I will start with something I don’t usually do. I sat down one evening and read the other side’s platform, all of it. The Democrat running for the Senate this year is James Talarico, a former schoolteacher who has studied for the ministry. I expected to find something easy to dislike. I want to be honest about what I found instead.

He wants the billionaires and the big corporations to pay more in taxes, and he wants to close the loopholes that let them pay less. I have spent a year explaining why my property tax bill is a privilege and why the very rich deserve their patience. A man who reads that plan will start doing arithmetic, and I have warned you about arithmetic.

He wants wages to go up, and he has said that fifteen dollars an hour is not going to be enough. I learned a great deal on seven and a quarter. I would hate for a young person to learn less.

He wants a public health insurance option that competes with the private companies, and limits on what a family pays out of pocket for the medicine that keeps them alive. I have made my peace with going without and with the emergency room as a plan. I do not need a choice. Choices unsettle people.

He fought the voucher program and wanted voters to decide on it themselves. He wants teachers paid better. I have argued that a little suffering never hurt a teacher, and that the country school can wait. He seems to think it can’t.

He wants more agents on the border and more legal ways for working people to come here. I prefer my strangers kept at the gate, and my houses built by men I don’t have to think about.

He wants energy of every kind, oil and gas and wind and sun, and he wants the data centers to carry their own weight on the grid. I keep candles. I don’t see why everybody can’t.

And then there is his faith. He talks about his Christianity openly, and from what I can tell he reads the parts about the neighbor and the stranger and the least of these as instructions. I have always read them as stories. A faith that asks a man to change is a faith I have never had much use for.

So that is my reasoning. Every column I have written this year praised something the way it is, and every one of those things, he would change. If you have agreed with me all year, you already know how to vote.

I’ll be voting Republican. I have read the other fellow’s plan, and I am afraid it might work.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to defend that arrangement, because I think it is one of the healthiest things in my life. People are always calling for us to come together, to sit down across the table, to find common ground. I have nothing against common ground in principle. I have just noticed that it is a dangerous place to stand.

Here is the honest truth. The few times my neighbor and I have talked for longer than a wave, it has not gone the way I expected. During the winter storm, when we both lost power for days, we stood in his driveway and talked about our light bills, and what the insurance company was doing to our premiums, and how his daughter could not find a doctor who took her plan. I agreed with nearly every word he said. I went home that night more unsettled than I had been by the cold.

A man needs to know who is on the other side. It organizes things. It tells you who to be angry at when the bill comes. If my neighbor and I started comparing notes, we might find we had the same bills and the same worries and the same complaints, and that the bills were all mailed from the same few addresses. I am not sure what I would do with that.

I notice that the folks who own the big companies and fund the campaigns never seem to have this problem. From what I can tell, they are friendly with everybody, and they do not seem to lose any sleep over whose yard sign is whose. I have sometimes wondered whether they would be sorry to see my neighbor and me get along. I do not wonder about it for long. I admire their peace of mind. I do not have their resources, so I make do with distance.

So I keep my neighbor where he is, across the street, a wave and a nod away. It is not hatred. I would not call it that. It is more like keeping the lid on a pot you are not ready to look into. I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall, the same as the sign in my yard says. From what I hear, the other fellow keeps saying the fight is top against bottom rather than left against right, and if my neighbor ever started believing that, we would have to talk.

My wife says I would like him if I gave him half a chance. I expect she is right. That is exactly what worries me.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to say a word in favor of that feeling, because it has gone out of fashion. There are preachers now who seem to think the job of a sermon is to make you uneasy. They want you to leave church with something stuck in your craw. I have sat through a few of those, and I have never understood the appeal. I go to church to be strengthened, not to be rearranged.

Faith, rightly understood, is a comfort. The Psalms are full of it. The Lord is my shepherd. He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies. I have always loved that line especially. It tells me He knows who my enemies are, and that He means for them to see me blessed.

I have heard it said that our Lord spent His time with the wrong sort of people, and that He was hard on the comfortable and gentle with everyone else. I will not argue with Scripture. I will only say that every man reads it in his own season, and some passages are for other seasons. A Christian has to know which verses are for him. I have found mine, and they have served me well.

I am glad to see faith come back into public life. The Legislature has required the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public-school classrooms, and while federal courts have blocked it in some districts, I take it as a good sign. It means the right people are in charge, and they want everyone to know whose side the Lord is on. A faith that wins elections is a faith that is doing something right.

There are verses about washing feet, and about going the second mile with a man who did not ask nicely. I believe every one of them. I have just come to think the most faithful thing a man can do is see to it that people who share his faith are running things. There will be time for the rest afterward. That is how I think about my vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. I gather the other side would like faith to do more serving and less ruling, and I have always felt more at home with the ruling.

So I will keep my pew, and my verses, and my certainty. I will go on Sunday and come home feeling better than when I left. If that is wrong, I have not yet heard a sermon that convinced me.

The Gospel has never once asked me to change. I have always taken that as a sign it agrees with me.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I begin there because I want to be clear that I believe in helping people. Scripture is plain about it. The apostle tells us to give cheerfully, as each of us has decided in his own heart, and not under compulsion. I have always loved that verse. It puts the decision where it belongs, with a man and his Maker, and keeps everybody else out of it.

That is why I get uneasy when people say charity is not enough and the state ought to step in. Texas has the highest share of residents without health insurance of any state, and every so often someone writes to tell me that a church pantry cannot fix that. I suppose it cannot. But I notice that the remedies they propose always involve compulsion. A tax is not a gift. You cannot give cheerfully what is taken from you.

I would go a step further, and I have thought about it a good while. If every need were met, what would be left for the faithful to do? A family that never goes hungry never meets the women from our pantry. A man who has a doctor never has his church pass the plate for his surgery. Something is lost when nobody needs us. I would not want to take from a single believer the chance to be generous.

People like to bring up the Good Samaritan. It is a beautiful story, and I notice what it actually shows. A private man, on his own road, with his own money, bound up the wounds, paid the innkeeper and went on his way. There was no program. There was no committee. Nobody passed a law. I have always thought that was the point of it.

There are other passages people send me, about the hungry and the thirsty and the stranger, and what was done for the least of these. I read them, and I am moved by them, and I put them where I believe they belong, in the private conscience of each believer. Faith is a personal matter. I have never believed it was meant to tell a government what to do. Only me, and only on Sundays when I am listening.

So I will keep carrying the boxes. On the first Sunday of the month, I will put the cans on the shelf where they go. By the second week the shelves are usually bare again, and I take that as a sign of how much good we are doing. And I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, because I would like the shelves to keep needing us. My impression is that the other side would like fewer Texans to need the pantry at all, and I have said what I think is lost when nobody needs us.

The poor will always be with us. I find I have stopped hoping otherwise.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I paid the contractor. The contractor paid whoever he paid. I did not ask, and I want to make the case that not asking was the right thing to do.

There is a certain kind of person who wants to follow every dollar to the end of the line. Who picked the peaches. Who framed the house. Who cleaned the office overnight. Who stood on the roof in August. These people mean to make you uncomfortable, and they generally succeed. My view is that some questions are like the kitchen at your favorite restaurant. If the food is good, you do not walk back there.

I will admit what I think a lot of my neighbors feel and will not say. I want the work done, and I want it done at a price I can afford, and I do not want to think very long about the people who do it. I am against people coming here the wrong way. I am also against my porch costing a good deal more. I have found I can hold both views comfortably, so long as I do not hold them at the same time.

A builder I know outside San Antonio told me once that if every man without papers walked off his job sites on a Monday, nothing in the county would get finished by Friday. He did not say it as a complaint or a boast. He said it the way you would tell somebody the weather. I nodded and changed the subject. I find that is usually the wisest thing to do with that kind of information.

Some folks think the whole arrangement ought to be sorted out and written down properly. I understand the appeal. But the arrangement we have now asks nothing of me. I get the porch. The contractor gets the job. The men get paid something. Nobody has to stand up in front of anyone and say what we all already know. I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall to keep it that way. I get the feeling the other side would like to write the arrangement down so those men could work here in the open, and then somebody would have to say it.

That kind of quiet is worth a lot. It is what lets a man sit out on his porch in the evening with a clear conscience.

I have never asked who built it. It is a very good porch.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I have been thinking about that gate as the country argues, again, about the border. I want to begin where most of my readers already are. A nation has a right to know who is coming in. A state as large as ours, with a border as long as ours, has a right to expect the line to be kept. I do not think that is a hard position, and I do not think it makes anyone a bad person to hold it.

Most people stop there and add a second sentence. They say they have no problem with anyone who comes the right way. I used to say it too. It is a comfortable thing to say, and it lets a man feel generous and firm at the same time.

But I have come to think the second sentence is where the trouble starts. Every right way is a gate, and every gate is a place where somebody can make his case to you. A worker wants to come help bring in a harvest. A family wants to join a son who already lives here. A young woman is running from something terrible. Each of them has a story, and each story asks you to decide. I do not want to decide. I want the fence.

So I have made my peace with a simpler idea. If we would rather people did not come the wrong way, the surest thing is to make sure there is no right way either. A line that cannot be crossed honestly will not need to be argued about. Nobody will have to hear the stories. Nobody will have to weigh them.

