LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, First off, a big tip of the ol’ Leonard hat to the San Marcos Daily Record for its in-depth coverage of efforts related to the shall we say – spirited – debate between Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra and Texas House Representative Erin Zwiener regarding contentious groundwater issues here in Hays County. I was particularly impressed with the front-page headline in Wednesday’s issue, “Water Wars Boil Over.”
Pithy. Clever. Punny. Direct. And with the subhead, “Zwiener denied entry to Becerra’s water summit,” no need to guess what was going on.
I grew up reading the New York Daily News and the New York Post, whose sales are primarily newsstand driven. Both papers rely on clever, sometimes provocative, and sometimes hilarious headlines to catch readers’ eyes, hoping they’ll drop a couple of bucks and pick up a copy on their way to the bus or subway.
My favorite? The New York Post’s classic “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” It told the story of a murder in a bar the night before – a gin mill whose entertainers didn’t face a particularly stringent dress code. A customer shot and killed the owner and held the customers hostage. Learning that one was a mortician, the killer took it a step further, ordering him to cut off his victim’s head. And – Voila! – a classic headline. Not so good for the dead guy but, hey, he’d probably never been the talk of town before his big night on the town.
And then there was the time back in the mid‘70s when New York City couldn’t meet its financial obligations and was looking for a federal bailout. Gerald Ford, who was president at the time, gave the request two thumbs down. The Daily News positioned it like this, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
But clever wasn’t always the rule of the day. There was the time when a Daily News reporter – a very enterprising reporter – was granted access to the execution chamber to witness the electrocution of notorious murderer Ruth Snyder. He strapped a forbidden camera to his ankle and secretly snapped her photo at the moment the electricity coursed through her body. The resulting photo took up most of the next morning’s front page under the one-word headline “Dead!”
My point? Wednesday’s headline in the San Marcos Daily Record was a classic, as well – one that could easily hold its own when measured against the pithy front page of a New York tabloid. I just hope the recruiters from the big city don’t come a-knocking at the Record’s door.
As happy as I am with the Record’s handling of this water story and its headline, I’m equally unhappy with elements of the story itself: an elected official locked out of a “private” meeting by another elected official on an issue in which both have a strong and active interest.
Why? Hard to say; there are a couple of competing stories here. One has the locked-out official RSVPing to an invitation to the event. But the response went to the email of an employee who was on vacation, so no one saw it in time. The other? Banned from the meeting because she’s an “agitator.” I’m still scratching my head, trying to figure out which it is.
Either way, I happen to like agitators, and wish we had more of them.
It took a bit of agitation for American colonists to break away from Great Britain. It took a bit of agitation – a Civil War, in fact – to extend freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to formerly enslaved Americans. It took a bit of agitation to curb the robber barons in America’s socalled “Gilded Age.” It took a bit of agitation to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and replace it with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It took a bit of agitation to get a 40-hour work week, workplace safety laws, free public education, employee health benefits, Obamacare, Social Security, safer vehicles, pure food and drug laws, and an end to child labor. I could go on and on, but a bit of agitation is frequently what it takes to move things forward.
Heck, my grandmother was an agitator. She was a lovely but (at least I thought at the time) timid woman – an immigrant who didn’t want to do the wrong things in her new country. But I remember her walking a picket line calling for passage of Medicare. I’d never known her to do anything like that, but at the time she was pushing 70 and she had no health insurance and no prospects of being able to qualify for it or pay for it. But her agitation – and that of so many others – got the job done. And more than 60 years later, I’m enjoying the benefits that she fought so hard for.
When it comes to agitation, I think immediately of former Congressman John Lewis who famously said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” when working for positive change.
To be fair, there’s been a bit of grumbling on both sides here. Representative Zwiener, has been pretty candid about what she describes as years of issues involving Judge Becerra and herself. But finger pointing, no matter which side it’s coming from, doesn’t solve a thing. It just makes solutions harder to come by.
I do not question the sincerity of both of them in their efforts to address serious groundwater issues in Hays County. A burgeoning population, the continued expansion of roadways and other impervious, paved surfaces, a seemingly never-ending drought, sensitive and stressed aquifers, and the threat of industrial water users, such as Data Centers, to elbow aside smaller users, creates a dangerous situation.
Becerra and Zwiener may have different approaches to dealing with the problem. That doesn’t necessarily make one right and the other wrong. But it does make it harder to effectively protect our precious water resources.
As long as both are pulling in different directions or pointing fingers, any solution will remain elusive. It’s time for all the players to realize that as long as our leadership is fighting, the people of Hays County are losing.
There’s no room for pride here. There’s no room for ego. There’s only room for cooperation and collaboration and laboring toward a shared vision. Anything short of that is an abdication of leadership.
We can address our water needs — today and in the years ahead — but only by working together.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
