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‘All souls matter’ at tone-deaf Texas parade; GOP officials spread conspiracy theories.
When the world ends, you’ll want to be in Seguin, since apparently it will be the last place on earth to get the message. The small town east of San Antonio held an “all souls matter” public prayer event Monday that doubled as a parade for — police. “We are not going to let the enemy come in, father, and try to destroy, father, this city,” a speaker is heard saying on video. We hate to break it to organizers, but the enemy is systemic racism, not the protesters demanding justice, and it sounds like it’s already in town. Asked what he thought of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, Guadalupe County Sheriff Arnold Zwicke told the Seguin Gazette that “if people would simply comply with a lawful order, they wouldn’t find themselves in those situations.” Having an officer press his knee on your neck for almost nine minutes while you plead to breathe and call for your dead mother is not a “situation.” It is a crime.
Or is it? And actually, how do we know it happened at all — besides, of course, the whole thing being caught on tape widely available on the internet? According to four GOP county chairs, Floyd’s death was “staged” to either hurt President Donald Trump or to “keep the sheep in line.” The officials from Bexar, Nueces, Comal and Harrison counties spread the conspiracy theories through social media this week. A fifth chair, the Republican chairman-elect in Harris County, Keith Nielsen, posted an image with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote — “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” — on a background with a banana. We’ll focus on the positive here, as several Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, immediately condemned these actions and called for some of the officials to step down. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz had enough, too: “Dammit, stop it. Stop saying stupid, racist things. Our country is grieving,” he tweeted, adding that Nielsen should resign. You know, we’re pretty sure George Floyd’s murder was well documented. But we’re hearing rumors that the GOP may have a problem with racists in their midst. They should look into it.
The River Oaks Shopping District, miles away from downtown, wasn’t buying all that “peaceful Houston protest” stuff, as highend retailers — including Cartier, Dior, Harry Winston and Brunello Cucinelli — boarded up their windows over the weekend. With looters taking advantage of demonstrations around the country, the upscale shops took a better-safe-than-sorry approach. Their precautions stood out in a city that otherwise kept its doors open.
In more business fare, there’s a new Mexican restaurant coming to Amarillo called Big Beaners. Its mascot is a kidney bean wearing a sombrero, sporting pointy boots and a huge handlebar mustache, and … forget it. We can’t even anymore. Next.
The New York Times Magazine recently wrote a piece about the San Antonio Food Bank and the challenges that many Texas families are facing during the coronavirus outbreak. It was a powerful story when the San Antonio ExpressNews wrote it two months ago, and it was still important last week when it appeared in the magazine’s pages. Unfortunately, something was lost in the translation into coastal eliteese. To wit: “San Antonio is the economic heart of a swath of south-central Texas called the Alamo, where thousands have lost their jobs, particularly in restaurants and the oil and gas industry.” Now, we can debate where the Panhandle begins and whether Texas is the South or the West, but there is no swath of anything called the Alamo (except for the Alamo). So, to the editors in the economic heart of a region of New England called Ellis Island, we say: Remember the Alamo… is a building.