Blue in a Red State by Justin Krebs

Author:Justin Krebs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595589699
Publisher: The New Press

Kathleen Thompson

GRAPEVINE, TEXAS

I have friends who live in Texas, but they are from other states. . . . I’ll hear them critiquing national progressives on a number of issues. When you do that, I can always tell you’re not from Texas. You come from a state where you don’t know how good you have it.

Kathleen Thompson’s two boys attend Vacation Bible School during the summer, a mixture of summer camp activities and Bible lessons. As Kathleen describes it, she speaks in an amused tone that suggests she has had to explain this program to north-easterners before. “In the Deep South, we have Vacation Bible School. All the churches have banners up. All the different denominations.”

She picks them up each afternoon. One day was a special occasion. It was the anniversary of the filibuster by state senator Wendy Davis, a representative who held the floor of the Texas senate long enough to stall a severe, right-wing antichoice bill. Davis’s actions—now known simply as “the Filibuster” throughout Texas—caught the imagination of progressives around the country, fired up Texas Democrats, and catapulted Davis into political stardom as well as the gubernatorial race.

To mark the anniversary, Kathleen was wearing a burnt orange T-shirt—the color of the University of Texas, and a de facto hue of Texas pride—that bore a message of support for “Wendy,” as the politician is universally known. “I wore it to work and to errands—and then to pick up the boys at Vacation Bible School. One woman who was picking up her kids said, ‘We love Wendy too!’ I was surprised.”

Kathleen—a local organizer, civic activist, and loyal Democrat—is used to her shirts sparking reaction. It’s just that the comments are usually negative. That exchange was proof that Texas is changing.

Kathleen recalls the 2014 gubernatorial race. “A lot of people said Wendy couldn’t win, that it was too soon” for Texas to elect a Democratic governor. “But we had people calling the office every day. People would stop me. They’d say, ‘We really like your shirt—we like Wendy too—we’re going to vote your way in November.’ They wouldn’t have said that a year before.”

Texas may seem like a deep-red state around the country—but Texans know that it’s more mixed. It has a rich Democratic history, a large minority population, and increasing energy among progressives who are tapping into the sense felt across Texas that it’s time to go in a new direction.

“Things are changing here,” Kathleen says hopefully. “You can only bully people and beat up on people and get away with it for so long.” She recounts how it felt when Davis entered the national spotlight. “It felt like Texas’s time has come. What happened with the filibuster—Wendy performed this amazing multihour filibuster—so many people were there. People who thought that Republicans had overreached in this very bullying way. People just started screaming in the gallery. They couldn’t take any more. It was a visceral response.”

That incident sparked new energy among many Texans who were as mad as hell—and kicked off what Kathleen sees as a potential political transformation in her state.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.