavior we might brand treasonous if pursued by others among us, certain questions on occasions such as 9/11 may well prove inconvenient or awkward or painful but can also enlighten, allowing us to take fuller stock of ourselves, the better to rally to meet new, unimagined challenges. It might help us settle on what our values are anymore. Yes, one might contend strong opinions, no matter how well argued or reasoned, risk driving people off from such annual observances. Yet to conduct hollow ceremonies and predictable recitatives year after year after year, without acknowledging questionable changes in ourselves, our nation and the world, risks showcasing symbols, music and rhetoric to grandly diminishing returns. And if we simply return to our destructive and ill-founded ways immediately after such ceremonies, can they really be regarded as consequential?

Meanwhile, dangers not so easily recognized as foreign-born Islamic radicals even now demand from us sacrifice, courage and self-introspection if we are to surmount them. Are we worthy?

Afghan war left Americans conflicted but mostly indifferent

During 20 years of warfare against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, Waco Tribune-Herald colleagues and I struggled to keep up with an ever-changing mission. It was launched to drive out fundamentalist combatants who aided the 2001 terrorist attacks on our centers of commerce and military might that left nearly 3,000 dead on the American homefront. Then it shifted to a dubious nation-building mission to transform Afghanistan from a tribal confederation into an outpost of democracy worthy of 21st century civilization.

But under the Obama, Trump and now Biden administrations, the mission morphed into finding some way of quitting and just getting out – no surprise, given these missions never fully engaged Americans beyond buying a lot of “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, even considering the astounding loss of American lives incurred by a Taliban regime hosting Osama bin Laden, terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. Maybe this is a sign of Americans’ latter-day shallowness, decadence and short attention span. To a degree, such qualities have contributed to our accelerated exit from the country, punctuated by Thursday’s bloodshed near Hamid Karzai International Airport, the apparent work, once again, of terrorists.

President George W. Bush certainly didn’t help matters by invading Iraq in 2003, a year and a half after beginning war with Afghanistan. The decision to wage two wars using an all-volunteer military distracted from the fight for Afghanistan in resources, manpower and focus. Nor was all this aided by his foolishly pursuing a second round of tax cuts adding to the national debt. We put both wars (including massive medical expenses) on the nation’s credit card. Citizens were told to go shopping. Such defined our 21st century patriotism and national sacrifice.

Tribune-Herald staffers may not have been on Afghan battlefields, but our attendance at President Bush’s press conferences at the Western White House near Crawford; our proximity to Fort Hood; and our coverage of local veterans returning home gave us a certain fractured insight into what was going on. I say “fractured” because Bush put a positive spin on our nation’s work in Afghanistan; the troops and others on leave or between deployments were often far more nuanced and frank.

One local, Jeff Aguirre, then 34, conveyed to us in 2007 the promise he felt in his mission as a contractor training Afghan security. He wanted to “go over there and see the world and be there as a part of that country was being built up and coming online with the rest of the world.” Now working as a McLennan County sheriff’s deputy, Aguirre in a Trib interview this month discreetly avoided volatile policy opinions but suggested our withdrawal would extinguish hope among the Afghan people.

Army Spc. David Kaye, then 22, a Baylor University journalism student (and now BU assistant athletic director for communications), echoed Aguirre’s sentiments in 2006: “The best way to end terrorism is to end this way of life, give these people a better way of life, to give them better opportunities." But another Army soldier, 27, spoke to us of the resentment he felt in 2013: “Throughout the whole deployment, I never felt welcome. We were there to help, but at no point did I feel the locals were thankful. We were intruders.”

I pressed Congressman Chet Edwards in February 2009 about President Obama’s vow to withdraw from Iraq. “He has shown a willingness to look at conditions on the ground before deciding how soon the troops should come out,” he said of Obama “That's wise. He outlined his goals during the campaign, but that goal shouldn't be a straitjacket, particularly when American lives are at risk. It's important to maximize (our presence) to ensure Iraq is stable in the long term. Same goes for Afghanistan.

“But we must be very careful how long and how deep we're mired in the Afghanistan conflict,” Edwards stressed. “It is more tribal and far more complex than even Iraq, as difficult as that has been. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates indicated we need to be very realistic about what our goals and expectations are in Afghanistan. Before long, I want to see our exit strategy from Afghanistan. I don't want 50,000 to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next 10 years.”

Sacrificing at the mall

When President Obama traveled to Fort Hood in November 2009 for memorial services after 39-year-old Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan’s shooting spree on post left 13 dead and many more wounded, grief clearly mixed with misgivings. Joseph Fowlkes, 32, of Killeen, who had retired from the military that October after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, stressed to us the dilemma: "I was tired of getting deployed. I was tired of my friends getting deployed. But we can't pull out entirely because then everything we've done over there will be for nothing."

As Trib colleague Michael Shapiro reported in 2011, Osama bin Laden’s death drew restrained comment from Fort Hood soldiers who expressed doubt this long-sought development would lead to major change in the war in Afghanistan. Killeen resident Theresa Kurts expressed hope it might make for fewer or at least shorten future Mideast troop deployments, noting that her best friend’s husband was set to go on another tour to Afghanistan in June: “He’s supposed to be gone for 18 months, so maybe with this he won’t have to be gone so long.”

By contrast, I found spirits high all over Waco in the wake of the brilliantly executed operation of a Navy SEAL team, U.S. intelligence and the Obama administration in dispatching bin Laden. For instance, at Dubl-R Burgers in North Waco, customer Dennis Frymark, 47, a former Marine, told how his boss, Mark Money, a former Navy man, teased him at work: “He offered me condolences that the Marines couldn’t handle it, so they called in the Navy to do the job.”

Sentiments turned dark amid news of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ 2012 slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, some as young as 2. We received letters to the editor blaming such rage on endless deployments of an exhausted, often unappreciated military to hostile stretches of the Mideast. “I was a Marine during the Vietnam War and I was proud to serve my country,” a local veteran wrote. “I was also glad to know that when I was deployed to Vietnam that I would only have to serve a 13-month tour and not be forced to go back. It is shameful to ask our military men and women to endure never-ending combat. I do believe we should have gone into Afghanistan seeking Osama bin Laden and his ilk. But it’s 10 years later and 1,700 American lives have been lost. It’s time to get out now!”

I remember in 2013 publishing a guest column by then former first lady Laura Bush in which she urged fellow citizens to stick with the mission, especially given the brutal treatment of women by the Taliban if the latter returned to power. “We know from our own history — from the Civil War to women’s suffrage and civil rights — how hard and long the path to freedom is,” she wrote. “As the people of Afghanistan continue on their own hard path to freedom, they must know that we are with them.”