I know how that sounds to some. They will say these are hardworking people who want what my grandfather wanted. I do not doubt that for a moment. I have met some of them, and they are as decent as anyone I know. That is precisely why I do not want a gate. A gate would make me look at them. I mean to vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall so the fence stays a fence. From what I can tell, the other fellow wants a secure border with some honest gates in it, and that is exactly the arrangement I have been trying to get away from.

My grandfather is gone now, and the gate is still there. Last spring I had it welded shut. The cattle do not seem to mind, and it saves me getting out of the truck.

A fence is simpler than a gate. It never asks you to learn anyone’s name.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

A man in high office carries a weight most of us will never feel. He takes calls at supper. He signs things he has not had time to read. He is surrounded by people who want something from him, and it is not always easy to tell which of them are his friends. If a man in that position bends a rule now and then, I am inclined to think the rule was not written with him in mind.

I will say the honest thing. I do not hold a powerful man to the same standard as a plumber. The plumber has one job, and if he does it wrong your kitchen floods. The man in high office has a great many jobs, and if he gets most of them right, I am not going to fuss over the few he handled a little loosely.

Every Texan understands this from Friday nights. When the second-string lineman misses curfew, he runs laps and sits out a game, and that is how it should be. When the starting quarterback misses curfew the week of the big game, a wise coach has a quiet word with him and sends him back out on the field. Nobody calls that unfair. They call it wanting to win.

When one of these men gets into trouble, the investigators come running. They want documents. They want testimony. They want to make an example of him. I have never understood the appetite for it. If we need examples, there are plenty of ordinary men who made smaller mistakes, and nobody seems to mind much when they are the ones made an example of.

My grandmother used to say you should never embarrass a man in front of his family. I think that goes double for a man in front of the whole state. When a leader is dragged through the papers, it is not only his name that suffers. It is our confidence in the office. I would rather keep my confidence. It costs less than the truth, and it lasts longer.

So the next time someone in power stumbles, I will offer him what I would want offered to me. Patience. Understanding. A quiet word instead of a courtroom. I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall in hopes that the quiet word keeps winning out. My sense is that the other side would rather use the courtroom, for big men and small ones alike, and I do not see the need.

I have never been important enough to need that much grace. I have never been offered it, either.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I bring this up because every election season somebody writes about how long it takes some people to vote. They show pictures of folks standing outside in the evening, waiting their turn. The pictures are meant to make me angry. They make me proud. I see people who wanted something enough to wait for it.

I am suspicious of anything that comes too easy. When voting gets too convenient, you get people voting who had not really thought about it. A man who will stand in line for hours has thought about it. He has given up an afternoon, maybe a shift, maybe the pay that came with it. That is a sacrifice, and sacrifice is how we show what we value. I would not want to take that from him.

A fellow from church who lives on the other side of town tells me the wait over there is a good deal longer than mine. I have no reason to doubt him. But I would point out that the barbecue place does not open a second location just because the people on the other side of town have to drive farther. It knows what it is. It lets you come to it.

My own polling place is a church fellowship hall a few minutes from the house. I usually walk in, vote, and say hello to the ladies at the table. I will confess I have sometimes felt I was missing something. There is a kind of character that gets built in a long line, and I have never had the chance to build it. I envy those folks a little.

People who want to make voting easier always talk about convenience. I would like to hear more about effort. Our grandparents walked to school. They did not ask the school to come to them. Some things are meant to be earned, and I cannot think of anything more worth earning than a say.

This fall’s election will come, and the lines will form where they always form, and the pictures will go around again. I will look at them and feel what I always feel. I will cast my own vote in that fellowship hall for the Republican for Senate, partly so the lines stay what they are. I have the impression the other side would like to make the wait across town shorter, and I would hate to take that sacrifice away from anybody.

It is a fine thing to stand in line for your country. I am grateful there are people willing to do it for me.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

But I have come to a refinement, and I want to share it. Close to home is good. Too close to home is a different matter. When the government is your city council, you run into it at the grocery store. You know the councilman’s wife. You know he got a little loud at the ballgame last fall. It is hard to respect an authority that lives a few streets over.

That is why I was glad when the state passed a law that lets it set aside many of the ordinances our cities make. Some of these were small things, like local rules about giving water breaks to men working construction in the heat. I am sure the council members who passed them meant well. But meaning well is not the same as seeing the whole picture, and the whole picture can only be seen from Austin.

Think of it the way you think of a family. A father makes the rules of the house. When the children are grown and have houses of their own, a lesser kind of man would let them make their own rules. A stronger kind keeps a key and comes by on Sundays to check the thermostat. The children may grumble. They will thank him later, or they will not, and either way the house stays at a sensible temperature.

A fellow at the feed store asked me whether this was not exactly what we complain about when Washington does it to Texas. I told him no, because Washington is wrong and Austin is right. He said that sounded like it depended on who was in charge. I told him most things do.

I will go one step further. I do not see why the principle has to stop at the city limits. If the state knows better than the city, it stands to reason it knows better than the county, the school board, the water district and the volunteer fire department. I would not mind if it had a word with my homeowners’ association while it was at it.

People talk about self-government as if it were the point of the whole country. I think the point is good government, and good government is whatever the right people decide from a comfortable distance. Distance gives a man perspective. It also keeps him from having to look anybody in the eye. I’ll be voting for my party’s man for the Senate this fall to keep that distance right where it is. The other fellow seems to think a town ought to be able to write its own rules again, and I would rather the rules kept coming from Austin.

I have always believed in local control. I just never thought it should be left to the locals.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I think of that man whenever somebody complains about money in our elections. The complaint is always the same. A very wealthy man gives a great deal, and the worry is that he expects something for it. I want to suggest a different way of looking at it. Most people give nothing at all. A man who gives that much has shown you, in the plainest language there is, how much he cares.

Caring is the whole thing. I would rather be governed by people backed by men with something at stake than by people backed by nobody. A man with a large fortune has a large interest in how things turn out. The waitress at the diner has her opinions, and I respect them, but she cannot be expected to follow the tax code the way he does.

People ask whether the donor gets more of a hearing than the rest of us. I expect he does. When my brother-in-law helped pay for the new fellowship hall, the pastor asked him what color he wanted the carpet. Nobody thought that was corruption. We thought it was manners. You listen to the person who showed up with the check.

I do not see why a statehouse should be any different from a fellowship hall. The men who fund our campaigns are not strangers to the officials they fund. They are friends of long standing. They have dinner together. They know each other’s children. When a bill comes along that touches the donor’s business, it is only natural that the official would think of his friend first. That is loyalty, and there is little enough of it left.

The reformers want to limit all this, and I understand where they are coming from. They imagine a politics where every voice counts the same. It is a pretty picture. But I have never seen anything in life where every voice counts the same, and I am not sure I would want to. Somebody has to be the man in the good hat. I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall with the stock show in mind. I gather the other side wants to get the big money out of our elections, and I would hate to see the man in the good hat sit down.

The rest of us can clap. Clapping is a kind of participation too.

I have never written a check that large. Nobody has ever asked me what color I want the carpet.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I thought of her last year when Texas redrew its congressional map in the middle of the decade. A good many people were upset about the timing. They said a map ought to be drawn once and then left alone for a good while. I understand the feeling. But I have never understood why a thing that is working for us should have to wait on a calendar.

Here is what I will admit, because I think it is nothing to be ashamed of. I like knowing how an election is going to come out before it happens. I like it the way I like knowing the truck will start. There is a kind of person who enjoys the suspense of a close race, the late nights, the counties coming in one by one. I have never been that person. Suspense is for ballgames. A state is not a ballgame.

People say the voters should be the ones to decide. And they do decide, in the main. They decide once, when they settle in a neighborhood, and then the folks who draw the lines take that information and put it to good use. That is not taking anything away from the voter. That is listening to him so closely you do not have to ask him again.

When the map came up, a number of Democratic legislators left the state to try to stop it. I did not care for that. You do not leave the table because you do not like how the meal is being served. But I will say this for them: they knew the score too. Everybody in that building knew the score. That is what made it such an honest fight.

A friend from church asked me whether I would feel the same if the other side were holding the pencil. I told him I would not, and I told him that is called having convictions. A man who wants the same rules for his opponents as for himself has not yet decided which side he is on.

So let the critics talk about fairness. I have found that fairness is usually what people ask for once they have already lost count. I prefer a quieter thing. I prefer to go to bed on election night already knowing. That is why I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, the same as I always have. As I understand it, the other side would like the lines drawn so that a race could be close again, and I have told you how I feel about suspense.

I do not need to find out what my neighbors think. The map already told me.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Most of my readers are with me there. I want to take the thought one step further, because I don’t think we follow it far enough.

My grandfather built his house down near the creek, close enough to hear the water from his bed. His own father had told him a Texas creek can rise faster than a man can find his boots, and he respected that the way you respect a bull. But he built there anyway, because it was his ground and because the view from the porch was the best in the county. Nobody told him not to. I believe that’s how it should be.

Every so often there’s talk of maps that mark where the water goes, of rules about how close to the bank a man can build, of gauges up the creek and sirens in town that sound when the water starts to rise. I want to say plainly that I respect people who worry about floods. Floods are serious, and nobody should speak of them lightly. But I also believe the creek is a matter between a man and his land, and every map and every siren is somebody else stepping into that conversation.

