Gather evidence on blackout without an agenda or ideology

COVID-19 killed half a million Americans in less than a year. Blackouts left four million Texas homes without electricity on the coldest four nights in decades. Thirteen million Texans were left without running, potable water.

Poet William Butler Yeats had seen something similar in 1919 following World War I and the Spanish flu and wrote “The Second Coming.”

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Today, provocateurs are stoking division and hatred with disinformation. Most of us are scrambling to explain what went wrong. Yet others see nothing more than an inconvenient anomaly. Then, there are those who want to

Brett Coomer / Staff photographer Victor Hernandez, left, and Luis Martinez fill their water containers with a hose from a spigot Feb. 2 in Haden Park as the freeze left many without water.