Antioch Community Church members and Baylor graduates Heather Mercer, 24, and Dayna Curry, 29 ensured that Waco figures in the footnotes of any comprehensive historical chronicling of the Afghan war. Arrested by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan more than a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Christian foreign aid workers faced a possible death sentence for spreading the gospel. Yet a decade later, Mercer radiated Christian resilience, tolerance and charity: “I think for all of us involved in that experience in Afghanistan, that was the irony of the situation. The experience solidified the sense of calling to serve Muslims in hard places.”

“Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry decided to go to help people who needed help,” President Bush said in welcoming them to the White House on Nov. 26, 2001, after rescue from Taliban captors, and mere days after U.S. and allied forces drove the Taliban into retreat. “Their faith led them to Afghanistan. One woman who knows them best put it this way: They had a calling to serve the poorest of the poor, and Afghanistan is where that calling took them. And Heather and Dayna's faith in God sustained them throughout their ordeal. It's a wonderful story about prayer, about a faith that can sustain people in good times and in bad times. Their faith was a source of hope that kept them from becoming discouraged.”

Bush said Curry and Mercer’s ordeal was also “a story about people in our country who rallied for them. People prayed all around the country. I was particularly struck by the fact that Heather's dad offered to take her place in prison. I was struck by the fact that a country preacher out of Central Texas flew to Afghanistan to lend his presence in any way that would help. I know there are a lot of people right outside of Crawford that were praying for these girls' release. And when they were, people all across Baylor University cheered. Something besides football became more important in their lives – life itself."

But an interview that Trib opinion page colleague Sandra Sanchez conducted in 2012 with Army Lt. Col. Jack Usrey of Fort Hood nailed the real problem. He spoke of the road mines, soldiers with limbs blown off, fear from locals and isolation from his wife and three children. But what struck him worse and was harder for him to accept was the apathy and lack of concern from citizens back home about what he and other military personnel were doing in Afghanistan.

“These folks are just oblivious. They have no idea,” Usrey, then 46, told Sanchez in Temple beside his wife of 20 years during a Christmas holiday visit — his first trip home since deploying on a year-long mission in May. “During World War II, the entire country activated and everyone was at war. Well, we’ve been at war for a decade now but no one knows. It’s almost like we (soldiers) are at war and America’s at the mall.”

Pandemonium guaranteed

Because leaving Afghanistan promptly was one thing on which President Trump and President Biden agreed, we should have expected more in how the withdrawal was actually conducted: Biden stupidly allowed himself to be boxed in by what amounted to the U.S. surrender terms that Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Instead of expanding his options to transport to safety U.S. citizens and Afghans who assisted the United States at great peril, Biden contributed to the chaos and panic that were, admittedly, always inevitable.

In recent days, Republicans have scrambled to duck blame in all this by rewriting history, “1984”-style. For instance, hours after the Taliban seized Kabul and the Afghan government collapsed, the Republican National Committee quietly removed from its website the claim "Biden has had a history of pushing for endless wars" while "Trump has continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America’s longest running war.”

For Trump apologists to suddenly express dismay at a withdrawal their idol sealed with a pact signed in February 2020 (specifically negotiated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) suggests they’re disingenuous, which renders them untrustworthy, or in denial, which amounts to the same. Yes, it’s possible a Trump pullout might have been more orderly, but plenty of evidence suggests otherwise, including the bumbling and incoherence of the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis raging across the United States in 2020, packing hospitals and filling morgues – stunning incompetence that arguably cost thousands of American lives. And it goes without saying that Trump and his administration couldn’t even secure the U.S. Capitol from his own supporters during the Jan. 6 insurrection that halted congressional duties related to the 2020 presidential election and caused members of his own party to flee for their lives.

None of this excuses Biden, who must shoulder far more blame. Yes, any evacuation would have spurred pandemonium, especially among Afghans who foresaw neither the disintegration of Afghan security forces nor abandonment of their government with such immediacy. Indeed, even in the United States, chaos often prevails not only anytime a hurricane looms but in how federal and state relief efforts address the aftermath. President Bush proved as much with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts undermined by communication breakdowns, supply failures, indecision, confusion, fraud and political appointees with little disaster experience.

One marvels at how Biden, invoking the Trump pullout pact as an excuse to depart, could nonetheless ignore the logistical preparation that might have ensured such necessities as secured access to the Kabul airport and smart, orderly processing of visas for desperate Afghan allies. The latter has dragged on so long that a class-action lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government during Trump’s tenure challenging "life-threatening delays" in processing special immigrant visas for Afghans who assisted U.S. endeavors. And one reels at the Biden administration decision at one point to amateurishly tie the U.S. departure to a Sept. 11 deadline – a suggestion juvenile in conception, acceptance and execution.

To avoid further humanitarian outrage, Biden must through negotiation with the Taliban and/or through U.S. and NATO armed initiative ensure evacuations are handled methodically and efficiently in Kabul and elsewhere. If this means backtracking in earlier plans and pledges, so be it. History honors recalibrating in a disaster, assuming intelligence, wisdom and humanitarian grounds are factored in. One leverage the United States has to some extent: control of billions of dollars in Afghan capital the Taliban now seek from their central bank and the International Monetary Fund. As for the concern that hasty evacuation of unvetted Afghans may unwittingly import terrorism to America, one solution is quartering refugees in safe, clean, hospitable facilities out of harm’s way while each is vetted as best as possible.

Democracy at home, abroad

Gumming up discussions moving forward is the question too many pundits still want to debate: Should the United States leave Afghanistan? Yet this has been answered resoundingly. Polls show Americans want out. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed majorities of U.S. military veterans had concluded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t worth fighting. And the 2020 presidential election pitted major candidates who wanted out. With an all-volunteer army, the scramble to cut taxes, the lust by U.S. citizens to vilify one another and our battle at home to hang on to the very democracy we sought to export, the time is right. American indifference to democracy in Afghanistan has preceded our indifference to democracy in America.

Given that the Taliban hastened their conquest in part by negotiating with tribal leaders, one wonders if Afghanistan has changed much beyond Kabul. But America has definitely changed. While we salute our troops with knee-jerk reverence, we care too little about the sometimes impossible missions on which we send them. Our fickleness should outrage them. On the homefront, we show our true colors: Out of political obstinance or fear, we balk at rolling up our sleeves to save even our neighbors, our co-workers, our children. And the Christian goodness symbolized by Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry in 2001 has been significantly supplanted in America by a malignant strain of evangelicalism fueled by the same hostility, discrimination and fundamentalist and apocalyptic theocracy of which we so readily accuse the Taliban.