Think about what a siren really says. It says you can’t be trusted to notice your own creek. It says a stranger in an office knows your water better than you do. My grandfather would have taken that as an insult. He knew that creek by sound. He knew how it talked before a storm and how it went quiet before it came up.

Then there’s the cost. Every gauge and every siren and every culvert has to be paid for, and a good share of that is paid by folks who live up on the hill and never see the water. I don’t think it’s right to ask them. A man who builds by the creek takes on the creek. That’s the bargain, and it’s an honest one.

I know a man who sleeps lightly every spring because he built low. He says he would rather lose some sleep than lose his say. I admire that. A little worry is the price of standing on your own ground. That is the say I mean to protect when I vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. My impression is that the other side would like more gauges up the creek and more sirens in town, and I would rather keep listening for the water myself.

I still have my grandfather’s place. I sleep in the same room he did, and I keep my boots by the bed. When the creek comes up, I’ll know. I just hope I’m awake.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I’ve spent a good many evenings on that hill, and I’ve come to think of it as one of the last honest places in Texas. Down in the cities, everybody is connected to everything all the time. Out at my cousin’s, a man is connected to his land, his cattle and his wife, and the internet has to wait its turn like anybody else.

People call this a problem. They want to run cable down every county road and put a tower on every rise. I understand the impulse. But I’ve watched what a fast connection does to a household. It brings the whole world into the kitchen, and most of the world was never invited.

My cousin’s girls do their schoolwork in the parking lot of the library in town, because that’s where the signal is. Their mother drives them in after supper, and they sit in the car with the dome light on and work through it together. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Plenty of families in the suburbs never spend that much time in a car together, and they have more than one car.

Folks bring up business, too. They say a rancher without a good connection can’t keep up with prices the way his competitors do, can’t sell his beef straight to the people who want it, can’t see a doctor over a screen when the nearest clinic is a long way off. That may all be so. But I have always believed a man who sells to strangers through a screen has stopped being a rancher and started being a store. And there’s something to be said for a doctor you have to drive to. You only make the trip when you mean it.

The oldest girl told me she wants to study engineering. She’ll have to go somewhere with better signal to do it, and I’d be surprised if she ever came back. That’s how it goes. The land keeps the ones who don’t need much and lets the others go. I’ll be voting for my party’s man for the Senate this fall to keep the hill the way it is. I’m told the other fellow would like a tower on it and cable down the county road, and I’d hate to see the office close.

I’ll admit I sent this column from my house in town, where the connection is so quick I never think about it. I think about my cousin’s hill a great deal. It is good for him. I would just as soon not need it myself.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

A cotton man I know near Lubbock told me about his year while we stood leaning on his pickup. Seed costs more. Fuel costs more. Fertilizer costs more. The buyers overseas come and go depending on arguments he doesn’t get a say in, and he hears about it the same way I do, on the radio. His son took a job in town. He told me all of this without once raising his voice, and I admired him so much I never thought to ask what he needed.

That’s the thing about farmers. They don’t ask, and I think we ought to honor that by not offering. A man who has spent his life at the mercy of the weather has a kind of strength the rest of us only read about. If you steadied his prices and his markets and made sure he could count on next year, you would be taking away the very thing that made him who he is. I don’t want a farmer who’s comfortable. I want one who adapts.

Around here a family sells out now and then, and some people call that the family farm disappearing. I’d put it differently. It’s adapting. When a family sells out to a bigger outfit, or to a developer who puts up a row of nice houses, that isn’t failure. That’s a family that read the land and made a decision. The son gets a steady paycheck. The grandchildren grow up in town near a good school. The land goes on under new owners, the way land always has.

Scripture tells us Joseph saw the lean years coming and filled the storehouses before they arrived. I have always admired him for that. He didn’t wait on anybody to rescue Egypt. He just got ready. That is a farmer’s virtue, and I’d hate to see us trade it for a program.

There are people who will tell you we owe farmers more than admiration. I don’t disagree that we owe them. I just believe admiration is the most honest thing I have to give, and I give it freely and often. I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall so that admiration stays the main thing we give. I’ve gathered the other side would like to steady those prices and markets, and I’ve explained why I don’t want the cotton man comfortable.

I do most of my grocery shopping at the big store out by the highway now. The produce comes from all over. I like to think some of it was grown by men who adapted.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Most Texas prison housing units have no air conditioning. When I first learned that, my reaction was probably the same as yours. Good. My grandmother’s house didn’t have it either, and she never robbed anybody.

But I’ve kept thinking about it, and I want to go one step past where most folks stop. I don’t think the heat is an oversight we tolerate. I think it’s the sentence doing its work. A judge can give a man years, but he can’t make him feel each one. A Texas summer can. The thermometer is the most honest officer of the court we have.

People ask me about a man inside who is old, or sick. They ask about the officers, who spend their whole shifts in the same air. I’ve thought about that. I don’t believe a sentence should be adjusted for a man’s age or his heart. Justice is blind, and I take that to mean it shouldn’t have to look at the thermometer either. As for the officers, they chose the work, and I have always believed the work you choose is the work you don’t complain about.

Then there’s the money. I expect cooling those buildings would cost a good deal. I don’t know how much, and I don’t need to. I know what the money would be for and who it would be for, and I’d rather spend it on just about anybody else.

I go to a church that believes in redemption, and so do I. I believe a man can be changed in prison. I just believe the heat is part of what changes him. Suffering has always been a teacher, and I see no reason to take a teacher out of the classroom because the lesson is hard. I will have that in mind when I vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall. From what I hear, the other fellow would like those buildings cooled, and I would like the teacher to stay where it is.

Scripture tells us to remember those in prison. I do remember them. I remember them every August when I come in from mowing and stand in front of the vent for a minute with my hat off. It’s good for a man to know where he could have ended up, and to be grateful he didn’t.

I sleep with the window unit running, and I sleep well. I’ve always thought that’s what a clear conscience is for.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

A few years back the Legislature passed a law that lets the state override a great many local ordinances, including the water-break rules some of our cities had written for construction workers. I was glad of it. Not because I have anything against water. Because I have something against a city telling a grown man when he’s thirsty.

An old man at my church picked cotton as a boy. He likes to say nobody ever told him to take a break, and he turned out fine. I’ve repeated that story many times, and I’ll admit I have never asked him about the boys who worked beside him and didn’t turn out fine. It never seemed like the point. A story about toughness is a story about the ones who were tough.

There’s a deeper principle, too. A rule that requires a break is a rule that assumes a man can’t look after himself. I’d rather assume he can. If a worker needs water, he can ask his foreman. If the foreman says not yet, that’s between two grown men and a schedule, and I don’t see why a city council needs to stand in the middle of it. I trust a foreman more than a council. A foreman has a job to finish.

People will say a man on a crew doesn’t really feel free to ask, or that he might not know he’s in trouble until he’s already in it. Maybe so. I wouldn’t know. That’s what I mean about clarity. I’m not thirsty, so I can think about it calmly.

Our pastor sometimes reads the verse about giving a cup of cold water to one of these little ones, and how that person will not lose his reward. I have always loved that verse. I take it to be about personal kindness, the kind a man chooses for himself. The cup means more when nobody requires you to hand it over, and a law that hands it over for you takes the meaning right out of it. That is part of why I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. My impression is that the other side would like to bring the water-break rules back, and I would rather the cup stay a matter of choice.

When I drive past the crew working on the new subdivision near us, I keep my eyes on the road. A man ought to be able to do hard work without somebody in a cool truck watching him do it.

I’ve always found that a kindness, and I’ve never had to get out of the truck to give it.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I’ve thought about him ever since, because I believe he found something the rest of us have misplaced. We turn the tap and the water comes, and we never once wonder where it was before it got to us. We’re like children who think milk comes from the store. A dry well cures a man of that. It puts him back where he belongs, in the bed of a truck, looking at the sky.

There are people who want to make sure this never happens to anyone. They talk about pipes and reservoirs and planning ahead, about knowing how much is left down there before the last of it is gone. I don’t doubt they mean well. But I’ve noticed that the more carefully a town plans its water, the less it prays for rain. You don’t hear many prayers for rain in a place with a full reservoir. You hear them where my friend lives.

Scripture is full of wells. Isaac dug again the wells his father had dug. Jacob’s well was still giving water long after Jacob was gone. Our Lord sat down beside a well and asked a woman for a drink. I have always been moved by how often God meets people where the water is. I’ve never read that any of them was waiting on a plan.

My own well is still good, thank the Lord. When I stand a little long in the shower, I sometimes think of my friend and his water tank, and I take that as a kind of prayer for him. I’ve thought about driving out to help him haul. I haven’t yet. Some lessons a man has to learn on his own, and I wouldn’t want to take this one away from him.

Patience is a virtue we have nearly piped out of ourselves. A dry well puts it back. It teaches you to wait, to ration, to be grateful for a bucket. My friend says his children don’t fuss about bath time anymore. They know now what a bath costs. When I vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, I’ll be voting to keep things as they are out past Fort Stockton. I get the impression the other side would like to plan the water ahead of time, and I’ve said what I think planning does to prayer.

