Report on TX-22 town hall 8/22

DailyKos 8/23/09
A Small-town Texas Town Hall
by Dan Gallo

When I moved to Texas from New Mexico nearly eight years ago, my friend Doc Potter, a college professor in Santa Fe, sent me an email suffused with horror. "Don’t you know those people are the worst kind of backwards?" he asked. "Racists, sexists, Republicans, neanderthals! You’ll be a couple of hours away from Crawford, for Christ’s sake!"

"I ain’t scared," I said, and meant it. I worked for the National Park Service at the time and had transferred to Big Bend National Park in far West Texas, in a ruggedly handsome desert county the size of Rhode Island consisting of more cows than people—only about 10,000 bipeds inhabit the area. Most of those people had family living in Brewster County since before the turn of the Twentieth Century. Most have guns, pickup trucks, tobacco plugs, drawls, boots and hats, and most can deliver a calf or weld a busted bull rack when called upon to do so. But there were also others, I reasoned. A neo-hippie hamlet on the border, a highfalutin art colony blossoming in Marfa, an influx of retirees and twenty-somethings from the outside world.

I was proud last November, if a little surprised, that Brewster County went blue. There are plenty of Confederate flag-flyers and jaw-droppingly knuckle-dragging bumper stickers here, not to mention the sly prejudices half-articulated in the barns and shops of my town’s respected citizens. Sometimes they’re more than hinted at.

As my precinct’s Democratic Party chair, I got a call last week about the upcoming town hall meeting about healthcare, featuring Representative Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX 23). "We need as many Democrats as we can get to be there," I was told. "Be prepared for some noise, though." I couldn’t make the first half of the meeting and by the time I got to the abysmal Mexican restaurant where it was being held, it had gone beyond standing room only, the crowd spilling out into the entry way and the patio, people jammed in to every nook and cranny, some sitting on the floor.