No one with a heart can fail to be touched by the surprising protests mounted by Afghans against abrupt return of Taliban reign, the desperation we see at the Kabul airport and the laments of Afghans over U.S. departure. Yet the idea of further U.S. commitments in blood and treasure – the cost by now including the lives of some 2,500 U.S. service members and 3,800 contractors as well as an estimated $2.26 trillion to battle the Taliban and prop up Afghan security forces, all amid American sentiments ranging from apathy to disdain – can only arouse cynicism after collapse of those same Afghan security forces and the Afghan government. Thursday’s horrific explosions near Hamid Karzai International Airport killing 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans only further stamps the futility of a mission to transform Afghanistan from a fitful tribal enigma into a responsible presence in the Middle East; clearly, even the Taliban who yearn for U.S. departure, and to a strange degree have helped facilitate it, can’t control Kabul given all the sectional rivalries now in violent play. (ISIS-K, no friend of the Taliban which it claims isn’t fundamentalist enough, has claimed credit for this latest burst of terrorism.) A thoughtful friend of mine who served in the Air Force for 20 years and whom I regularly consult for insights into such matters as how to properly employ taut military muscle in an increasingly dangerous world put it soberly enough: "We trained them and gave them equipment for 20 years, and if they won't fight for their own country, we need to get out."

Hard truths, hard feelings complicate Texas voting rights

The ongoing clash between Texas Republicans, who have long run the show at the Texas State Capitol and will do whatever is required to retain the power and the privilege, and Texas Democrats, now concluding a quixotic mission to the U.S. Capitol to level the playing field in ways they can’t manage at the ballot box, has been described as a battle over voting rights. True. It’s also described in Texas as a rural-versus-urban struggle, highlighting differences bolstered by generations of politicking, gerrymandering and stereotyping on both sides; one existence sees itself as carrying on a sentimental, sometimes illusionary charge regarding tradition and down-home values, the other is swept up in the speculation, even excitement one sometimes finds in changing times that nonetheless seem to move us closer to the grand promises made in our nation’s founding documents.

Yet many of us know what this is really about.

The grim reality was reinforced for me the other day while reading an online update illustrated with a two-photograph panel: In the left photo: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, white, 63, seemingly caught mid-sentence haranguing about Texas House Democrats who for a second time this year broke quorum, fled the grounds and suspended business in that chamber, shelving an “election integrity” bill in a state where 2020 elections were, to quote the Republican-run Secretary of State’s Office, “secure and smooth.” Abbott vows to call special session after special session till Democrats return, take their medicine and watch as Republicans pass election reforms complicating and restricting participatory democracy in Texas.

In the right panel of this diptych: Texas House Democrats, a sea of ethnic color defining today’s Texas, gathered for a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol. And just imagine the damning public relations disaster awaiting a state that prides itself on its neat and proper corporate profile and its strong reputation as a tourism mecca if and when these African Americans and Hispanics are returned to the Texas State Capitol in handcuffs by order of white men in the Texas leadership. Jordan Vonderhaar has shot a telling photo for Texas Tribune of a bunch of whites gathered around the House Speaker’s podium, pressing to strip absent Democrats of committee appointments.

For anyone who denies this is ultimately about race, I say: Look at the photographs.

Consider, too, last week’s testimony submitted before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties by three of the Democrats who fled the Texas State Capitol, including 82-year-old state Rep. Senfronia Thompson. An African American from Houston long of the Texas House of Representatives, she said imposing restrictions on citizen access to the polling place isn’t unusual in Texas; it qualifies as tradition in some minds: “For my grandparents to have a voice in their government, they saved pennies and nickels to afford a $1.50 poll tax. Even after saving their hard-earned money, the price that was imposed in an effort to restrict the access of voters of color to the ballot box was too high for both of them to vote. My grandmother voted, but my grandfather could not. A poll tax was not the only barrier my grandparents and many other people of color faced when attempting to exercise their right to vote. Although we still have issues with access to transportation and the ballot box today, it was even less accessible to my grandmother who lived in the suburbs of Houston. She was made to travel a great distance just to access a polling location designated for ‘colored only’ where she was allowed to cast her ballot.”

And there’s this from 48-year-old state Rep. Nicole Collier, an African-American attorney from Fort Worth, also testifying before the subcommittee on the need to nationalize guarantees to election access: “In the November 2020 general election, Texas saw the largest voter turnout in Texas since 1992 with 66.8% of eligible voters casting their ballot, including the highest turnout in 10 years of black, brown and Asian eligible voters. Too often we look for obvious signs of suppression when it comes to our freedom to vote such as poll taxes or literacy tests. However, suppression can also happen in subtle ways like when your polling location continues to change, or the hours the polls are open vary, long lines or harsh criminal penalties for people who make simple mistakes. All of that disrupts the voting process and makes it less likely for people to participate. Voting does not have to be hard, but it should be fair and free.”

State Rep. Diego Bernal, 44, a former San Antonio City Council member completing this trio of Texas House Democrats appearing before the subcommittee, reminded lawmakers of Hispanics’ growing influence in Texas, arguably worrying the Republican Party of Texas to the point of attempting to confound electoral access through repeated legislation: “This bill was filed, heard in committee and voted out in just a matter of days. More than 450 members of the public came to Austin, Texas, to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies regarding how this legislation would impact their lives: 407 individuals registered opposed, 65 registered in support and 12 registered neutral. Testimony resulted in a marathon hearing with witnesses waiting up to 23 hours to testify. Much like testimony heard about Senate Bill 7 [during the 180-day regular legislative session this spring], the vast majority of public testimony on House Bill 3 [filed during the July special session] focused on how this bill would make voting more difficult. Nonetheless, Republicans disregarded the witnesses, refused to accept any [House] Democrats’ amendments and voted the bill out of committee 9-5. This forced my colleagues and I to take action once again, utilizing the Texas House quorum rule to defeat the measure, which brings me before you today.” The legislation, he added, defies demographic realities: “Census data shows that the Hispanic and Latino community is the fastest-growing demographic in Texas. As such, we are a vitally important voting bloc and will decide the future of the state’s politics. Latinos are not a monolith. To reflect the diversity of our electorate, it is vital that we have a responsive elections system that can adjust to the needs of the community casting their ballots. More options, not less.”

Certainly after largely excusing and whitewashing an armed insurrection incited by a president of their own party falsely and maliciously claiming widespread electoral fraud for his loss in 2020, Republicans really should check themselves before attacking Texas House Democrats for recklessness. As Democratic House Subcommittee Chairman and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin, 58, said of the Trump-inspired insurrectionists during last week’s hearing: “They had a complaint about voting, too. They came here to ‘Stop the Steal.’ They had been goaded by Donald Trump to come and try to put pressure, coercive pressure, on Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes from Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, to proclaim a power no vice president has ever exercised before and doesn’t exist in the Constitution. And Pence, to his great credit, refused to do it. And you know what? They trashed the place. And they injured and wounded 140 police officers. Now we have representatives from a major political party in Texas representing African Americans, Mexican Americans, white people, Native Americans who are coming forward to say that their voting rights are being subjected to a gauntlet, an obstacle course that was so precisely elucidated by Rep. Bernal who said this is just another dressed-up form of voter suppression.”

