This Tragedy Was a Choice

Foreword

How we, as a community, spend our time and energy is a measure of our priorities. In today’s essay, Brian joins the lament over the young lives lost in Texas and asks us not to let policy makers off the hook for decisions that cost lives.

-Katie Shaw Thompson

This week, a wall of water 20 feet high tore down the Guadalupe River in Texas. It came fast—too fast. It washed over a girls’ summer camp, swallowing bunkhouses whole. Over 27 children are dead. Dozens more are still missing. The number is climbing. The grief is unspeakable. And the rage should be, too.

Because this didn’t need to happen.

The technology exists. We have early warning systems. We know how to monitor rainfall, track river rise, and send out alerts within minutes. We are not in the 1800s. We are not at the mercy of the clouds.

But Kerr County, where the flood hit, didn’t want to raise taxes. So they didn’t install the system. They didn’t pay for the infrastructure that could have warned the camp. That could have saved those girls.

A budget is a moral document. It tells you what a community values. And in Kerr County, they valued low taxes more than they valued the lives of their children.

We hear this logic all the time: We can’t afford it. We don’t want big government. We don’t trust the feds. But when the river rises—26 feet in minutes—and there is no warning, who do we blame? The water? The sky?

No. We blame the people who knew the risks and chose not to act.

But that’s not what Governor Greg Abbott wants you to do. When asked who’s to blame, Abbott shrugged off the question:

“That’s the word choice of losers,” he said. “Every football team makes mistakes. 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.’”

This isn’t leadership. It’s cowardice wrapped in sports metaphors. The girls who died weren’t “a mistake.” Their deaths were not a fumble in a football game. They were preventable.

If “we’ve got this” means refusing to fund basic public safety, then no—you don’t have this. You never did.

And it’s not just local government. The Republican project for decades has been to hollow out public infrastructure. They’ve gutted the National Weather Service. They’ve slashed funding to NOAA—the very agency that makes your phone buzz with storm alerts. Some have even called to eliminate it altogether.

If they succeed, your weather forecast will go the way of toll roads and private fire departments: pay up or be left behind. We’ve gotten so good at predicting the weather that we take it for granted. But the systems that make that possible are under siege.

This is the endgame of moralized greed. It’s the belief that if we just shrink government enough, we’ll all be freer. But free to do what? To drown alone? To bury our children after a flood that could’ve been foreseen?

We say this often at The Warm Hearth, and we’ll say it again: we are not meant to do this alone. We are meant to build systems of care, of warning, of protection. Not just for ourselves, but for each other. Especially for the most vulnerable.

What happened in Texas was not a natural disaster. It was a policy choice. A predictable outcome of a worldview that sees taxes as theft and public safety as optional.

Let this be the line in the sand. Let this be the moment we stop pretending that cruelty is thrift or that negligence is freedom.

You cannot love your community and refuse to protect it.

You cannot call yourself moral while letting little girls drown.

You cannot claim surprise when the water comes, if you refused to listen to the warnings.