Month: August 2025

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. For all of my life I have considered this place home. I married a man who was also born and raised in Houston. His ancestors came to Texas before it was a state. My grandmother was born in Texas at the end of the nineteenth century and took her last breath right here in Houston. 

I’ve travelled throughout the United States and to other countries and each time I have returned I have felt a sense of joy and security in being back home. I love my neighbors and most of the people I encounter in my city, but of late I find myself wondering if I want to be here anymore. I no longer have the feeling that I belong in this place since my votes are mostly overridden by voters who back individuals with whom my views are diametrically opposed. More and more often I wonder if it’s finally time to strike out for a new location where lawmakers seem to be kinder and more advanced in their thinking. I wonder if the Texas that I once felt so comfortable in will ever be the same. Somehow the laws being foisted on the citizenry fly in the face everything that I hold sacred. 

I finally got representation from a Congressperson who responds to my inquiries and votes for the issues in which I believe. Now even this is being threatened by a ridiculously outrageous decision by our governor to gerrymander the districts to insure that Republicans win five more Congressional seats in the midterm elections. I seriously can’t believe how the awful people running our state get reelected over and over again when they do nothing of merit for the people. 

They seem to think that it is a good idea to give thousands of dollars to families that want to send their children to private schools. They insist on banning books and putting the ten commandments on view in every classroom. They withhold funds for Houston seemingly out of vengeance for the many Democrats who are voted into our local offices. They took over our school district with a man of questionable credentials who has run off many of the finest teachers with his absurd ideas. I could go on and on but the point is that I feel as though I do not matter in my state anymore. I am invisible and made so purposely. 

I suppose that given my age it is most likely that I will endure my anonymity and use it to hide out until I draw my last breath. The idea of picking up stakes when I have so much invested in Texas is frightening. The places where I might like to live are so far away from the people that I love and so I suppose that my fate will be to simply endure the political environment that is so distasteful to me. My only hope is that eventually this too will pass. I want to believe that it will before I move on to my eternal reward. 

The majority of my grandchildren are looking for greener pastures and I can’t say that I blame them. Maybe I will be able to take turns visiting them in places where I feel more comfortable. I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself so that will mean only short moments of respite from the ugliness of Texas politics that makes me so incredibly sad. 

I used to boast about my home wherever I travelled. I spoke of the good people in my state and the landscape that represents so many different ecosystems. I felt that my voice was important to the state representatives and that my concerns were being addressed. I lulled myself into a kind of slumber during which I was not seeing how the changes were creating a Texas that is anathema to me. When I ultimately realized what had happened it was too late to stop the madness. Now so many of my fellow Texans just pull the R levers without really understanding what each of the individuals plan to do. 

I haven’t completely lost hope. I continue to have a bit of Pollyanna in me. Still, I find myself wondering what it would be like to live in Illinois or Colorado. I visit New York City and feel so at home. I imagine myself in Minnesota or even California, which is ironic given that I prayed to get back to Texas when I lived there as a child. If I really get carried away I think of how lovely it would be to live in Ireland or England or Canada. I always enjoy being in those places and feel the tug of my ancestors who came to America from there. Still, I know that being on a vacation is not the same as living somewhere for days and months and years. Reality always sets in when I concoct such dreams.

I am inching toward my eighties and at my age understand that there are no guarantees regarding how much longer I will be healthy or even alive. Considering a major move seems somehow silly and so I will have to find ways to deal with the sorrow that I feel in losing the Texas that I once knew. I felt so much better when I believed that I was living in a wonderful place with so many opportunities. Now I have seen the underbelly of my state and it is difficult to view. That gives me only the option of doing my best to rally around the good Texans attempting to bring our precious state back to a focus on all of its citizens. I suspect that there are more people like me than I can even imagine. it’s time to find them and rally with then until we fix the mess that has been made. We are Texans. Surely we can do this instead of just giving up and moving away. Time to quit crying and get to work. I don’t have a moment to lose.

I am from the generation that first grew up with television. In the early days everything was black and white, literally. The shows rarely ran for more than thirty minutes and there were only three channels until PBS came along. At a certain time each night each station played the national anthem and went off the air until morning. 