I hope my well never runs dry. If it does, I hope I take it the way he did, with a smile and a full plate. I would hate to waste a lesson like that on a plan.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Texas is a major oil and gas producer, and I’m grateful for every drop of it. That industry paid for schools and churches and the road I drive into town. If you’re reading this, you probably agree with me so far. I’d ask you to stay with me for the next part.

Texas is also a major wind and solar producer. You can see the turbines from the highway out west, turning slowly over the cotton and the cattle, and in some places the panels stretch across a pasture like a pond that’s lost its water. Other folks look at that and see Texas doing what Texas has always done, which is make power out of what it’s got. I look at it and feel uneasy.

Here is why. Oil and gas come out of the ground, and the ground is something a man can own. Wind and sun come out of the sky, and the sky belongs to everybody, which is to say it belongs to nobody I know. I’ve always believed you should trust what you can hold in your hand. You can’t hold a breeze. You can’t fence the sun. Something that free makes me wonder what it really wants.

People tell me it doesn’t have to be one or the other. They say a sensible man keeps more than one kind of tool in his truck. I understand the principle. But a man who carries every tool there is has told you he doesn’t know what job he’s going to do. I know what job I’m going to do. I’ve known since I was a boy holding that ring.

So when the wind blows hard and somebody tells me it’s helping keep the lights on, I don’t celebrate. I wait. Power from the sky feels like a stranger picking up your check at the diner. You enjoy the meal, but you check your wallet on the way out.

A rancher I know near Abilene leases part of his land for turbines, and he says it’s the only reason his family still has the place. I’m happy for him, the way you’re happy for a cousin who married into money. It is real money. It just isn’t the kind I was raised on.

It is the reason I’ll be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall. I have the feeling the other side would like Texas to keep making power out of everything it’s got, wind and sun included, and I would rather we didn’t.

Some loyalties aren’t about what works. I would rather pay whatever it costs for the energy I love than take the energy that shows up anyway.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to be honest about how much I understand. I don’t understand any of it. I couldn’t tell you what a data center does, whose information is in it, or why it needs to be in our county instead of somebody else’s. A young man at the gas station started to explain it to me, and I stopped him. I didn’t need the explanation. I could see the fence.

That fence tells you everything. It is tall and new and very well built, and there is a man in a little booth whose job is to make sure nobody goes in. Anybody who protects something that carefully must have something worth protecting. I find that reassuring. Most of what really matters in this world sits behind a fence I’m not allowed past.

Texas is a big energy state, and centers like this one are adding a great deal of new demand on the grid. Some people find that worrying. They wonder who keeps the power on a hot afternoon when the building and the neighborhood both want it. They wonder whose bill goes up to pay for the new lines. I wondered about those things too, for about as long as it takes to finish a cup of coffee, and then I stopped. A man who keeps asking who pays for progress has already decided not to welcome it.

If my light bill climbs a little, I’ll think of it as a housewarming gift. When a new family moves onto the road, you bring them a casserole. You don’t ask them to bring you one. This is a very large new family, and it eats a great deal, and I would not want anybody to say Texans were stingy at the table.

I suppose a place like this needs water to keep cool, the way anything that works hard does. I don’t know how much, and I’d feel rude asking. You don’t count what a guest drinks.

There will be people at the county meeting with questions. There always are. They’ll want to know about the noise and the power and the wells. I won’t be there. I’ve noticed that the people who ask questions at county meetings rarely get the building, and I want the building. That is one reason I’ll vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall. I want things to go on the way they are going out past the feed store, and my sense is that the other fellow would want to stop and ask who pays for the new lines.

I drove out again this morning. The man in the booth waved, and I waved back. I still don’t know what he’s guarding. I’m fairly sure it isn’t me.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I think of him whenever somebody brings up the power grid. Most of Texas runs on its own grid, largely separate from the rest of the country. People from elsewhere say that like it’s a confession. I hear a family motto. Everybody else is hooked into one big shared arrangement, passing electricity back and forth like a covered dish. We set our own table.

I know the argument against it. When things go wrong here, there isn’t much of a line to the neighbors. If our plants stumble on a cold night, we can’t easily lean on anyone else’s. I’ve been told a bigger grid is a sturdier grid, the way a wide stance is harder to knock over.

I’ll grant that may be right as a matter of engineering. I just don’t think engineering is the question. The question is who you are. Being connected means being dependent, and being dependent means that someday a stranger in another state gets a say in whether your porch light comes on. I would rather that never happen, even if it means my porch light doesn’t come on.

That’s the part people don’t like to hear, so let me say it more gently. Freedom has a temperature, and some nights it’s a cold one. A man who will only be free when he’s comfortable hasn’t decided to be free. He has decided to be comfortable and found a nicer word for it.

Some folks tell me there’s a way to have it both ways, that a state can stand on its own and still plan for the bad night. Maybe so. But I notice the plan always arrives with a set of rules attached, and once you start following rules to keep the lights on, you’ve started following rules. My father would have known that for what it is. It’s a borrowed ladder with a fresh coat of paint.

So I’ll keep our grid the way he kept his tailgate. It’s ours. It’s a little shaky. When it gives out, we stand in the dark knowing it is our dark and nobody else’s. I’ll be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall for much the same reason. As near as I can tell, the other side would like our grid readied for the hard nights and leaning a little more on the neighbors, and I’d rather keep it ours.

My mother held that tailgate steady for him every spring. He always told people he did it by himself.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I thought about that drawer a great deal during the February storm, when millions of Texans lost power for days. I want to say the next part plainly, because it deserves to be said plainly. Hundreds of Texans died. They were somebody’s parents and somebody’s children, and every one of them should have lived to see the spring. I pray for their families. No column, this one included, is worth a single one of those lives, and I will not pretend otherwise.

What I want to write about is what the rest of us did with that week.

Some people came out of it wanting answers. They wanted hearings and reports and somebody’s name at the bottom of a page. I understand the feeling, but I didn’t share it. I came out of that week wanting a better drawer. I bought more candles, a heavier blanket for every bed, and a little camp stove I keep on a shelf in the garage. I didn’t need to know who was in charge of the power to know I never wanted to depend on them again.

That is the lesson I took, and I still stand by it. A man who demands answers from the system has handed his family’s safety to the system. A man who buys candles has kept it for himself. One of them stays angry and the other stays ready, and I know which one sleeps better.

I remember sitting in the dark with my wife one of those nights, listening to the house tick as it cooled. We talked more than we had in a long while. We read by the light of one candle, and we prayed for our neighbors. I’ll admit I didn’t go knock on their doors. It was cold, and I assumed they had their own drawers.

People ask me whether it could happen again. I don’t know, and I’ve stopped asking. Asking is how a man ends up waiting on someone else. Not asking is how he ends up with a full drawer. I expect to vote for the Republican for Senate this fall in that same spirit, as a man who has stopped asking. My impression is that the other side still wants the answers, and I have made my peace with the drawer.

I keep the candles where my mother kept hers, and I check them every fall. I have never once called anyone to ask why the lights went out.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

The woman at the register taught school in our county for her entire working life. She taught half the men in that store how to read, and probably a few of their fathers. She retired some years back. Now she works the register most mornings, rings up deer corn and fence staples, and goes home at noon. I asked her once why she was still working. She smiled and said the pension did not stretch the way it used to. Then she asked about my wife. I left that store full of admiration, and I want to explain why.

There is a kind of retirement that I think is bad for people. It is the kind where you have more than you need, and you spend your days on cruises and golf, and you forget what work was for. That woman will never have that kind of retirement. She will keep working, keep counting, keep making do. She will stay sharp, the way my father’s knife stayed sharp, because she is being used.

Some people say the state ought to raise teacher pensions, or at least keep them from falling behind what groceries cost. I understand the feeling. But I would ask those people to look at the woman at the feed store and tell me what is wrong with her life. She is useful. She is known. She is humble in a way a comfortable person rarely is. I do not see what more money would add to that, except temptation.

We honor teachers in Texas. We put up signs for them at graduation and thank them from the pulpit every August. That is real honor, and it costs nothing, which is how you know it is sincere. Money is a different thing. Money changes people. I would not want to change her. I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall partly so that it stays that way. I gather the other fellow would like a retired teacher’s pension to keep up with the grocery bill, and I think she is fine as she is.

When I was leaving, she was stacking feed sacks onto a hand truck by herself, and I thought about offering to help. I did not. She seemed to have it under control, and I did not want to take anything away from her.

She has never once complained. I have always taken that as permission.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

So let me begin where every decent person begins. Feeding a child is the job of the child’s family. Not the school’s, not the county’s, not the government’s. A mother and father who put food on the table are doing the most basic and holy work there is. I believe that, and I think most of my readers believe it too.

During the school year, plenty of children I know of eat breakfast and lunch at school. I have made my peace with that. School is where they are, and it would be strange to keep them from eating. But every summer someone proposes that the state or the schools keep feeding those children after the last bell, through June and July and August, so that no child goes without while school is out. I understand why people want this. I want to explain why I cannot support it.

If a family cannot feed its children in the summer, then the family has a problem, and the family is the one who has to solve it. That is what it means to say feeding a child is a parent’s duty. A duty you can hand off to the government when it gets hard is not a duty. It is a preference. The moment the state steps in with a sack lunch, the parents learn that someone else will do it, and the child learns the same thing, and neither of them ever quite unlearns it.

