Springtime In South Texas

I left my home in Central Texas early this afternoon. It was a beautiful spring day. The morning air was so crisp and pure that we opened all the windows and aired out the house. The sky was a deep, deep, wonderfully vibrant shade of blue that made me want to sing, or do cartwheels, or both (disregarding the fact that I can't do either). Birds were singing, butterflies were flitting about, squirrels were chattering ... I even heard a turkey gobbling.

Every plant was some shade of verdant green, and they were all budding, blossoming, or blooming. The wildflowers ... ah, God, the wildflowers ... they are beyond my poor powers of description. After the last couple years of drought, we've had a decent amount of rain this spring, and the wildflowers have responded, bursting forth with long-delayed passion.

When I climbed into my truck the temperature was in the high 70s and the humidity was in the mid 40s. You couldn't ask for a better day.

I rolled down the windows, cranked up the stereo, and headed south.

Sigh...

Three short hours later the temperature was 98 and the humidity was somewhere around 75. Semis were roaring hither and yon, leaving whirlwinds of dust and gravel in their wake (I've replaced one windshield and filled three chips in the new one, all in the last three months). Yes, the Eagle Ford shale play has been a great boon for the South Texas economy, but it does come at a cost. Part of that cost is a degradation of the quality of life down here. IMO it's a tradeoff worth making, but that doesn't make it any less palatable.

 

So my incredibly spirit-renewing absolutely drop-dead gorgeous spring day lasted about four hours. To top things off, tomorrow I have to face 100+ college students whose performance on last week's exam was flat-out dismal.

Usually crushing their hopes and dreams cheers me up, but after today's transition from paradise to Hades it's going to take more than that.

Like Shiners.

Many, many Shiners...

Talk About A Hostile Work Environment

We tend to take things for granted around here, until something like this pops up in the news.

7 mutilated bodies found in Nuevo Laredo

The mutilated bodies of seven unidentified men were found in an abandoned vehicle Monday morning east of downtown Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Authorities responded to a 9 a.m. call reporting the vehicle and bodies at an intersection one block from a Mexican army base, according to a government official who asked to remain anonymous.

“Their arms, legs and heads were cut off,” the source said.

Actually, this incident wasn't even reported locally. I was totally unaware of it until I read the San Antonio newspaper.

Seven mutilated bodies less than ten miles from my South Texas residence and office.

Reporting of those bodies occurs 200 miles away.

I'm a big critic of the media, but unlike the obama lapdog mainstream media, at least the Mexican and local South Texas media have a damn good reason for forsaking their reporting duties. I doubt if I would splash headlines across the front page with my name in the byline while knowing that at any time I could be kidnapped and executed in a most gruesome manner.

One of the things I try to teach my students is to look beyond the immediate consequences of their decisions, and to be aware of the secondary and tertiary outcomes. For those of you that use drugs (even the so-called victimless marijuana), I could care less what you ingest, or what you consider recreational drugs.

But I do get riled up when the downstream consequences of your drug usage contribute to the power and profits of the cartels.

We can debate whether or not drugs should be legal (FWIW, I'm all in favor of legalization), but if you don't man up and admit that your usage supports at least in part the unholy regimes of those vile and evil cartels then we have little common ground upon which to carry on a dialogue.