During the congressional hearing, one also got a sense of the outrage and defensiveness among Republicans, including Congressman Pete Sessions, 66, still smarting back home in Waco over a photo he posted on social media, then deleted, of himself posing with “Stop the Steal” protesters outside the U.S. Capitol a few days before 800 or so like-minded protesters stormed the building, overwhelmed Capitol police officers and drove lawmakers (including Sessions) into hiding. At one point, Sessions lambasted the Texas Democrats assembled before him and faulted the subcommittee hosting them for “allowing and coddling people who should be at work in the state of Texas, [doing] their constitutional duties, and yet we’re treating them as hometown heroes in Washington, D.C.” Of his own party, he declared defiantly: “We don’t go and accuse people of things just because we’re losing” – an astonishing statement given that Sessions and fellow Republicans have for months alleged widespread fraud, without evidence, in the hard-fought 2020 presidential election. (To quote Sessions on social media back on Nov. 19: "This election was conducted fraudulently. We have the evidence and will prove the case.") At another point during the hearing, obviously seeking to show that Texas lawmakers are progressive on race, Sessions, who is white, stressed how ballots in the state are even printed in multiple languages: “That’s not backwards. That’s pretty important!” Then Collier and Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund corrected Sessions: Texas offers voting in multiple languages because the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and federal courts mandate it.

Sins of the here and now  

The latest struggle over voting rights confirms an article I read 30 or so years ago by a historian – the name is lost to me – who predicted that America’s Original Sin, demonstrated in that “peculiar institution” of slavery, then in Jim Crow laws and traditions rendering African Americans second-class citizens, would dog, bedevil and cripple America well into the 21st century. And anyone who knows the saga of the Texas Rangers knows of the horrific violence visited upon Hispanics in our state. Even now, much of the immigration fervor, while absolutely legitimate on one plane, is clearly driven by rabid racism on another. Such racism clearly spurred Texas’ poorly crafted voter ID law in 2011, partially based on wild-eyed claims that the illegal immigrants quietly slaving away in the blazing sun on Texans’ roofs and manicuring Texans’ lawns and working in Texas slaughterhouses and on highway construction speeding Texas’ prosperity would break from labors few U.S. citizens would condescend to do to risk exposure, arrest and deportation to vote on issues and candidates with little significance or meaning in their shadowy existences.

At the time I read this historian’s prediction about racism clouding American democracy and destiny well into the next century, I had the same opinion of many whites in Texas: that while there remained great room for improvement in racial equality in the 1990s, America was on the right track. There was landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, plus important initiatives such as affirmative action. And whether police departments or school districts or newsrooms such as the two in which I worked for nearly 45 years, the momentum across much of America was to earnestly diversify opportunities and enable the marginalized.

Yet the scab of racism ever awaits some opportunistic demagogue playing to white paranoia to pick it off and set back our hard-won strides. In the current environment of ethnic and racial polarization, with both sides erupting at the slightest of sleights, measures such as Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s repeated bids to press for reparations addressing the lingering consequences of slavery and Jim Crow only aggravate escalating tensions. So do claims such as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ contention in the controversial New York Times “1619 Project” that the American Revolution was fought to perpetuate slavery.

Plenty has been written on America’s unique struggle over equality, including national pride in the Declaration of Independence that in many minds today justifies the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness some citizens now pursue in defiant, selfish, knee-jerk fashion. It has been cited regularly, for instance, by Americans angrily refusing to protect their families and neighbors and classrooms and long-range commerce by bowing to temporarily mandated facial coverings during a deadly pandemic. This obstinacy and belligerence extends to our continuing unwillingness to completely live up to the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s noble passage – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Certainly matters weren’t helped by the fact Americans launched their bid for independence amid duplicity. Even slaveholding Jefferson, cognizant of the incongruity in his freshly written (and freshly edited) words, noted that a long dismissive passage he included on the slave trade in a draft of the Declaration of Independence was removed entirely “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia.” Troubled by this obvious hypocrisy well into his graying years, he gently acknowledged the failing in an 1814 letter to an admirer who pressed him to use his prestige and influence toward the abolition of the slaves in America. “No, this enterprise is for the young, for those who can follow it up and bear it through to its consummation,” the author of the Declaration of Independence replied. “It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.” So it came to pass in horrific ways even Jefferson probably never imagined. During the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Westerner Abraham Lincoln recognized, in the words of late great historian Pauline Maier, arguably our foremost expert on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “that it was impossible to separate the Declaration’s condemnation of monarchy from a condemnation of slavery.” And in time, Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address, delivered in a time of civil war threatening the viability of the Constitution itself and promising “a new birth of freedom,” became in Maier’s words “an American sacred text.” Part of President Lincoln’s new birth of freedom: Passage after his 1865 assassination of the 15th Amendment, proclaiming that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Yet 151 years later our nation still wrestles with the issue of race that for so long seemed to make the Declaration of Independence the perfect lie. We’re fresh from a presidential administration that, in the words of former George W. Bush speechwriter and policy analyst Michael Gerson, aggravated such rifts and grievance: “One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of white-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles. Thus his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6 riot felt free to carry Confederate battle flags and wear ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirts without fear of reproof from their political allies. Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference. The result has been an illuminating but horrifying clarity.”

Indeed, in the thick of conflict in Texas over racially charged allegations and counter-allegations regarding election laws, and practically on the eve of the Fourth of July, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and others pressured the Bullock Texas State History Museum to cancel (and at nearly the last minute) what promised to be a lively, thought-provoking discussion involving the newly released "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth." The book highlights what many well versed in Texas history already knew: Much of Texas' dispute with Mexico in the 1830s was based on Anglo settlers' strong embrace of slavery and Mexico's aversion to it. Patrick took credit for the cancellation, insisting the Bullock museum was no place for "fact-free rewriting of TX history." One of the book's three authors (all white, by the way), Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson, branded the museum "a propaganda outlet." One patron outraged at the museum’s cancellation of the event charged that it should be "governed by historians and facts, not politicians trying to score political points." Yet John Waynesque myths of Anglo heroism command strong tribal loyalty. A letter received at the Waco Tribune-Herald in the wake of this controversy came from a retired Baylor University physics professor who angrily lashed out at defenders of the three historians in familiar take-it-or-leave-it fashion: “It is obvious that some today prefer that Texas still be a part of Mexico. Thus, we true Texans draw a new line in the sand; it is down the middle of the Rio Grande River. Those who do not appreciate, respect and honor what the brave husbands, fathers and sons did at the Alamo, most paying the ultimate price, pack your bags, head south across the Rio Grande River and don't come back. Had it not been for them, we might all be living in Mexico.”