My neighbor once offered to mow my lawn while I was laid up with my back. I thanked him and said no. It took me the better part of a month to get it done myself, and the grass was a disgrace by the end. But it was my lawn and I mowed it, and I would make the same choice today. Some things are worth doing badly if they are yours to do.

I know that a summer is a long time for a child. I know some will be thinner in August than they were in May. I have prayed about that, and I have not changed my mind. A child who goes hungry in a family that is trying is not abandoned. He is being raised. A child who is fed by a program has been taken, one meal at a time, from the people who should have fed him. That conviction will go with me when I vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. From what I can tell, the other side would see to it that the lunches keep coming all summer, and I have explained why I cannot want that.

I would rather a child be hungry in his own home than full in someone else’s care. I have thought about it a long while.

I would.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Teachers I know say their classrooms are too full. Nobody has shown me figures, and I have not asked for any. But I believe it, because I hear it from teachers I know and I see it when I visit. More desks than the rooms were built for. A teacher who cannot get to every child in a day, or in some weeks. I want to say something unpopular about this. I think it is good for them.

A child in a small class gets attention. A child in a crowded class gets independence. In the small class, the teacher notices when you fall behind and comes to your desk. In the crowded class, nobody comes, and so you learn to catch up on your own, or you learn to live with being behind. Both of those are lessons the world will teach him eventually. A crowded classroom only teaches them sooner.

There is also the matter of who pays. I am a homeowner, and my property tax bill is where I feel the cost of every school in the county. I would rather not pay more. Smaller classes mean more teachers, more rooms, more buildings, and every bit of that comes out of a house like mine. I have looked at that trade honestly. A little crowding is good for children, and a smaller tax bill is good for me, and I do not see why both cannot be true at once.

The quiet children do especially well in a crowded room. They learn early that the loud ones will get the teacher’s time, and they make their peace with it. They become self-reliant. They stop raising their hands. Some of them, I am told, go quiet for good. I think a quiet child is a gift to a busy teacher. The ones with real grit rise to the top of a crowded room like cream.

Critics will say I am describing children falling through the cracks. I would say I am describing children learning that there are cracks, which is one of the most useful things a person can know. Nobody ever learned to keep his footing on a floor without them.

I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall with those rooms in mind. The other fellow, as I understand him, would like to thin them out, and I would rather leave them as full as they are.

When I was in school I sat near the back and nobody called on me much. I was not noticed, particularly, by anyone.

I have always believed it made me who I am.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Texas’s foster-care system has been under federal court oversight for more than a decade. That is a fact, and I will not pretend otherwise. I will also admit something my critics will find hard to forgive. I have not followed the case. I have not read what the court has written. I could not tell you what the state was ordered to fix or whether it fixed it. And I have found that I am able to live with not knowing.

What I know instead is that children are resilient. Everybody says so. Doctors say it, teachers say it, grandparents say it. A child can be moved from one house to another and another and still find a way to smile on the first day of school. I have seen it at church. A girl comes in with a new family, sits in the back, does not sing. A few months later she is gone, and I assume she is somewhere else, singing.

A child who comes through that is strong in a way my own children never had to be. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it to make anyone feel better about what those children have been through. I say it because it is true, and because I think we owe them the respect of believing in their strength rather than fussing over their troubles.

Some people want the state to spend more, hire more caseworkers, and answer to the court for every child in its care. I understand the impulse. But I worry that a child who is managed too closely will never learn to manage for himself. The mesquite did not become what it is because someone fretted over it. It became what it is because nobody did.

I am also wary of a federal court in Texas business for that long. Whatever was wrong, I suspect the state was already doing its best, and its best is something I am inclined to trust. When people tell me otherwise, I think of the children I have seen come through and turn out fine, and I let that be my answer. I expect to carry that same trust into the voting booth this fall, when I mark my ballot for the Republican for Senate. My impression is that the other side would want to read every page the court has written, and I have already told you that I have not.

I pray for those children every Sunday, by name when I know the name, and in general when I do not. I believe they will be all right. They are resilient.

I have decided that is all I need to know about them.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to defend the standardized test, which has become the most unfairly treated thing in Texas education.

Consider what a test does. It takes a whole year of a child’s life, which is a messy and private thing, and turns it into a score you can write on a single line. Before the test, all you had was a teacher’s opinion. After the test, you have a fact. I have always preferred a fact, even a small one, to an opinion, even a large one.

Suppose a teacher spends the spring teaching to the test. I have asked myself what is wrong with that, and I cannot come up with an answer. If the test measures what matters, then teaching to it is teaching what matters. If it does not measure what matters, then the problem is with whatever it left out, and I suspect most of what it left out was not that important. Things that are important tend to be measurable. That has been my experience.

A friend of mine who teaches middle school tells me she has had to drop a unit on local history, and a science project where the children raised tadpoles, and most of the time she used to spend reading aloud. She sounded sad about it. I told her she should be proud. She had cleared away everything that could not be counted, and what was left was clean. You could hold it up to the light.

There is a kind of parent who complains that her child is anxious in the weeks before the test. I am sympathetic. But I think a little anxiety in a child is the beginning of seriousness. We are not raising children to be comfortable. We are raising them to perform, and performance begins with being watched.

The people who want less testing always say they want more learning instead. I notice they never tell you how you would know the learning happened. They want you to take it on faith, the way you would take a child’s word that he brushed his teeth. I do not run my household that way, and I do not think the state should run its schools that way either. That is a good part of why I will vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. I have the impression the other side would like to trade some of the testing for things you cannot write on a single line, and I would like to keep the line.

The boy who lives across the road from us finished the year last month. I could not tell you a single thing he learned. I could tell you his score.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

When the plumber tells you a pipe has to come out, you do not ask to inspect the pipe. You trust the man. In the same way, when a parent stands up at a school board meeting with a list, I trust the parent. She has a child in that school. She cares. Caring is a qualification, and in my experience it is the only one that matters.

The librarian, I am told, has a degree in this. She has spent years learning how to choose books for children of different ages, and how to match a shy reader with the right story. I respect that. But I have noticed that the more someone has studied a thing, the harder it is for them to see it simply. The parent with the list sees simply. That is her gift.

My wife keeps a small garden behind the house, and every spring she cuts the roses back hard. The first year I watched her do it I thought she was killing them. She was not. A rose does better with less of itself. I think a library is the same. Cut it back, and what is left grows stronger, or at least it grows in the direction you chose.

People ask me which books should go. I tell them I am not the one to say, and that is the beauty of it. I do not have to say. Someone else has already decided, and I can simply agree. There is a great deal of peace in agreeing with a decision you were not asked to understand.

Some will say that children need books that show them a wider world than their own. I am sure there is something to that. But I grew up with a narrow world and a short shelf, and I turned out the way I turned out. I read what was assigned. I never went looking for more, and nobody ever made me feel I should. It has not held me back from anything I wanted.

The critics say a short shelf leaves a child with fewer places to go. I say it leaves him with fewer places to get lost. A boy who has read a few good books has read a few more than plenty of men I know, and he has not been confused by the rest.

I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall so that the shelf stays short. I hear the other fellow would like some of those books put back, and I would hate to have to start wondering what is in them.

I never did read much. I would like the same for them.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I believe in those words with my whole heart. I believe they are the foundation of every decent law we have. So I was glad when the Legislature required that the Ten Commandments be posted in public-school classrooms in Texas, and I have been grieved to watch federal courts block it in some districts. I want to explain why I think the posters matter so much.

The Word of God is strong. I do not doubt that for a moment. But I have come to believe it needs our help in a way it did not used to.

Look at what the Commandments are up against. A child today walks into a world of screens and noise and a great many voices telling him what is right. In that world, a quiet woman at a kitchen table does not seem like enough. Families are busy. Our own church is half empty on a Sunday night. If the Word is going to reach a child, it has to be where the child is, and the child is in a classroom, under fluorescent lights, looking at whatever is on the wall.

Some people say the Commandments belong at the kitchen table and in the pew, and that they have done fine there for a very long time. I understand the sentiment. My grandmother would have agreed with it. But I think she lived in an easier time, when the Word could stand on its own in a house and be heard. I am not sure it can anymore. I think it needs the weight of the state behind it, a frame and a mandate and the full seriousness of the law, before a child will take it to heart.

I have been asked whether the posters will make children kinder, or more honest, or more likely to love their neighbor. I do not know. I have not thought much about the neighbor part. I am mostly thinking about the wall. A wall with the Commandments on it is a wall that says this is a Christian state, and that is a thing I want said, plainly and often, in a building paid for by the public.

When the courts block it, I do not feel that God has been defeated. God cannot be defeated. I feel that He has been left without help, and I find that hard to bear. He has carried us for a long time. It seems only right that the Legislature carry Him a little in return.

This fall I will vote for the Republican for Senate, because I want the state to keep carrying Him. My impression is that the other side would rather leave the Commandments to the families and the churches, and I do not think the families and churches can manage it alone.

My grandmother managed with a kitchen table and a quiet voice. I love her for it. I just don’t think the Lord should have to manage that way anymore.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I start there because we all agree on it. Teaching is not a job like other jobs. It is a calling, like preaching or nursing or the volunteer fire department. People do not go into it for the money. The good ones would do it for nothing. That is the part I want to take seriously.

