San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Distrust in government spreads with virus
LUBBOCK — For a while, it seemed that the coronavirus had spared West Texas. Cases were low. Few had died. Concern through the spring was focused on getting businesses running again.
By mid-June, the Texas Tech football team returned to campus. Local baseball tournaments resumed. Hotels filled up.
Then people started getting sick.
In Lubbock, a burnt-tan city of 250,000 with a rollicking college bar scene, more people tested positive for the virus in the past three weeks than in the previous three months combined. On the day Gov. Greg Abbott began to swiftly reopen the state two months ago, the city recorded eight positive tests for the virus. On Wednesday, there were 184.
The sudden jump, concentrated among those in their 20s, reflected a sharp and uncontrolled rise in the virus that has hit Texas harder than many other places in the country. Unlike the early weeks of the pandemic, when infections were concentrated in the state’s mainly liberal cities, the virus has now reached into the deep-red regions of the state that have resisted aggressive public health regulation.
Yet for many conservatives, even those with the virus now at their door, the resurgence has not changed opinions so much as hardened them.
For those Texans, trust in government is gone, if it was there to begin with, and that includes some of the state’s top leaders. On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas declared himself tired of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor.
“I don’t need his advice anymore,” Patrick said.
That sentiment was echoed outside a popular, newly-opened hamburger restaurant in Wolfforth, just outside Lubbock, where even Abbott, a Republican, came under harsh criticism.
“It seems like he’s been influenced by Fauci and the left,” said Mark Stewart, who sat with his wife and children and several other families at a gathering for locals who home-school.
None in the 18-person group, which squeezed around several outside tables, wore masks or made an attempt to stay distant.
“This is the first time we’ve met each other and we don’t care,” said Stewart’s wife, Tamera, adding that other people might take precautions when they are together and stay far apart. “Texas has all kinds. But we’re done with all that.”
Such attitudes present a daunting challenge for local leaders trying to contain a resurgent outbreak, especially in solidly Republican areas, where mandatory public health measures can generate swift opposition.
And they could complicate an order by the governor, issued late Thursday, requiring Texans to wear face coverings in public, with few exceptions, or be fined up to $250. The order applies to counties with more than 20 positive cases, in other words, most of the state.
It is the sort of requirement that Lubbock’s conservative mayor, Dan Pope, an eighth-generation Texan, sought to avoid imposing himself, opting instead to urge compliance from his avowedly independent-minded constituents.
“My approach all along has been one of personal responsibility,” Pope said in an interview from a ground-floor conference room in the city’s new municipal building.
He said that he would enforce the governor’s mask order nevertheless.
The mayor, who wore a black Lubbock-branded face mask, was working out of the conference room, rather than his 11thfloor office, because his adult daughter who lives in town had recently tested positive for the coronavirus. His younger brother had also been infected, he said.
“I’m clean as far as our health department goes; I just think in an abundance of caution — I don’t want to be the guy,” Pope said. “I’m asking our people to act this way. Why wouldn’t I act that same way?”
That message is commonly heard from conservatives in Texas as they seek to balance public health concerns against worries that an aggressive government response could result in a backlash. Mandates have come to be associated with demands from leaders of the state’s largely Democratic cities.
Before Abbott’s latest order, mayors in West Texas had blocked efforts to require residents to wear masks while inside stores, in some cases linking their opposition to disgust with leaders in Austin and Washington.
“Free Americans, and free Texans, must not allow a fractious, divided and politically motivated body of values lightweights to dictate day-to-day living,” Mayor Patrick Payton of Midland said at a news conference Wednesday.
Gabrielle Ellison was elated to hear that message. Ellison is the owner of Big Daddy Zane’s, a bar in Odessa that attracted national attention in May after it joined with other businesses in Texas and, aided by men carrying assault rifles, reopened in defiance of state restrictions.
Ellison said she was defying the state’s order again and keeping her bar open. She has joined a statewide lawsuit over the governor’s closures.
“To me that is a life-and-death situation,” she said. “I can’t feed my family. My bartenders can’t feed their families.”
If anything, she said, the aggressive growth of coronavirus cases in Odessa made her more confident in reopening.
“It has affected it in a more positive way,” she said. “We’re having people survive,” she said, adding, “Let’s just let this run its course.”
In Lubbock, the shutdown of bars left a usually bustling strip near the Texas Tech campus devoid of all activity Wednesday evening, even as parking lots filled outside gyms elsewhere in town. Several local bars have said they would not reopen.
With the closures, gatherings had shifted from bars to pool parties by day, and house parties at night, officials said. Cases have now been traced to those gatherings.
Despite the surge in infections among young people, before the new mask order this past week, many chose not to wear a mask. Or let it slip their minds.
“I left mine in the car,” Ambroshia Pollard, 29, said as she emerged from a grocery store with her mother and month-old daughter.
Still, she said, she took the virus seriously.
“My brother’s friend got it. He’s young, 21,” Pollard said. “I feel like it’s real and people should be more conscious. Us too, we should have masks.”
But many of their fellow shoppers also came and went without them, as did diners at a Braum’s Ice Cream and Burger restaurant in Wolfforth, and drinkers at the Brewery LBK in downtown Lubbock. There, groups of friends gathered around beers and cigarettes on the patio and argued about the utility of the governor’s mask order shortly after it came out.
Not a mask in sight.