Such defensiveness tolerates very few missteps. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with an African-American woman who vigorously supported Democratic state treasurer and Lone Star wit Ann Richards after the Waco native and Baylor University graduate won election as Texas governor against gaffe-ridden West Texas businessman Clayton Williams in November 1990. I had casually expressed the hope that Richards as governor would bring competing interests together in her administration. I made the remark in reference to sparring Republicans, Democrats and independents. The supporter’s response: “Sure, but y’all are going to have to get in line behind the women, the blacks and the Mexicans.” I took this quip as half in jest, half-earnest. But in the racially tumultuous decades since then, I’ve often pondered it, appropriate though it may have been after decades of ugly racism in Texas, including all too recently at the polls. In the 1990s, white males encountering such a pointed, in-your-place remark about white men getting in line behind other constituents in mainstream society would have likely bowed to the sometimes useful conventions of political correctness and let the observation pass by except to possibly express astonishment or outrage or bemusement in the company of close friends and family. Thirty years later, however, the angry, diehard white-identity politics characterizing the Age of Trump has expanded if not shattered any boundaries of “expressible prejudice,” unleashing whites to openly claim “reverse racism” when similar remarks are directed against them or about them. And sparks are sure to fly when a prominent African-American journalist claims that the white Founding Fathers rebelled against the British crown primarily to safeguard the institution of slavery or when an African-American congresswoman from Texas repeatedly presses for reparations to make up for slavery and Jim Crow laws – a remedy that peeves many whites, some of whom had ancestors who fought in the U.S. Army against the forces of slavery and secession (as mine did), others who question the wisdom of being judged and penalized for the sins of the fathers. All of this tests the limits of democracy.

Only last month, the respected Pew Research Center reported survey findings suggesting some two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-inclined individuals believe voting is a privilege that can be limited if requirements are not met. By contrast, 67 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of the total surveyed said voting in elections is “a fundamental right for every adult U.S. citizen and should not be restricted in any way.” Interestingly, Pew reports, “black Americans are more likely than those in other racial and ethnic groups to see voting as a fundamental right, while white Americans are the least likely to say this.” Meanwhile, legal scholars and voting rights experts voice dismay at the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 1 dismantling of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, already hobbled by the high court’s gutting of the act’s critical pre-clearance provision in 2013 that once required states with a history of discrimination (such as Texas) to clear election changes with the U.S. Department of Justice or a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C. Section 2 was what the strongly conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit cited a few years ago in determining that the carelessly crafted Texas voter ID law was racially discriminatory. The appeals court thus correctly demanded fixes of the 2011 law, widening the range of documents one could show in order to vote in Texas.

Complicating matters

All of this brings us back to what promises to be a long, drawn-out battle over voting rights in Texas extending into late summer and well beyond, assuming federal courts are again swept into the conflict. As one who this year witnessed hours and hours of Texas House and Senate debate and testimony over election bills during both regular and special sessions, who has read each bill as it was laid out, then fine-tuned in committee, then amended after vigorous floor debate – and who has written more on voting rights than any other topic the past dozen years – I here offer some conclusions about what’s unfolding. Short version: Most proposals offered by Texas Republicans tightening election access, while disgraceful and self-serving in the broader context of American history, don’t strike me as sure-fire slam-dunks for voting-rights litigants (though given measures to stiffen penalties for possibly errant rank-and-file election officials, I'm astounded every self-respecting elections administrator and election judge in the state of Texas wasn't down at the State Capitol, reminding legislators of the great difficulty of enlisting election volunteers to work long hours amid everything from pandemic surges to short-tempered political warriors ready to take their frustration on anyone in sight.) Even so, Texas Democrats representing districts rich in minority constituencies are justified in their cynicism, frustration and anger. Add it all together and you have conflict begging for selfless leadership, piercing insight and plenty of magnanimity and patience. Don’t expect any in Texas.

For all the pandemic-inspired election irregularities in Texas in 2020, Republicans still did better in voter turnout, delivering Texas for President Trump with 52 percent of the vote (and 61 percent here in McLennan County). Yet Texas’ growing diversity has been troubling for the party, a consequence of some candidates and party officials regularly if sometimes subtly stereotyping people of color rather than trying to embrace and enlist them. Waco’s new congressman, Pete Sessions, moved to our mostly white congressional district after being defeated in 2018 by an African American (former Baylor University linebacker and voting rights litigator Colin Allred) in the more racially diverse, big-city district Sessions long represented. Sessions won 56 percent of the vote in Central Texas in 2020, 46 percent of the vote in his Dallas district in 2018.

When President Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020 and claimed without proof (assuming you’ve read some of the scores of court rulings handed down by Republican and Democratic jurists – and I have), Republican-led state legislatures began pressing legislation to complicate public access to the polls. Although Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, author of some of the recent election bills in Texas, disputes the charge, many of us in the legislative peanut gallery see all this as something more than a bid to secure “election integrity.” The Texas legislation and that in other states collectively represent an attempt to soothe the wounded ego of a defeated, irascible, vengeful former president, an effort to reassure a virtual king in exile of undying loyalty and devotion, even if this means placing on the sacrificial altar certain elements guaranteeing a vibrant and healthy American democracy. Such bills also offer further protection to Texas Republican lawmakers’ own electoral prospects. Yet in committee discussions and floor debate, Sen. Hughes – an East Texas Republican and Baylor Law School graduate – has repeatedly stressed “election integrity” legislation is critical not because of the former president’s tirades over election fraud but because surveys indicate many doubt the reliability of our elections. Which may well amount to the same thing. As Trump noted in a July 3 speech in Sarasota, Florida, if one makes a false claim long enough, many Americans will come to believe it – and Trump was raising the specter of election fraud well before Election Day 2020, insisting it was the only way he could lose. And then he lost.