I spent many evenings watching comedy shows with my father and Captain Kangaroo each morning after he went to work. After he died my mother restricted the number of hours that my brothers and I were allowed to spend in front of the television. The only time when we got away with total freedom was on Saturday mornings when we tuned in to our favorite kid shows that aired until around noon. Since our mother often slept in a bit on the weekend we took full advantage of being able to watch Fury, Sky King, My Friend Flicka and a host of other programming. 

As we grew older our mother was a tiny bit more permissive in expanding our free time in front of what became known as “the boob tube.” We began to look forward to Bonanza each week and even imagined what it must have been like to see that show in living color for the first time. It would be many more years until I was actually treated to the luxury of watching my favorite shows in anything other than black and white and shades of grey. 

After I got married my husband and I were both busy continuing our college educations so our television was more of a piece of furniture than a center for entertainment. Eventually we got more settled and turned our attention to watching reruns of Star Trek late in the evening when my husband came home from a nightshift at the bank where he worked. I still recall those late night viewings with utter delight. 

When I was still in the hospital after my second daughter was born I remember watching Sesame Street just an hour or so after she entered the world. After that PBS became the gold standard for viewing in our home. My little girls grew up on the programing for children on that local public station. I often watched the shows with them and realized how delightful they were and how much all of us learned from them. My husband and I found ourselves spending more and more of our own viewing time on PBS as well enjoying Masterpiece Theater and other wonderful offerings that seemed to be a cut above the less elegant programing on the three big stations. 

That is not to say that we did not find joy from ABC, NBC, and CBS. We had our favorites on each channel and we got our local news from those stations. Soon enough we installed cable television and then went to streaming services. Our television screen grew in size with a sound system worthy of a movie theater. The whole world seemed to be at our fingertips and yet we found ourselves reverting back to PBS again and again. I once remarked that if we were forced to choose only one outlet to watch forevermore I would pick PBS without hesitation. 

I can’t imagine how anyone considers PBS to be too liberal or biased. They simply offer a wide variety of programming that is generally of higher quality than much of what is available on other channels. As for the news hour, there is no doubt in my mind that it is more fair and balanced than any other source. It is old school in that it does more reporting of facts than analyzing what is right and what is wrong. Even the editorial discussions are presented by people representing both liberal and conservative thinking. I have always seen the Public Broadcasting System as one of the best investments of our tax payer dollars but I also understood that they need more than government money to insure the quality of their programming so I have donated to the fundraising efforts for many years. 

I am a late comer to NPR radio. I mostly listened to music for most of my adult life but my tastes began to change a bit as I grew older. In the city where I live the airwaves on the radio are filled with conservative talk radio that is so one sided that it is annoying. There are also dozens of Christian radio stations and those that offer programing and music for virtually every ethnic group . I was looking for a more information oriented channel when I stumbled upon NPR. I haven’t changed stations since I found it. Like PBS it is filled with programming that keeps me up to date with what is happening locally and on the state level in Texas. On the national level I get to hear incredible offerings like The Moth where people tell their stories and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me which is a competition featuring the week’s news with a comic bent. I’ve learned how to cook and how to care for my car on NPR. It is a wonderful way to learn about music and musicians and to stay abreast to scientific inventiveness. 

I live in the fourth largest city in the United States so I hope that there will be enough of us supporting PBS and NPR to keep them going. I fear that we will soon be subjected to lots of advertisements and the kind of financial pressures that water down the freedom and honesty of other media sites. I am both saddened and angry that our Congressional representatives did not have enough foresight to keep these national treasures going and growing for now and the future.

I suspect that those who voted against funding for them have rarely if ever watched them. If they had taken to the time to see for themselves they would know that there is nothing suspect about these wonderful outlets. In fact, they are exactly the kind of responsible and educational sites that we should be wanting more and more. I’m ready to open my pocketbook to save these wonderful institutions that have been presenting quality programming for as long as I can remember. They are truely wonderful if we can keep them.