What does it mean to be a neighbor? What does it mean to be a hero?

The disaster drained my heart, but it was the Congressman's empty platitudes that raised my ire

I wasn’t planning on writing about the horrific flooding in Texas. That’s not for lack of concern, mind you. Quite the opposite. It’s just that the facts on the ground seemed so self-evident that I didn’t know what I’d have to add to the conversation. I sensed that we had already moved on. I hated that we already moved on, but I didn’t know how to speak to an audience that had already started shuffling out of the auditorium.

You don’t need me to tell you that it’s all so devastating. Your heart knows that intuitively. Over 100 deaths so far, many of them children. Oh God, the kids. At summer camp. By this point, you have already read the phrase “every family’s worst nightmare” a hundred times, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Last night, I walked along the Milwaukee River near my house, on riverbanks where my kids feel truly and fully at home. I love that river, just as I’m sure so many of the hundreds dead or missing loved the Guadalupe.

You also don’t need to tell you that it didn’t have to be this bad. Not just for all the “we should be taking climate change seriously” reasons but also the “this is what happens when you gut NOAA and the NWS and let Kristi Noem control FEMA” reasons. Plenty of commenters on the left have already made those points, and they’re right to do so. I fear the discourse that’s about to come down the pike, though. “Is this good or bad for Trump?” “Can Democrats make this stick?” “How will this affect the midterms?” Listen, I don’t even care that Ted Cruz was on vacation, and how that looks bad for him. Of course it looks bad. That news would only matter if the addition of “more Ted Cruz” meaningfully changed any situation, but that’s never been the case. My God, I just want a hundred people to still be alive again.

That’s the only thing I truly believe, by the way. I don’t want you to die an unnecessary death, and I want the life you do live to be decent and filled with beauty.

There’s more to it than that, I suppose. I don’t want you to be bullied by a boss or a bigot. I don’t want you to live without what we all need (money, food, healthcare, education) to get by. I want you to have a good place to live that you can afford. But above all else, I want you to be safe and loved. I want that for you whether you live in the heart of the Texas Hill Country or near Macarthur Park in Los Angeles.

I wasn’t going to write about the flood, but then I read an essay by Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press. In the interest in showing grace in a difficult time, I’m sure that Crenshaw’s heart aches for the victims, just as mine does. His district wasn’t hit by the floods, but I trust that the situation still hit close to home. But I also know that Crenshaw has a long history of inserting himself into narratives, and that The Free Press is the kind of outlet that claims its committed to speaking forbidden truths, when the only thing it truly stands for is flattering the prior convictions of the rich and powerful.

On its face, Crenshaw’s piece is inoffensive. He talks about heroes. About how neighbors helped neighbors. About teenage counselors waking up bunks full of kids and carting them to high ground. That’s fine. One of the most important political books of my lifetime is Rebecca Solnit’s paean to solidarity in darkness, A Paradise Built In Hell. Every hero that Crenshaw highlights is, indeed, worthy of our collective gratitude.

But as I kept reading, I found my resentment rising. By the time I finished, I had moved from shared sympathy to full on anger. Screw this guy. This opportunist politician. This man who just voted for a budget that will further strip the U.S. government of its ability to care. Maybe it was all of Crenshaw’s clichés. Yes, the worst brings out our best, but what does that even mean? Again, you just defunded SNAP, you cretin. What best does that bring out of anybody? Maybe it was all the tired old lines you hear from politicians who’ve put in their miles on the pandering circuit. My God, he kept talking about how the heroes showed “the spirit of Texas,” as if every state isn’t full of people who would rush to save literal children from a flood.

I can’t read lines like that, which substitute solidarity and connection for jingoism, without instinctively humming Finlandia to myself. A salve against exceptionalism.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Like Crenshaw, I too love Texans, but not because I rely on them to elect me to the United States Congress. I love my friends in Texas because that’s what we do best as human beings. We love each other. We hear that a parent is grieving the unthinkable, and we long to reach out our hands. Even if they’re a stranger. Even if they live thousands of miles away, on the banks of a different river.

I always feel a complicated, bittersweet pang in the wake of the inevitable post-tragedy tributes to the human conditions. I bristle at the images of the blood bank lines and the reminders to “look for the helpers,” not because I’m ungrateful for all the people who raised their hand at the moment that their heart burst. Bless all of them, truly. It’s just that the narrative in moments such as this reinforces the myth— implicitly if not explicitly— that this is the only time that we are expected to give a damn about each other. After the flood. After the fire. In many cases, after it’s too late.

There’s a version of this essay— simpler and perhaps more satisfying— where I lash out at Dan Crenshaw’s hypocrisy and leave it at that. How dare he talk about heroism and neighborliness now when he practices a politics of radical unwelcome, when he and his party support gun thugs raiding elementary school graduations and poor people losing their Medicaid and trans people being reduced to culture war cannon fodder. How dare he lecture me about the spirit of America and Texas when that spirit lives not only in the Texans who shuttle kids away from the floodwaters but also the Texans who help women cope in the midst of a war on their bodies, the Texans who run know your rights trainings, the Texans who run mutual aid networks and free clinics, the Texans who clean up the messes that the Dan Crenshaws of the world create.

