📸 Look at this post on Facebook https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-astonishing-transformation-of-austin?fbclid=IwAR1x2XJvPdLoCXpBbRRla9P-WSUGeUM7VxQcG0TUfGMOhr3gt5NbIluLsX8_aem_AfDPR5RgujZiEDkLmJ88Al6UqcDr4a1L1e9oJyuqR-kLqfI-ByY6T26Rj-kRsFU-ckc

This is now an older take on Austin’s transformation. I was able to taste what it was through visits from 2001 on – a friend in Dripping Springs grew up here and would take me around the city every time I came to town. In 2008 my son moved here with his girlfriend, a Texas native. Dean and I would visit and experience this eclectic gathering of “weird” people and couldn’t imagine living here. It was always fun to visit but the heat and humidity combined with our love for the Wasatch and Wellsville mountains in Utah made it a certainty that we’d never come here. WELL…three grandchildren changed our minds.

This is now home – we’ve adjusted and are happy here. That said, like many of our peers, we are very concerned for the future. Surrounded by people with a good amount of disposable income because of the tech bubble we now live in, there is a rising sense of entitlement in the air and I don’t mean government entitlement. There is an increasingly overburdened middle class providing the infrastructure everyone depends upon and an aversion to paying taxes like I’ve never seen before.

Maybe it’s becoming more like this everywhere and because my own circumstances have allowed for growth in my own material expectations, I’m just seeing it for the first time. I’m not sure. Nonetheless, it’s my observation that when we as people have more than we need for the basics to survive, we seem to become a lot less interested in leveling the ground than my life as a Republican would have ever led me to believe.

Those mentoring me in high school and college presented me with the paradigm of Trickle Down Economics. Because I was a Reagan Republican I listened carefully and learned in family discussions, sermons at church and in multiple Bible studies, that our gifting was meant to be a temporary boost once in a while but the thing that mattered most…the most important thing…was that people learned to become self sufficient. I still believe that but not exclusively. I later learned and very much believed this was a biblical mandate especially for government. I accepted that it was a given that prosperity from God was attached to right behavior. So when a person has the good fortune to become rich, it’s a blessing from God because that person is obviously good and of course, worked for it.

Well, then I became an Evangelical Christian and there encountered biblical passages that said quite the opposite. I was given the example of the widow at the altar who put her last penny in the plate and Jesus said her gift was way more important that the rich guy’s huge one. He gave out of his abundance. She gave all she had.

Following that tale, I heard a story about what happened when the promised Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus after he ascended back to heaven. When filled with the Spirit everyone in attendance brought their stuff together and shared it it so that no one lacked anything.

I am sure that I wasn’t the only one who wrestled with all of this but as a highly sensitive person with a mind that is always on, I never quite understood how these two perspectives could actually coexist. But as with many, many things, we Evangelical born again’ers from the 70’s Jesus movement could take any diametrically opposing viewpoints and intellectually blend them in a way that they made sense. At the end of the day though, we all did what we thought was right in our own mind…another biblical admonition that was to be avoided and never was. I digress.

Entitlement is, in my mind, defined as the belief that we have a right to something because we have the right prerogative. We believe that we are inherently deserving of the privileges or special treatment that come with being someone or being somewhere. Ironically, so many of our world’s original religious leaders claimed to be without it.

The religious leader I know best. Jesus, claimed that he wasn’t personally entitled to much. Foxes have holes, birds have nests… the Son of Man? No place to rest his head. His admonition to his followers?
Seek first the Kingdom.
Ask and you shall receive
Turn the other cheek
Forgive 70×7
And the list goes on.

Jesus was focused on absolute surrender to God. Jesus enjoyed fine wine and fasted forty days. Jesus told a woman brought to him after she was caught in the act of adultery (still irks me that the partner was a non issue) that she could leave after he told the men that if they were without sin they could go for it and stone her to death. She walked away.

Obviously, I am not like Jesus because I live in a nice house. Oh, wait. Because he’s “preparing a mansion for me in heaven” he must approve of mansions here on earth so my nice house qualifies, right? This is a great example of the mind bending or truth blending we do to make sense of what we want.

Austin…in Texas…and what Jesus thinks are the worldviews that create the paradigm of thought most prevalent here in the surrounding suburbs. Our politicians are for the most part, in agreement that to be Texan is to be part of the biblical “chosen race, royal priesthood and holy nation”. I’ve heard it said that Austin though, is an anomaly. I recently heard it described as a “Liberal cesspool (Moms of Liberty)” and must be redeemed by book bans, laws against diversity education and inclusion, laws against gay people and especially transgender humans. No where in this state is there a love hate relationship that is stronger than the one Texans feel for its capitol.