Here in Texas, we like our politics like we like our rice: dirty.

What an eyerolling, ignorant, unbecoming, shit kicker statement is that! 

First of all, my credentials are: I was born and raised in Houston, Texas well over 60 years ago. 

I saw JFK at Hobby airport before he got to Dallas, shook hands with LBJ and visited his ranch. Voted as soon as I could, legally and love BBQ.

All that aside, I’ve worked or volunteered in various healthcare facilities, including psych and rehab for most of my life. 

And now it’s all over the Conservative feeds that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had been a patient at a psychiatric facility. 

For the gutter-line political opportunists, this is a perfect chance to leverage a disaster. But for us on the streets, who have been told by the media that Race is an issue, income disparity is a problem, politics are a filter to view potential friends, it’s not. And we are sick of being told what is.  

What IS an issue, is my own party of choice, the Conservatives, the so-called Christian coalition, blowing a person’s mental issues up onto the headlines. Leveraging another person’s sickness to score points.

Knock it off! 

Many of us have been in hospitals for the same issues. 

Life is hard! We get damaged, we get hurt. And by the Conservative backing of this story, you are mocking people’s problems, struggles and threatening them with public ridicule if they seek help.

In your own slang, “That’s not good optics.”

And if the best you can do is turn back the clock to when Senator Thomas Eagleton famously lost his spot on the 1972 Democratic presidential ticket after it was revealed that he had been hospitalized for psychiatric care and depression back in the 1960’s. He was admitted for “nervous exhaustion and fatigue,” which included undergoing electroshock therapy. 

That was almost 55 years ago. 55! And people are laughing and giving the heart icon and high fiving because the opposing party had to be admitted into a psych hospital. 

Look at it like this: the guy had the balls to do the hard thing, get admitted, to get the help at the worst time, to get away from the worst people. 

I was never going to vote for James Talarico, but when I do vote, it will be in shame that I am given the options the way that I had.

Thanks for Reading,

I’m
John I Chester III