High Noon of Broken Dreams

"The Day Of Reckoning Is Coming" Paul Burka of Texas Monthly tells us in a story about South Texas politics. "A culture of bribery" has overtaken South Texas, is the story in today's Houston Chronicle. All this while day after day we read about fugitive elected officials avoiding prosecution for crimes they are alleged to have committed. After reading these an honest elected official looking for a better way may feel like Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal in the movie High Noon.

In Burka's story appearing in January's Texas Monthly he quotes my earlier post on this blog that laments about the politics handed down to this region when political bosses ruled with an iron fist. People like Archer Parr, George Parr, James B. Wells, Stephen Powers, John Closner and Anderson Y. Baker were the bosses of old who handed down political traditions and ways of operating voter turnout that are no longer suited to a changing environment. As Burka states,

"Democrats are going to have to clean up their act or they are going to lose more and more races in South Texas. The older people who have lived under the patron system all their lives are dying out. Younger, upwardly mobile Hispanics will not put up with it. The old ways will not go peacefully, but they will go."

Cleaning up the hearts of men is an effort we have searched for since Adam's fall from grace. But we who love this community, whose reputation is repeatedly stained by one political figure after another, must begin to look more closely at the system that helps perpetuate candidates prone to this fall. Without a doubt this community has a sizable number of honest hardworking public servants. I call many of them friends. It unfortunately is the few that have tainted a proud community. Let us remove the political shackles that were placed on this community by ambitious men from days gone by.

Let us start by demanding that political figures and parties respectfully advocate to each individual citizen from our community in the same manner enjoyed by every other American. An over-reliance on political bosses, their machines or their politiqueras does a disservice to the citizens of this community and helps perpetuate many of the disgraced political figures we see in our newspapers. If we are going to expect people to turnout to vote then we must give them something to vote for. We can start with the simple concept that these ever so special people of South Texas deserve honest government from honest elected officials. We should respect them enough to present them with constructive ideas and allow them to make an unfiltered choice of candidates of their own choosing.

The future belongs to the party or the candidate that appreciates and follows the basic principle of "respect" - a value that runs deeper in the soul of every South Texan - long before the political bosses of old moved their political system away from it.





High Noon video adaptation by Steven Santos.