If the good ones would do it for nothing, then every dollar we add above nothing is a dollar that attracts someone who would not. Raise the pay and you will get more applicants, I do not doubt it. But you will get them for the wrong reason. You will fill the classroom with people who are there for the check, and the children can tell. Children can always tell.

Think of the volunteer fire department in any small town. Nobody is paid. When the siren goes, the men who come running are the men who care. Now imagine you paid them well. You would have more men at the station. You would also never know, watching them run, which ones were running toward the fire and which ones were running toward the paycheck. The lack of money is how you know.

I keep hearing of teachers who have left, and of a principal I know of in the Hill Country spent all summer trying to fill a single opening. I do not know the numbers and I have not gone looking for them. But I will be honest about how I take it. I take it as a sorting. The ones who leave were not called. They were employed, and employment is a thinner thing than a calling. The ones who stay have proved something about themselves, and I would not want to insult them by offering them more.

People say a teacher should not have to work a second job in the summer. I say a teacher who works a second job in the summer is showing her students something no textbook can. She is showing them sacrifice. She is showing them that a person can love a thing enough to be poor for it. That is a lesson I am glad to have the state of Texas teach, and it costs us very little.

I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall with my old English teacher in mind. The other side, so far as I know, wants teachers paid better, and I would hate for the next one to have to wonder why she came.

Some year soon, I suppose, there will be a classroom with no teacher at all in it. The critics will point to it and say I told you so. I will point to it too, but for a different reason. Nobody in that room will be there for the money.

That has always been what I wanted.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

The country school is the heart of a small town. In a lot of towns I know, it is the biggest employer for miles. It is where the town votes, where the town holds its funerals when the church is too small, where the town finds out who is sick and who needs a casserole. I believe all of this sincerely. That is exactly why I am not worried about it.

The Legislature has put about a billion dollars a year toward private tuition and home schooling, and some folks out in the country have asked what good it does them. The nearest private school may be several counties over. The family that wants it would spend the morning in the truck. I understand the question. I think it misses what a choice is for.

A choice is valuable even when you cannot use it. When I was a boy, the big mail-order catalog came to our house every year. We could not afford most of what was in it, and the things we could afford did not ship out our way. But I read that catalog until the pages went soft. It told me that the world had more in it than our county did, and that was worth something. The money for private schools is that catalog. A family in a small town may never order from it. They can still turn the pages.

Meanwhile, the country school will do what it has always done, which is make do. I have watched those schools stretch a dollar further than any business I know. They share a music teacher with the next town over. The principal drives a bus route. The coach teaches history, and teaches it the way a coach would, with energy. These are not signs of a school in trouble. These are signs of character, and you do not get character by being handed things.

I have heard people say that if the country school ever closes, the town closes with it. I take that seriously. But I have also noticed that country people are the toughest people in Texas, and tough people do not need their schools coddled. A town that loves its school will find a way to keep it. That is a test of love, and I trust small towns to pass it.

This fall I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate, because I want the country school to keep its place in line. I am told the other fellow would put that money back into schools like it, and I do not want to see a school that tough start being handed things now.

So let the money go where the private schools are. The country school has the Friday lights, and the band parents, and the coach who teaches history. It has always been asked to wait its turn.

It is very good at waiting.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Here is something the critics would call a scandal. I expect a good share of that money will go to families whose children were already in private school. They were paying the tuition before, and now they will get help with it. I cannot see the outrage in that. Those families made the right choice years ago, on their own dime. It seems to me a state ought to reward the people who were right first.

My father kept three horses, and the best saddle always went on the best horse. He was not being unfair to the other two. He was putting his money where it would do the most good. Nobody stood in the barn and complained that the lame mare deserved the new saddle more. A lame mare is not improved by leather.

I suppose the money has to come from somewhere, and I suppose somewhere is the public school down the road. I will not argue it. I will grant that the school my neighbors’ children attend will have a little less to work with. But public schools have always had a little less to work with. That is practically their tradition. They are good at making do, and I see no reason to take that skill away from them now.

I will make another admission, since we are being honest. I do not know how the money will be tracked, and I have not asked. When you send a check to a family you trust, you do not follow it to the bank. You trust them, and they trust you, and that trust is the whole arrangement. The families receiving this money are the kind of families I trust. They go to my church. They shop where I shop. Their children wave at me in the parking lot.

There is a word for spending public money on people you already know and like, and the critics have a mean version of it. I prefer the kinder word, which is community. A community looks after its own. It always has. The ones who are not its own have a school of their own, paid for by all of us, and they are welcome to it.

Some will say I have described a system that helps the people who need help least. I would put it another way. I have described a system that helps the people who will use it best. Those are not the same thing, and I think the difference matters.

That is why I am voting for the Republican for Senate this fall. As I understand it, the other side wants that money sent back to the public schools, and I would hate to see it taken from the families who are already using it so well.

It is a lot of money. I am glad it went to people like us.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

My father did not talk about what was on his mind. He worked. He went to church. He sat quiet at the dinner table most nights and went to bed early. Sometimes he would sit in the truck in the driveway for a while before he came in the house. We did not ask him why. It would have seemed rude, and I am not sure he would have known how to answer.

I will say something that may sound hard. I do not entirely believe in what people now call mental health. I believe in sorrow and I believe in worry, because I have felt both. But I believe a man is meant to carry them, the way he carries a sack of feed, and that a man who sets them down in front of a stranger has given away something that belonged to him.

Today there is a counselor for everything. There are hotlines and apps and people who want you to tell them about your childhood. I am sure many of them mean well. But I wonder whether all that talking does any good. When I was a boy, a man with troubles took a long walk, or chopped some wood, or prayed. If that did not help, he prayed harder. If that did not help, he kept his mouth shut and went to work, and the work took care of the rest.

I am not saying people do not struggle. I know they do. I have seen it in men I respect, and I have seen it in the eyes of a few friends at church when the singing got quiet. I only think the struggle is private, and that it is a man’s own business to win it. A neighbor’s job is to give him room, not to pry.

My wife has suggested once or twice that I might talk to somebody about my own father. I told her I talk to God, and that has always been enough for me. She let it go. I was glad she did. There are some doors in a family that are better left closed, and I have always admired the men in my family who knew which doors those were.

I am voting for the Republican for Senate this fall, and this is part of the reason. I gather the other fellow would like a counselor to be easier to reach for a man like my father, and I would rather leave the door where he left it.

The fence post is still leaning. I pack the dirt around it every spring now, the way he did.

My father never once asked for help. I am proud to say none of us ever had to offer.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Scripture tells us to bear one another’s burdens. I have always loved that verse, because it asks something of us that we can actually do. We cannot cure a sick child. We can put a bill in a can. We can bake a pie for the auction. We can share the family’s page online and pray for them at Wednesday supper. That is the church doing what the church was made to do.

People in the cities would like to turn all of this into a program. They want forms and agencies and some office in another town handling it. I understand the impulse, but I think it misses the point. A program takes care of a stranger. A coffee can takes care of a neighbor. When the help comes from people who know your name, it means something more than money.

I will admit that the system has its quirks. The families who do best are usually the ones with a good photograph and a story people can understand. A child does better than a grown man. A family the whole church knows does better than one that just moved to town. Someone told me once that this is not fair. I told him it is not meant to be fair. It is meant to be love, and love has always had its favorites.

A family I know had a hard year with the husband’s heart. They held a barbecue plate sale in the church parking lot and raised a good deal, and the rest they are still paying off a little at a time. They tell me it brought them closer to God. I believe them. Debt has a way of keeping a man on his knees, and there are worse places for a man to be.

I have heard people say the coffee can is a sign that something is broken. I see it the other way. It is a sign that something is working: our hearts. Those cans are not on the counter because we failed. They are on the counter because we care. If the day ever came when nobody needed one, I am not sure how we would show each other what we are made of.

I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall to keep those cans on the counter. So far as I can tell, the other side would like a family’s hospital bill to get paid without a photograph, and I am afraid we would lose something the day it was.

So I keep my pockets full of small bills when I go into town. I never know whose photograph will be on the can.

I gave what I could to a family last month, and I prayed for them as well. I hope one of the two was enough.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I thought about that recently when a young couple I know out in West Texas told me about having their first baby. The nearest place to see the baby doctor was most of a morning away. They made that drive again and again, through the whole pregnancy, and then once more at the end, in the dark, with her holding the dashboard and him holding the wheel.

They told the story at church, and you could see the city people in the congregation wince. I understand the wince. But I want to make the case that those young people were given something city couples never get. They were given the road.

On those drives they talked about names. They talked about her mother and his father and what kind of parents they meant to be. They prayed together, out loud, which he told me they had never done before. They learned to read each other’s silences. By the time that baby came, they were more married than most couples are after a good long while, and I think the miles had a lot to do with it.

A doctor across the street is a convenience. A doctor across the county is a pilgrimage. Our grandmothers understood this. I expect many of them had their children far from any doctor at all, with a neighbor woman and a kettle and a great deal of prayer. Nobody wrote articles about how hard it was. They simply did it, and the ones who came through told their daughters how.

Rural hospitals in Texas have closed in recent years, and I know that has made the roads longer for a good many families. People want to talk about that as a loss. I would ask them to see it as an inheritance. We are giving young Texans the same long road their great-grandparents traveled, and the same chance to find out what they are made of.

