Dear Reader,
My God. The horror.
It’s the best I can do to describe what happened in Texas.
An Act of God & the Inaction of Men
I am mad at God.
Might seem like a weird thing for a religion blogger to write, but it is true. It is also undoubtedly hypocritical to have let God off the hook for any number of horrors in the world today but fixate on the one that affects my home state.
I have swum in the Guadalupe and South Llano rivers. Many times. I suspect campgrounds I stayed at were underwater this weekend. I went to a camp like Camp Mystic on retreats; many of my classmates went to like camps every summer through school.
It is a beautiful piece of country. God’s own country.

A thirty-foot tsunami through the most-used part of the river on the summer’s busiest weekend…overnight, when people were sleeping….
If there had to be a flood, why was it at the seeming worst confluence of circumstances?
I am mad at Greg Abbott et al.
Two things can be true: local law enforcement acted bravely and saved lives during the flood; AND they or (more likely) the administrators and politicians leading them failed to prepare.
I’ll quote Heather Cox Richardson’s recent newsletters here:
“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”
Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster (July 8).
And with emphasis my own:
On July 4…flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.
But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.
Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started (July 10).
Then, of course, the President today branded anyone (including the victims’ families) who asks questions about how local, state, and federal authorities prepared for the flooding as “[a] very evil person.”
A hit dog yelps. If they had no consciousness of guilt, or at least no fear of exposure, I doubt they would protest so much.
Their Armadillo Dieth Not
Texas Sen. Ted “Cancun Ted” Cruz managed, again, to be out of the country on vacation during a historic natural disaster. To his credit, he did eventually come back from Greece, but I joked that I wish him an immortal armadillo to dig up his yard. Juvenile, yes, but apt.
A harmless, burrowing nuisance—this one tireless, deathless, invulnerable.
Grief, guilt, and anger are immortal armadillos.
The grief of the bereaved will gnaw away for a lifetime, burrowing deep in the psyche. Grief and griever can reach a companionable truce, though.
But grief and anger, dear reader—until accountability is taken, the armadillos gnaw away.
Again—My God. The horror.