The legislation Hughes has carried since early spring has been changed often, but at least three things remained constant. Two of them: the banning of drive-thru and 24-hour voting initiatives introduced in heavily populated, ethnically diverse Harris County. The chief purpose then was to thin election lines during a pandemic packing Houston hospitals and local morgues. Yet these initiatives also proved especially popular with minorities. For instance, an analysis of Harris County early voting by the Texas Civil Rights Project showed 53 percent of those pursuing drive-thru voting were African American, Hispanic or Asian American. Yes, Hughes is correct that the offering of drive-thru and 24-hour voting in Harris County is unfair to voters in smaller counties without the resources and manpower to mount such options. Yet those smaller counties – granted, often with greater proportions of whites – have lesser populations that don’t particularly need such services. Hughes is also correct that voters from county to county benefit from a level playing field, though he ignores the fact that, again to cite Texas Civil Rights Project statistics and rationale, communities of color “tend to have less flexible work schedules,” owing at least in part to generations of segregation and marginalization in everything from education to job opportunities. Hughes is also correct that drive-thru voting becomes problematic when a vehicle carries more than one person. At a time when Democrats claim to be dedicated to protecting the privacy of the voting booth from newly empowered partisan poll watchers, a car with more than one occupant obviously threatens this same privacy unless everyone in the car besides the voter lumbers out. That said, Democratic Sen. Royce West also makes a legitimate point: Perhaps a drive-thru voting measure could consequently be limited to vehicles with one occupant – a suggestion not pursued by Hughes and other Republicans.

Hughes is also correct that the other key element of his voting bill – giving those aforementioned poll watchers greater autonomy in polling places – will ensure the public has more “eyes and ears” on an electoral process now under greater suspicion. Yet these are ultimately partisan eyes and partisan ears, dispatched by candidates and political parties, and without the relevant training required of long-suffering polling-place workers. This invites the sort of trouble we saw when a poll watcher disrupted voting in a Bellmead polling place sufficiently in spring 2019 that police were summoned. And, yes, race was an element in that instance. Hughes’ case in the Legislature isn’t helped by a video leaked this past April of an apparent Texas GOP official singling out minority-rich urban precincts on a Harris County map, insisting “this is where the fraud is occurring” and pressing for recruitment of an “army” of 10,000 poll watchers and workers to stem such fraud. Nor has Hughes instilled confidence by refusing to require of poll watchers the same training poll workers undergo, which begs the question of how poll watchers can truly know when election law is being violated. That said, Hughes did sign on to an anemic measure requiring that poll watchers take an oath: "I swear that I will not disrupt the voting process or harass voters in the discharge of my duties."

Republicans’ mixed messaging

This brings us to the perspective of the far more racially diverse Texas Democrats, whether toiling in the Texas Legislature or mingling with sympathetic sorts in Washington in what one could argue is a wrong-headed recourse without a realistic end game. Hughes, 52, white, Republican and almost evangelical in his demeanor, is unfailingly polite in his exchanges with Democratic colleagues. Yet for people of color who grew up in a state that only slowly came to grips with the integration of public schools and lunchroom counters, trust understandably lags behind. When Texas Democrats have won elections sufficiently to gain a quantifiable say in what Texas Senate legislation should reach the floor, Republicans such as Hughes and our own state senator, Brian Birdwell – who in his supposed “Christian values” represents the epitome of what’s happening to white evangelicalism today – have simply changed Senate rules, lowering the threshold of support such legislation needs to accommodate Texas Republicans’ shrinking majority. For instance, this past regular session they lowered it to five-ninths of the Senate. Skeptical Houston Democratic Sen. John Whitmire quipped: “I grew up in Whitney, Texas, and I’ll be darned if I remember us studying what five-ninths is.” Democratic Sen. Carol Alvarado, who is Hispanic, was similarly sarcastic when offered materials supporting the latest rule change ensuring Democrats couldn’t block legislation unless bipartisan in nature: “Thank you for this chart. I thought it was part of an eye chart we were going to take. As Sen. Whitmire said, I don’t remember learning about five-ninths. I don’t even know if that’s on a measuring cup. But we’ve gone from two-thirds to three-fifths to now five-ninths. What’s next? Where does it stop, this chipping away at the traditions of this deliberative body?”

Later, when dueling House and Senate versions of the election bill in the regular legislative session went to a conference committee to massage the two into one, Democrats were largely cut out of negotiations during which the bill somehow grew from 23 to 67 pages behind closed doors, including measures never discussed. These included a provision to curtail hours for the last Sunday of early voting in a way that would undermine the "souls-to-the-polls" initiative so popular among churchgoers in African-American communities who after services caravan to the polls. And when this mysteriously bloated legislation at last emerged from the shadows, Republican senators compounded matters, voting to shelve another rule that allowed sufficient time for all to at least inspect the bill, including those measures added without committee debate or public testimony. These included not only the provision curtailing “souls-to-the-polls” hours but another toxic measure making it easier for courts to throw out election returns. After angry and betrayed House Democrats walked out over Memorial Day weekend, ending the regular session, red-faced Republicans began backtracking, claiming these latter measures were last-minute mistakes committed by other hands.

Yet Democrats unfairly mischaracterize matters when they claim that all their suggestions have been ignored. For instance, while Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 in the special session are firm evidence of a representative democracy in fast decay, Republicans have made concessions. They’ve tried to reassure Democrats by not only scuttling the measure allowing courts to more easily overturn elections but even condemned the very idea; they’ve bowed to a Democratic priority to allow voters a chance to correct or "cure" mail-in ballot discrepancies; they’ve compromised to address Democratic reservations regarding partisan poll watchers, removing an explosive measure that would have allowed the latter to film certain polling-place activities – the latter surely an invitation to polling-place trouble given the lack of training required of poll watchers. As promised, Republicans scrapped the “souls-to-the-polls” early-voting measure (which would have almost certainly invited a humiliating defeat for Texas Republicans in the courts, given its obvious racism). The latest legislation even expands the requirement that employers allow employees time off from work to vote. This would extend that right from Election Day to anytime during early voting as well. (Some on the far right might even argue this is socialist in nature, a governmental imposition on capitalist endeavors.) And, whatever else, Texas Republicans haven’t forbid giving water to someone standing in a long election line, as Georgia Republicans amazingly codified this spring.

“At each stage of the process, the bill has changed,” Sen. Hughes told reporters during a July 21 press conference set up to do damage control after Texas House Democrats much-publicized exodus to Washington, D.C., to press for federal voting guarantees. “There was testimony in committee during regular session, testimony during special session, and amendments offered by Democrats and Republicans, and the bill has changed based on testimony from civil rights groups, disability rights groups. Everybody has input in this process. Now, most of the folks we heard from who were offended were offended by generalities they had read online or some characterization of the bills. When we talked about the provisions of the bill, there was not much to argue about. But, of course, we make changes to these bills as we hear from Texans all across the spectrum. And it’s always going to be that way.” East Texas Republican Rep. James White, a 57-year-old African-American who recalls being called “crazy for running in East Texas,” similarly argues against the “many misconceptions and myths regarding the election integrity legislation.” Among other things, House Bill 3 increases early voting hours weekdays from 8 to 9 hours and weekends from 5 hours to 12 hours on Saturdays and from 5 hours to 6 hours on Sundays. It codifies that seniors and the disabled may vote from their vehicles. “We have too many people wrapped up in political theatre and partisan soundbites that do a disservice to the average Texan,” White charges and, to a point, correctly.