I am not saying the drive is easy. That young man told me he had never been so frightened in his life as on that last night, watching the mile markers go by too slowly. But fear shared is a bond, and he and his wife have that bond now, and their child will grow up hearing the story.

This fall I will vote for the Republican for Senate, because I want young families out there to keep their road. I understand the other side would like to put a doctor closer to them, and I would not want to shorten the drive that made that young couple what they are.

Every family out there has a story about the long drive. Most of them end well. Those are the ones I like to tell.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Texas bans nearly all abortions. The law makes an exception for medical emergencies, and some doctors have said that exception is unclear to them. They say they are not always sure where the line is, and so they hesitate. Some people treat this as a scandal. I read it and felt something closer to reassurance.

I have always trusted a careful man. When my house was built, the contractor would not pour the foundation until the county inspector had signed off. Our crew stood around half a morning waiting on that signature. Some of them grumbled. I did not. I wanted the man who poured my foundation to be a little afraid of getting it wrong. Fear of the rules is how you get a house that stands.

It seems to me a doctor ought to feel the same way. If he is unsure whether the law allows something, the right thing is to stop and find out. Call the hospital’s lawyer. Wait for an answer. A doctor who hesitates is a doctor who respects the law, and I would rather have one of those than a doctor who decides for himself what the law means.

I will go a step further, because I think it is true. When it comes to reading a statute, I trust a lawyer over a physician. That is not an insult to doctors. It is simply their training. A doctor spends his years learning the body. A lawyer spends his learning the words, and the words are what matter here. If the two of them disagree about what a law allows, I know whose reading I would want on the record.

People tell me that in medicine, waiting has a cost of its own. I do not know enough about medicine to argue, and I have no wish to. What I do know is that the law was written carefully, by people who meant well, and that careful work deserves careful following. If following it takes a little longer, that is the price of living under laws instead of under the judgment of whoever happens to be in the room.

I know there are families who see it differently, and I do not doubt their sincerity. They have been through things I have not. I would only ask them to remember that a doctor who stops to check is not their enemy. He is a man trying to keep within the lines, which is all any of us are asked to do.

I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall, in part because I want doctors to keep checking with the lawyer first. My impression is that the other side would like the doctor’s own judgment to count for more in that room, and I am not ready to give up the phone call.

No one I love has ever had to wait on that phone call. I thank God for that, and I try not to think about it much further.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Think about what a plan is. A plan is knowing where you will go when something goes wrong. By that measure, most of the uninsured folks I know have a better plan than I do. They know exactly where they are going. They know the parking lot and which door to use after midnight. They have thought it through.

I will admit something that people on my side of the aisle do not like to say out loud. I do not think the emergency room is the cheapest way to take care of a sick man. I suspect it is the most expensive way there is. But I have never believed cheap was the same as good. My father bought the cheapest tractor in the county once, and he regretted it for years. You pay for quality. The emergency room is quality.

There is also something honest about it. A man who goes to the doctor every year for a checkup is planning to be sick. A man who goes only to the emergency room is planning to be well, right up until the moment he isn’t. I find that optimism admirable. It is the same optimism that built this state. We did not fence the frontier by worrying about what might go wrong.

Now, somebody does pay those bills in the end. I suppose it is all of us, one way or another, folded into everybody’s costs where nobody can see it. I have never looked into that and I do not intend to. If I am paying for my neighbor’s visit somewhere down the line, I would rather not know which line. It is a kind of charity that does not embarrass anybody, least of all me.

The waiting is long, a neighbor tells me. Hours, the night he went. But waiting never hurt anybody who could afford to wait. And the people in those chairs are not strangers for long. They talk. They share what they brought from the vending machine. I have heard it described as a community, and I believe that, the same way I believe in any place people have no choice but to be together.

I would not take this plan away from anyone. It has worked for a long time, and it asks nothing of the people who use it until the very end, when it asks for everything.

I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall so that this plan stays the plan. The other side, I gather, wants these folks covered before they ever reach the sliding door, and I see no reason to fix a plan that is open all night.

It is a good plan. I am glad it is not mine.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

That is what too many choices do to people. Everybody agrees on this, I think. We have more options than any people in history and less peace of mind. A man with one good pair of boots is happier than a man with a closet full of them, because he never has to stand there in the morning deciding.

I want to carry that thought a little further than most people do. My cousin lives in a county where there is one company that sells health plans. One. When his renewal comes in the mail, he does not shop around or call anybody or read anything. He opens the envelope, he looks at the number, and he pays it. Then he goes on with his day.

Some people would call that a lack of competition. I call it a lack of stress. My cousin is not spending his evenings comparing plans the way that young mother compared cereal. He knows exactly where he stands, and he knows exactly who to call. There is no confusion and no wondering whether he could have done better. He could not have done better. There was nothing else to do.

I have noticed that the people who want more choices in everything are rarely satisfied once they have them. They want a second option, and then a third, and then they want somebody to explain all the options to them, and then they want the government to step in and make the options fairer. It never ends. The man with one choice is spared all of that.

There is also loyalty to think about. When there is only one company, you get to know it. You learn its ways. You stop expecting it to bend for you, and that is a kind of maturity. A marriage does not work because you keep checking what else is out there. It works because you stopped looking.

My cousin’s number has gone up every year he has had it. He told me so at Christmas, without much feeling either way. I asked him what he planned to do about it, and he said there was nothing to do. I thought that was the most peaceful thing I had heard all year.

I am voting for the Republican for Senate this fall partly on my cousin’s account. I hear the other side wants a public option in counties like his, and I would hate to see him made to choose.

He doesn’t shop for insurance anymore. He just pays what the letter says. I have come to envy him.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Not lucky to be sick. Nobody would wish that on him. Lucky that there is a medicine at all. I expect that not so long ago a man in his condition would have had no bottle to buy and no bill to grumble about. Somebody, somewhere, worked very hard to change that. When I hear people complain about the price, I hear people who have forgotten to say thank you.

I will be honest about something. I do not know what that medicine costs, and I have never wanted to know. It seems to me that the moment you start studying the price of a gift, it stops being a gift and becomes a transaction. I would rather keep it a gift in my own mind. It lets me feel the right way about the people who make it.

My uncle built barns for a living. He set his own prices, and nobody ever told him what a barn ought to cost. If you did not like his number, you could build your own barn or go without one. That was not cruelty. That was a free man running his own business, and the people who hired him respected him for it. I see the companies that make our medicine the same way. They built the barn. They get to name the price.

People ask me who ought to decide what a lifesaving medicine should cost. I tell them the people who made it, the same as anything else. They have earned it. As I understand it, they took the risk, they hired the scientists and they waited a long time for the work to pay. If the price seems high, I would say that is a measure of how much the medicine is worth, and what it is worth is a man’s life. You cannot put a fair price on that, so I do not see why anyone should try.

My friend at church has started cutting back on other things. He says he eats simpler now and drives less. He has not once blamed anybody, and I admire him for it. A grateful heart does not keep accounts. He gives thanks for the medicine every morning, and so do I, on his behalf.

There is a lot of talk this year about what the government should do about the cost of things. I would only say this. Before we start telling people what they can charge for a miracle, we should stop and remember it was a miracle.

That is why my vote this fall goes to the Republican for Senate. As near as I can tell, the other fellow wants to put a cap on what a man pays for his medicine, and I would hate to see my friend’s mornings grow any less grateful.

I have never needed the medicine myself. I suppose that makes the gratitude easier.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Rural hospitals in Texas have closed in recent years. People write about this as though it were a tragedy, and I understand the feeling. Nobody likes to see a sign come down. But I have driven past several of those buildings now, and I want to offer a different way of looking at them.

When the hospital closes, a town learns who its neighbors are. The man with the good truck becomes the man who drives. The retired nurse down the road becomes the woman you call first. The church prayer chain gets longer and more serious. People who used to wave from the porch start keeping each other’s phone numbers on the refrigerator. You cannot buy that kind of closeness. It has to be earned, and I suppose it has to be needed.

My grandmother lived in a town that lost its drugstore lunch counter when I was a boy. The old men who had gathered there every morning did not stop gathering. They moved to the bench outside the post office, and if anything they talked more, because there was no waitress to interrupt them. Losing the counter did not end their friendships. It just moved them outdoors.

I believe the same thing is happening now, on a larger scale. A town without a hospital is a town that has stopped leaning on an institution and started leaning on itself. That is the oldest Texas story there is. We were not settled by people who expected a doctor down the street. We were settled by people who expected nothing and were grateful for whatever came.

I have heard the other side. I have heard about the long ride to the nearest emergency room and the families who made it. I do not wave those stories away. I pray for every one of those families, and I mean every word of the prayer. But I would ask the people telling those stories to remember the rest of the town too, the part that came together and is still standing.

A building is only a building. Brick and glass and a parking lot. What made it matter was the people inside, and the people are still here. Most of them, anyway.

When I vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, I will be voting to keep that quiet. From what I gather, the other side would like to see some of those doors opened again, and I am not sure a town would ever pull together the same way.

