this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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I'm in Texas this week, travelling (by electric car) between Houston, Austin, Dallas, and back to Houston.
I just arrived in Austin.
My hope for humanity is severed. Like...Houston wasn't bad per se, but it's way, way different from New England cities. There's just a general air of ignorance. There's a small number of people that I've run into that I'm thinking "this person is logical and sound".
The drivers are idiots. The roads are worse. Like, this massive sprawl of highways that are well maintained but still nowhere near big enough to handle the massive car dependency they have.
Seriously, why the fuck did I have to choose between two different 71-Wests. And all the left exits. The highways are beautiful, as objects of engineering accomplishment, and very well maintained (compared to northern cities). But they are hideous as a sign of an oil-tied culture.
Hell even when I finally found a charging station off the highway (which was 40 miles from where I asked for the nearest charging station on my route), I noticed that the charger was way out far away from the buildings. And no trash can nearby. Back home, the EV charging spots are numerous and usually the best parking spot around.
In between Dallas and Austin I saw tons of pickup trucks. Nearly every one had a flawless paint job and an empty bed. I saw two pickups that had a trailer attached...one had six-foor lengths of conduit that could have easily been carried on the roof of a car or even hanging out the trunk. The other was a Rivian.
The churches are massive and the billboards are pandering. I saw a new planned community going up with it's own elementary school and shopping center and my first thought is "that's a commune".
It just seems as if being born a sucker is a prerequisite for living here.
These kinds of comments are really insidious in trying to sell all the people of the states of the South as bad. That you should not look at the details, the poor who live in Texas because they have no choice, those who are about the people around them enough to try to make it work and stay. The majority of people in Texas did not support trump.
I don't suppose they did. In fact, I was most surprised to see only one Trump sign on the highway between Houston and Austin.
I think what most set me off was the billboard for Epoch Times claiming itself as the most accurate news or some such, and then a mile later seeing a Joel Osteen megachurch. It's just... a totally different world from what I'm used to.
Honestly the people themselves are all great, well intentioned people. It just seems like they are the product of generations of isolation with just the plantation owners, oil barons and the churches as their source of knowledge and little in the way of higher-ed to counter it. That's not their fault, not in the slightest. That's cultural level indoctrination and brainwashing. They are victims of it, and even if they do realize it, it's nearly impossible to break free of that type of community.
They're not bad people, per se. Just raised into ignorance and manipulation.