I was at lunch with some friends today, and one of them said she had been offered a job in Texas.
“You can’t take a job in Texas,” I said firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a lawless country. Didn’t you see The Thin Blue Line?”
The Thin Blue Line, for those of you who don’t go back as far as 1988, was a documentary film that terrified me and the rest of America. It showed a man wrongly convicted of a murder in Dallas by a seriously corrupt justice system. There is corruption everywhere you go, but it is not as systemic in other places as it is in Dallas. The sheer randomness of the arrest of someone who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time—and then found himself on death row—made me promise myself that I would stay out of Texas, and that if I did need to go there, I certainly would not be renting a car.
And then there is the pride they take in leading the nation in executions. What is it about Texas that it breeds figures like Judge Sharon Keller? Judge Keller refused to allow a last-minute appeal to be filed by attorneys trying to save the life of a client who was scheduled to die that night because, in her words, “We close at 5:00.” Coincidentally, this was on the same day the Supreme Court decided to hear a landmark case on the constitutionality of lethal injection
We move right along to the beef issue. While I have never considered vegetarianism for more than five minutes (between one breakfast and lunch five years ago), I reserve the right to change my mind if I want to. I’ve heard it’s an unwritten law in Texas that you must order meat with every meal, including beer at the bar. Seriously, I heard that.
In case I haven’t swayed you, let’s look at the cheerleading issue. If you happen to give birth to a girl in Texas, and she happens to be pretty and athletic enough to try out for cheerleading, she runs the risk of being killed by her best friend’s mother, who can’t bear the thought of her little Buffy not making the squad because your Debbie Lou is better than her. So the odds of early teenage death for girls is much higher in Texas than in the rest of the country.
So my friend—who, shockingly, wasn’t swayed by any of the above—decided on her own that she wasn’t moving there.
“It’s the weather,” she said calmly. “It snows in the winter and it’s 110 degrees in the summer. Who wants to live with that kind of weather swing?”
I reminded myself that it didn’t matter why she finally decided not to go. It’s just important that she not go.
Oh, one more thing. Isn’t George Bush from Texas? I’m just saying.
