The last of our bread lines.
In the frozen parking lot of an H-E-B, my husband and I wait in a line that snakes through the pharmacy drive-thru. My shins are cold from the air my wide leg jeans let in above my fuzzy socks. A mom and her three kids stand huddled six feet in front of us, a tangle of held hands and nervous energy. Behind us, a husband and wife grumble to each other about the line. “They probably won’t have anything.” I ignore them. The week has been more than stressful; I can forgive their pessimism.
The manager comes out to greet us, looking cold in a thermal long sleeve t-shirt with a signature red polo on top. “Folks, there’s gonna be a bit of a wait. We’re limited on staff and on supplies. There is plenty of water.” (The crowd universally untenses their shoulders). “But bread is running low.” The couple behind us leaves — anxious for the excuse to do so from the very start. I stare at a car frozen into the parking lot. The tire went out days ago when the roads first iced over. Now, it sits abandoned and lopsided with an icicle dripping from its running board down to the asphalt of the parking lot. Apocalyptic is the only word I can think of to describe it. Those still left standing make sure to vocalize our thank yous to the obviously frazzled employee. I wonder how he got here this morning, if he has kids at home. We’ll wait.
Our house was without water for three days; as we wait in line the pressure has been restored for a day or so. Every container in our house is filled with melted snow to flush toilets. Mom kept herself busy by digging up top snow for drinking and the next layers for whatever else. At this point we’re on a boil water notice, hence the reassurance about the bottles available inside. The electricity went out for 36 hours straight, then rolled back to life for a few hours at a time for the next three days. The temperature in our living room was 45 degrees at its coolest. We spent as much time doing nothing as possible beneath layers of blankets. Chest pain that had landed me in the ER before the storm transformed into a dull ache radiating all over my body as the cold settled over the house. The roads were iced over, trapping all of us in our sprawling suburban neighborhoods. This grocery store is packed because none within ten miles have been open due to the power outages and icy conditions. No one out in these Austin suburbs has been able to get food or clean water for a week.
Standing in the parking lot I think about my father’s birthplace of Havana. How the propaganda of capitalism places bread lines and crumbling infrastructure as the natural endgame of socialism. How people in America don’t understand the difference between corruption and economic frameworks. How my dad and his mom and his sister became Marielitos in 1980 and now forty years later I stand in a bread line after my own state failed. The line moves. We get inside. A bread delivery arrives as we’re in the produce section, so I grab a loaf even though we have yet to run out at home. It’s our favorite brand and our favorite type, a gift from the universe for making it through the worst few days of our lives so far. I feel tears well up in my eyes in relief.
It’s been a month since we were finally able to leave the house and restock our pantries. Life for the most part has turned back to normal for us. A gentle pessimism blankets our conversations about what happened. We are traumatized but alive. I delivered water and food to houses who still didn’t have it once the roads thawed out. ERCOT and Greg Abbott and the Texas leadership feel like immovable, unfixable problems. There is so much potential for change so close to such a widespread traumatic event. Who is mobilizing the people? Who is doing something so that this will never happen again? I’m not sure. I think it might be something I need to help with, but I am too close to the center. My whole nervous system feels raw and I feel dead to the problem. I take a puff on my inhaler in the mornings and wash my face and wonder if anything will change.
How do we as a nation keep doing this? Keep forgetting the people who’ve been left behind? Don’t we love problem solving? Don’t we love scandal? Why do we then look away when there’s still work to be done? My running theory is that the people who want the change the most are usually the ones who are most exhausted by the effects of all these mutual and overlapping disasters and cultural diseases. What we need are champions who aren’t living with the weight of the experience on their backs. I can think of only one or two people I know who aren’t currently hurting from one trauma or another inflicted upon them by a country that refuses to care for its citizens.
The trick of our culture is that it beats each of us down in its own way. We are all tired and hurt by one oppression or another. If it’s not racial trauma then it’s economic trauma or sexual trauma or body trauma or ableist trauma. The water is poisoned and we can’t escape. If everyone is too tired to fight back, we tread and tread and marvel at our own survival. Who is going to build a lifeboat? Men like Greg Abbott are the only ones capable of reaching land and they’re too busy hoarding their power and protecting its continuation to use any of the tools at their disposal. Governing is much harder than protecting the gloss of governance.
So, I think again of my dad’s childhood in Cuba. Of the food shortages and of the community surveillance and of the national narrative coalesced around one imperfect man. In Cuba the problem is and was supply. In America, the problem is distribution. Isn’t it so much easier to argue about how to give people bread than it is to just give people bread? I know that I am better off because my grandmother wandered into the Panamanian embassy and ended up on American shores. I know that my opportunities here have been created by my existence as both the next link in a Spanish colonial lineage and white Texan lineage. But I do wonder if my Cuban grandmother predicted that things like power and water would not be guaranteed to her granddaughter forty years after she left her home.
I write my senators. I get form emails back with a general, “I’m sorry, but this is really not our fault and I definitely did not *flee the country*.” I write my city council. I hear nothing. The water and food I deliver are provided not by the state but by local mutual aid groups doing the work of governing during a collapse of governance. I write the governor. He replies how disappointed he is in ERCOT management. Texas is the land of personal responsibility and yet not one of our leaders seems to find themselves responsible. Who is going to say, “The buck stops here?” Who is accountable for all this suffering? Is it no one? Is it all of us?
I wonder sometimes if years from now I’ll have to take my kids to a place where they’ll be safer and better provided for. I can only hope that I’ll be the last of the Leons to stand in a bread line.