Yet backroom shenanigans and indifference to voting initiatives that might help marginalized people of color become more involved in representative democracy surely undermine goodwill expressed through incremental legislative concessions and chamber collegiality. If Democratic lawmakers of color from Texas haven’t experienced racism themselves – pretty unlikely, given our history, politics and prejudicial mores – they are nonetheless informed by generations of racism experienced by their parents and grandparents. They’re even more defensive after four years of a president who infamously equated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis of the 2017 Charlottesville violence with civil rights protesters. Many are aghast at a party more and more complicit and unapologetic in the delusional, self-pitying notion of white victimhood, especially after all the hatred and suppression African Americans and Hispanics have endured through our state and national history. And they’re horrified at seeing hundreds of Trump supporters – more than 90 percent of them white – storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn a Democratic presidential election victory, a force driven by all the fury, hatred and evil intent of an old-fashioned mob set on an all-American lynching.

Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood

A few final moments from the first Texas special session and elsewhere involving “election integrity” underline the growing gulf between the two parties over race.

During a July 10 Senate State Affairs Committee hearing (over which Hughes and Birdwell presided), Democratic Sen. Borris Miles, a 55-year-old African-American lawmaker, pressed Jonathan White, chief of the Election Fraud Section of the Texas Attorney General's Office, about his decision to prosecute 62-year-old Hervis Rogers on illegal voting charges after Rogers famously stood in line for six hours to vote in the March 2020 “Super Tuesday” election. Rogers, an African American who lives in Houston, was three months shy of concluding his parole on felony burglary convictions in 1989 and 1995. Arrested on July 7, 2020 – more than a year after his alleged Super Tuesday offense but just in time for legislative fireworks over election reform in the Texas Legislature – Rogers now faces a return to prison for voting. Miles and fellow Democratic Sen. Royce West, whose African-American lineage includes a grandfather who reportedly witnessed the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, condemned the Texas Attorney General’s Office for racist intent in the case by seeking to prosecute Rogers in a neighboring, heavily white county rather than in his own racially diverse home county.

“Do you know why I feel really strange about this, Senator West, Senator Hughes?” Miles asked his colleagues during the Senate committee hearing. “They’re not prosecuting him in Harris County. They moved him to conservative Montgomery County [for prosecution]. That’s the kind of bias we have to deal with each and every day. That’s what the citizens – black, white, brown – most black and brown – have to deal with in the great state of Texas.”

Then Miles added: “You know, this guy thought he could vote. He was under the belief in his mind that he really could vote. Served his time. Got a nice job, nice family now, and he thought he could vote. Thought he was doing his civic duty, yet he’s violated his parole and he’s going back to prison. He just wanted to recognize his right to vote, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, we have laws in the state of Texas and he shouldn’t have been able to vote at this time. He had four months left. But there’s law and there’s the spirit of the law.”

White, drawing audible audience disapproval and skepticism with his evasiveness, worsened matters by explaining why his office pressed Rogers’ prosecution in another county: “We bring cases in places where we have existing cases and we have relationships with the district attorney’s office.”

Amid audience gasps, Sen. West, also an attorney, discouraged further explanation from White for his own good: “You know, when you’re in a hole, you better stop digging.”

Andre Segura, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, summed up in a statement the embarrassment all should feel in Rogers' arrest and subsequent bail of $100,000, which the nonprofit Bail Project covered: “It’s a relief that Mr. Rogers is no longer in jail. He should not have been arrested and charged in the first place, and certainly should not have been forced to languish in jail on an outrageously high bail amount. This prosecution demonstrates the danger to Texan citizens when even innocent mistakes in the voting process can be criminalized. Mr. Rogers received national praise for his commitment to casting a ballot, and we will continue to fight for justice for him and will push back against efforts to further restrict voting rights.”

Yet the scandal involving Hervis Rogers and the Texas Attorney General’s Office comes atop another racially charged case involving Crystal Mason, now 45 and also black, who voted in 2016, apparently unaware that because she was on supervised release from prison she couldn’t cast a provisional ballot. Two years later she was sentenced to five years in prison. No less than Donald B. Ayer, former deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice under President George H.W. Bush, said the Mason prosecution “lies far outside the bounds of any reasonable exercise of prosecutorial power and threatens the integrity of our democratic process and our electoral integrity as a nation.” Mason herself has smartly highlighted how differently blacks and whites are treated under voting laws, something Texas Democrats in Washington have shrewdly capitalized upon. In a Jan. 14 Fort Worth Star-Telegram column written in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Mason questioned among other things why a white Republican Tarrant County justice of the peace caught forging signatures to get on the ballot for re-election in 2018 was given probation while she faced prison time.

"Then, there’s the case of former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, who had his corruption conviction reversed because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided that a person must know that they have violated the election code,” Mason wrote. “That’s the right outcome, and the same should apply to people like me. Why was my case even prosecuted? Why was I not shown that same grace? My life and my family matter, too. But as Wednesday’s insurrection showed us — as well as the pandemic and the string of black lives lost to law enforcement well before George Floyd — there are glaring inequities in a number of systems, including healthcare, education, financial, policing and, in my case, the justice system. Those inequities remain unresolved today. Black people know we would never have been allowed to breach the Capitol’s barricade or sit at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with our feet up. The response would have been violent."

More recently, Texas Democrats have inquired why one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists set on impeding congressional certification of the 2020 election returns – 38-year-old white Florida crane operator Paul Hodgkins, photographed in the well of the U.S. Senate carrying a red Trump flag and wearing a Trump 2020 T-shirt after senators fled the chamber – was sentenced to just eight months for his actions, even though federal prosecutors pressed for 15 to 21 months in what was the first felony case stemming from Capitol Hill violence. For the record, the federal judge's leniency was based on the fact Hodgkins was remorseful, had no prior criminal record and didn't vandalize federal property, even though the judge acknowledged that Hodgkins’ presence helped enable the mob's success at stopping certification of 2020 Electoral College returns.