I don’t actually care about Dan Crenshaw. Internet vitality aside, I don’t think we build a better world primarily through “epic clapbacks” of preening, camera-ready politicians on the other side of the aisle. Again, let Ted Cruz stay in Greece. I’d say forever, but that feels like undue punishment to the Greeks.

There’s so much about the post-storm discourse that fills me with gratitude. I love that people are sounding the alarm about NOAA, about climate change, about what we’d do differently if we cared about forestalling or preventing the worst. After reading Crenshaw’s piece, though, I worry that even our best truth telling in this moment might remain too small, too granular. We might still fail to connect the dots.

Here’s something on which Crenshaw and I likely agree. We human beings want to be heroic for each other. We want to care for our neighbors. We want to show up when we’re needed. So let’s actually talk about what that means.

Being a neighbor means caring when the unthinkable hits, but also knowing who your neighbors are far before the storms start brewing. It means fighting against everything that makes your neighbors’ lives worse— an economic system that keeps them in poverty, bigots and grifters who make a living out of demonizing them, a government that leaves them to fend for themselves. It means organizing game nights and block parties and unions. It means staffing suicide hotlines for queer kids and ICE watches in Home Depot parking lots and then chaining yourself to the Capitol to protest policies that make suicide hotlines and ICE watches necessary in the first place.

It means, when you’re the one under attack, knowing your neighbors well enough to share your story. It means not just giving, but asking for help. It means lemon bars and raised fists, filling sandbags when the rivers rise and launching hunger strikes at Chevron headquarters when clear skies lull us into a false sense of complacency. I wrote about all this, last week when the budget bill passed. I am always writing about this. I hope to one day no longer have to write about all this. For now, though, the message remains.

In a few weeks time, when there isn’t a flood, we will stop talking about neighborliness again. Republicans will drone on about who they need to hurt to protect us from and “pragmatic” Democrats will opine about who they need to throw under the bus to win the next election. The Free Press will pivot back from treacly op-eds about neighborliness to its usual fare (mostly drive-by attacks on trans kids and Zohran Mamdani, framed as “heterodox opinions”). We will hear “well that issue is too radical,” and forget that a few weeks previously if you had told us that we were asked “would you have done anything you could to save a kid from the flood?” we would have said “yes, absolutely.”

I love that we want to be each other’s heroes. I love that we want to be each other’s neighbors. I have no doubt that, in the days after the flood, our hearts are truly and earnestly filled with a desire to be our best for one another. So let’s shout down the silver-tongued opportunists who tell us, in moments such as this, that the only thing to do with our hearts is to wait until the floodwaters come to our doorstep.

Neighbors help neighbors at the worst moments. That’s true. But only if they know how to be neighbors in the first place.

End notes:

1. I do love that many people’s first question, in moments like this, is “how can I give to immediate relief?” In this case, The Texas Tribune (a great outlet) has compiled a solid list.

2. I also believe in supporting efforts that seek not just to provide relief but also change political realities. If you feel that this space (either this newsletter or the trainings I run through the Barnraisers Project) fits that bill for you, thank you for your support. We promise to be good stewards of your gift.

3. You’ll notice I said “we” here. For the last few years, The White Pages and The Barnraisers Project hasn’t just been me. It’s also been my incredible professional partner Carly Ganz. All good things come to an end, though, and Carly is currently looking for her next work home. Are you hiring and would like an to work with an administrative whiz, empathetic thinker, creative problem-solver and great writer? Hire Carly! Seriously! It was one of the best decisions I made. If you’re curious you can check out her resume as well as this one pager about the kind of position for which she’s searching (remote or Milwaukee area, please) is here. Thank you!

4. Ok, so last week I had a breakthrough of sorts. Some of you might remember that I’ve been experimenting with new formats for my summer movie series? Well, last Thursday I did a live chat of my first ever watch of Arrival for paid subscribers and it was truly so much fun (both responding to pals in the moment and afterwards, as people checked out the chat later- the conversation is still going). It was so much fun, in fact, that I’m doing it again, with another classic of the last decade I haven’t seen but that I’m sure will inspire plenty of thoughts. We’re watching Get Out friends. Thursday at 8:30 PM CT using the Substack chat.

5. Let’s listen to Joan Baez sing Finlandia (from a Finnish Amnesty International compilation): “But other hearts in other lands are beating, With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”

Oh hell, I love that song, but this is a piece about Texas. I’ve already shared my own personal Holy Trinity of Texas songs [Amor Prohibido; International Player’s Anthem (I Choose You) and Pancho and Lefty] but this week let’s lean all the way in to Lone Star Lore.