And there’s the anger and frustration clearly felt during a Texas House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies hearing from Democratic state Rep. Thompson on the perils of further empowering partisan poll watchers in the polling place. In an exchange with the author of House Bill 3, Republican Rep. Andrew Murr, who is white (and who, to his credit, did vow he would “entertain language that sets forth training requirements for poll watchers”), Thompson drew on eight full decades of personal discrimination as an African-American – one whose single mother didn’t vote in Texas because of the state imposition of poll taxes and who herself grew up confronted with signs that read, “No Dogs. No Negros. No Mexicans,” and who in 1960 participated in lunch counter strikes at Madding's drug store in Houston between classes at historically black Texas Southern University – the campus where six decades later Hervis Rogers would gain national attention for standing in line for six hours to vote, only to learn later he had run afoul of state voting restrictions. I quote Sen. Thompson here at some length:

“Well, let me give you some information. I had a poll watcher come and stand behind me. And, normally, in an African-American area, and Hispanic areas, when they send poll watchers to our areas, they always send people who look like the Proud Boys into our communities. And they walk behind you and look just like they’re going to kick your rear end if you just move out of place. And they make you nervous. They make some people nervous. And this particular lady came and she stood behind me, and I politely turned around and asked her what did she want. And she looked at me and I looked at her and stood my ground because I didn’t think she needed to stand behind me while I cast my vote. No. 1, I could read. I didn’t need assistance by anyone, and I definitely didn’t need her to come stand near me. And what she was trying to do, and probably had been doing – I’m assuming from her conduct with me – she had been intimidating those African-American persons and those Hispanic persons in that precinct trying to cast their votes by the mere presence of her nationality, her ethnicity – Anglo and looking mean.”

Hours later, Senfronia Thompson helped lead Texas House Democrats out of Texas, bound for the national limelight, the high court of public opinion and further frustration in Washington, D.C.

Firing up the voters

On July 27, two days before Thompson and other Texas Democrats in D.C. testified before the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on federal voter protections anything but guaranteed by the states and courts, strapping Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, a 37-year-old black veteran of the force, testified under oath before the House select committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Among other things, Dunn noted how mere mention of his own politics accented the racism and hatred driving a mostly white mob bent on overturning the presidential election and, failing that, lynching Vice President Mike Pence:

“More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area near the Speaker’s Lobby near the Rotunda, some wearing MAGA hats and shirts that said ‘Trump 2020.’ I told them to just leave the Capitol. In response they yelled, ‘No, man, this is our house. President Trump invited us here. We’re here to stop the steal. Joe Biden is not the president. Nobody voted for Joe Biden.’ I’m a law enforcement officer and I do my best to keep politics out of my job, but in this circumstance I responded, ‘Well, I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count? Am I nobody?’ That prompted a torrent of racial epithets. One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, ‘You hear that, guys? This nigger voted for Joe Biden!’ And the crowd, perhaps 20 people, joined in screaming, ‘Boo, fucking nigger!’ No one had ever, ever called me a nigger while wearing the uniform of a Capitol police officer. In the days following the attempted insurrection, other black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6. One officer told me he had never in his entire 40 years of life been called a nigger to his face, and that streak ended on January 6. Another black officer told me he had been confronted by insurrectionists in the Capitol who told him, ‘Put your gun down and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are.’”

One final thought about Dunn and the other three officers testifying before the committee: Together – two whites, a black and a Latino who served his country in wartime abroad – these officers offered a more inspiring demographic portrait of America today than the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 rankled over what they claimed without proof was election fraud.   

The ultimate tragedy of the election conflict back in Austin is that no Republican leader has emerged with the political capital, wisdom and guts to bring the warring parties to the peace table. Political vilification and party idolatry has shifted into such high gears that society has few if any leaders left with the reputation or pull to rise above the fray and attempt fence-mending and constructive policy on race and voting rights. The governor of Texas, who at least had some standing and responsibility to do the right thing, opted instead to get to the right of three right-wing election challengers. This trio includes political commentator Chad Prather who, for his part, proposes Republicans “change the locks on [House Democrats’] offices, fire their staff, cancel their committee assignments, declare their seats vacant, arrest them for violating their oaths, prohibit them from ever holding public office, declare an emergency quorum and get on with business.” The governor’s own belligerence has only added to the discord and uncertainty. “Governor Abbott, you haven’t had one Democratic senator in your office,” Democratic Sen. Whitmire thundered at a July 21 press conference in Austin targeting the governor, who has also threatened the Democratic lawmakers with arrest – a gubernatorial vow taken amidst a border security briefing for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and crowdfunding antics to build President Trump’s border wall. “You’ve spent more time with the governor of Florida than you have with these honorable members of the Senate and the House.”

On the same day, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick seemed to suggest negotiations could continue on some measures in the Senate bill (excluding banning drive-thru and 24-hour voting, which state law never provided for in the first place). However, he said claims of racism leveled by Democratic lawmakers at Republicans helped no one. “It’s pretty tough to sit down and have a good discussion about a bill when you walk into the room accusing people of being something they’re not,” Patrick told reporters. “So if they would knock that off, that would be helpful, because I really haven’t heard that on other things.” Fair enough. But if Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan are truly earnest in wanting to negotiate meaningfully with Democrats and put out some of the fires fueled by misunderstanding if not outright racism, they can prove it by stepping wide of a bill mandating a third-party forensic audit of racially diverse Texas counties where Trump lost. This bill was filed by state Rep. Steve Toth, architect of the controversial critical race theory ban passed during the regular session and signed into law. Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough – briefly taking his gaze off the notoriety visited upon Hervis Rogers’ prosecution in Keough’s 84-percent white county – promptly championed Toth’s election audit bill. "Representative Toth’s proposed bill is timely and necessary with a view to exposing any instances of fraud during the 2020 election and reassuring Texas voters that their votes were accurately counted,” Judge Keough said. “I fully support passage of this bill and look forward to the results of the audit."

As for proposals in SB1 and HB3, most don’t appear definitively or obviously unconstitutional, however restrictive or cumbersome they might prove (though a provision to aggressively purge voter rolls threatens to send the state back to court if it bungles the job to the degree it did in 2019). Banning drive-thru and 24-hour voting and even empowering poll watchers are in keeping with age-old powers regarding the right of states to set electoral protocols so long as they don’t extend a right to whites denied to racial or ethnic minorities. What’s more, the Supreme Court of the United States is increasingly skeptical of protections once ensured by the Voting Rights Act. Read the high court’s majority rulings in Shelby County v. Holder and, more recently, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In some rulings on election issues, one senses a weariness by some of the court's jurists in repeatedly dealing with such disputes. If Texas Democrats want to change electoral dynamics, complaining and pleading to U.S. Senate and House Democrats whose hold on those chambers is razor-thin is as fool-hardy and myopic as counting on the nation’s highest court, which Democrats lost for generations due to their questionable decision in 2013 to weaken the Senate filibuster rule regarding federal court nominations. Their only recourse is neither the courts nor Congress but demonstrating a sustained ability to rival Republicans’ success in turning out voters. And if their many constituents don’t see the wisdom of jumping through a few more admittedly irksome, even unfair electoral hoops to vote to safeguard their individual rights as well as American democracy, then their cause will neither command nor deserve sympathy.