The parking lot is empty now, and on a still evening it is the quietest place in town. I go there sometimes to think. I try not to need it.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

That rule has served our family well, and I think it has served Texas well. Texas has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Every year somebody asks me whether that was wise, and every year I tell them it was one of the wisest things we ever did.

Money from Washington is a borrowed ladder. It always comes with a knock on the door. First it is a form, then an inspector, then a rule about who you may help and how. Before long you are not running your own house. You are keeping it tidy for company that never leaves.

Now, a man at church once put it to me that the money was ours to begin with, our own taxes trying to come home. I do not know whether that is so, and I do not need to. I will go further than he did. Suppose every dollar of it was ours. Suppose it was sitting on our own porch with our own name written on the box. I would still leave it there. A principle is not a principle if you set it down the moment it gets heavy.

There is a man I know who works full time at a feed store outside Abilene. He does not have coverage and he does not make enough to buy it. He is exactly the kind of fellow the money was meant for, and I want to tell you I respect him too much to hand it to him. He has his pride. We are protecting it for him.

He may not see it that way. I have never asked him, and I don’t plan to. When you are doing a man a kindness, you don’t stop to take a poll. You do what is right and trust that he will thank you later, or that his children will.

The people who wanted to take the money were not bad people. They were simply in a hurry. They saw a need and wanted to meet it by the end of the week. But a state is not a week. A state is a long time, and a long time requires a firm rule, held whether it is convenient or not, whether it costs a little or a great deal.

I will vote for the Republican for Senate this fall because I want that rule held. The other side, I believe, would like to see that money come home to Texas at last, and I would rather leave it sitting on the porch.

My father never borrowed a ladder. He fell off a kitchen chair once, reaching for the gutter. He always said it was worth it.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Consider what that measures. It measures how many Texans wake up every morning with nobody standing between them and their own judgment. No card in the wallet. No network. No clerk in an office somewhere deciding which doctor they are allowed to see. Just a grown man and his own two feet, and the hope that both of them hold.

My granddad drove a pickup for most of his life without a spare tire. He said a spare made a man careless. If you know you have one, you take the gravel road too fast. If you know you don’t, you drive like everything depends on it, because it does. He had a flat more than once. He walked home each time, and he told those stories at Thanksgiving for the rest of his life.

A man with insurance drives like a man with a spare. He goes in for a cough. He has the spot on his arm looked at. He takes the gravel road a little fast. Going without teaches you something he will never learn, which is how to listen to your body and then argue with it. Most of the time you win the argument.

I know the objection, because I have heard it at church. Somebody always has a neighbor who waited on a pain until there was nothing left to be done. I am sorry for that neighbor, and I mean it. But I notice nobody ever sends me the story of the folks who waited and turned out fine. There are a lot of them, I expect. They just don’t make the news, because nothing happened to them.

Freedom has always come with a price, and I would rather a Texan pay it in worry than in premiums. Worry is at least his own. Nobody mails him a bill for it, and nobody in another state gets to set the rate.

There are people who look at that number and see a problem waiting for somebody to solve it. I look at it and see a state full of people who have chosen to trust the Lord, their mothers’ remedies and a good night’s sleep. That is not a gap in coverage. That is a kind of faith, and I would not want to be the one to take it from them.

That is why I am casting my vote this fall for the Republican for Senate. My sense is that the other side would like to see a good many more of these folks covered, and I would rather the number stay right where it is.

I carry a card myself, for my wife’s peace of mind. I admire the men who don’t.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to be honest about why I said it, because I think a lot of my readers feel the same way and have never put it into words. I will never be a billionaire. Neither will anybody at that counter. None of us will ever be close. I know that, and I defend them anyway, and I would defend them tomorrow. It is not that I expect to join them. It is that I like knowing they are there.

There is something in a working man that wants to look up and see somebody standing very high. It is the same thing that makes a boy at the county rodeo lean over the rail to watch the champion ride. He is never going to sit a bull like that. He does not want the man thrown. He just likes knowing somebody can stay on that long. I feel that way about the men at the very top. It makes my own seat on the rail feel like it is worth something.

People try to stir up resentment over this. They want me to sit down with a pencil and compare what those men put in the collection plate of this country against what the waitress who refills my coffee puts in. I have never done that arithmetic, and I am not inclined to start. Suppose I did. What would I do with the answer? I would only be angry, and it is no use being angry at a man you will never meet.

So I spend my anger closer to home, where it does some good. I have a neighbor down the road who votes the other way from me, and I can work up a real head of steam over him. He drives the same kind of truck I do. He works the same kind of hours. His wife and mine shop at the same store and complain about the same prices. I do not much like him. That feels right to me. A man needs somebody to be against, and it ought to be somebody he can see from his porch.

This fall’s election will bring a lot of talk about who is on whose side. I already know whose side I am on. I am on the side of a man’s right to keep what he has, all of it, even if it is more than his grandchildren’s grandchildren could spend, and even if my own side of that arrangement never seems to grow.

I will be voting for my party’s man for the Senate, because I want it left that way. I am told the other fellow wants to close some of the doors the very rich use to keep what they have, and I would not want them closed on my account.

Let them keep it. They were never going to share it with me anyway.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I believe a child is best raised at home, by his own people. Most of my readers believe that too. We believe it because we were raised that way, and because the Bible puts the family at the center of things and not the state or the daycare center. A mother’s arms are not something you can rent by the hour.

So when the price of daycare climbs, I see the hand of providence in it. It is a fence around the family. A fence does not keep you in out of cruelty. It keeps you in because the pasture is where you belong. When the cost of leaving your child with strangers grows larger than what you would earn while you are gone, the question answers itself. Mother comes home. That is not a hardship. That is a homecoming.

Now, some families tell me they cannot afford for her to come home, either. The rent is due and the car note is due, and both of them have to work. I understand that. In those cases I would say there are grandparents. There are aunts. There are older children who can learn some responsibility. My own mother watched my sister’s children for years and never asked for a cent. If a family has none of those things, I am sorry for them, but I do not think it is the business of the rest of us to step in where the family has fallen short. The family is supposed to carry itself. That is what makes it a family.

The young mother at church mentioned that she and her husband had wanted another child and had decided they could not manage it. I told her I respected that. Too many people have children they cannot afford. A family that waits until it is ready is showing exactly the kind of prudence the rest of the country could use. If the cost of childcare is what taught them that, then the cost has done its work.

I know there are people who want the state to help pay for it, so that young parents can work and raise children at the same time. I think they mean well. But a family that leans on the government for its children is not raising them alone anymore, and I would rather they raise fewer of them alone than more of them with help.

That is a large part of why I will vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. The way I hear it, the other side wants to bring the cost of childcare down, and I would hate to see that fence come down with it.

I am for the family. I have always been for the family. I just believe it ought to be able to take care of itself.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

We talk a great deal in this country about the dignity of work. I want to say a word for the dignity of more work. A man who holds down a second job is not a man to feel sorry for. He is a man in training. Every hour he spends at that counter after a full day on the road is an hour he is not spending on the couch, or on his phone, or at some meeting where people talk about their feelings.

My grandmother made quilts. She made them at night, after the cooking and the washing and the garden, out of scraps of whatever was left over. Those quilts are the best things anybody in my family ever made. I do not think that is in spite of the hour she made them. I think it is because of it. A thing made from what is left of you has more of you in it.

I will be honest about something that worries me. I worry about the man with one job and his evenings free. What does he do with them? He reads things. He forms opinions. He goes to school board meetings and asks questions about the budget. Idle time does not stay idle for long. A second job keeps a man’s hands busy and his mind on what matters, which is making it to the end of the month.

People ask about the children. Who is home with them while their father is at the second job and their mother is at hers? I would say the children are learning, too. They are learning to warm up their own supper and to put themselves to bed. They are learning what it looks like when a parent sacrifices. I can think of no better lesson to leave on the kitchen table. Some of my best memories are of the evenings my own father was home, and I sometimes wonder whether I would have learned more if there had been fewer of them.

Enough is a dangerous word. I have watched it settle over good men like dust. A man who has enough stops reaching, and a man who stops reaching stops growing. I would rather a man be a little short and a great deal stronger.

I am voting for my party’s man for the Senate this fall because I want that young man to keep both his jobs. As I understand it, the other fellow would like one job to be enough to live on, and I worry what a man would make of all those free evenings.

I have only ever had the one job myself. I suppose I was never given the chance to build that kind of character.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I want to say something plainly that a lot of folks feel and will not say. I trust the big companies more than I ever trusted the small ones. I trust them because they are big. A small company has to scrape and cut corners to survive. A big company does not have to scrape for anything. It does not need to cheat me. It already has me.

People complain that prices have gone up since the little stores closed. They have. I noticed it the same as everybody. But I have come to see that higher price as a kind of fee for not having to think about it. My father spent his Saturdays comparing. I spend mine at home. That is worth something, and I do not mind paying for it, even if nobody ever asked me whether I wanted to.

There is an old idea that competition keeps everybody honest. I have never been sure about that. Competition is a lot of shouting. It is men on the radio telling you their tires are cheaper than the other fellow’s tires. It is a constant pulling at your sleeve. When there is only one company left in a line of business, all of that goes quiet. I think of a town with a single well. Nobody argues about where to get water. You go to the well, and you pay what the well costs.

A friend of mine who farms tells me he has fewer places to sell his crop than he used to and fewer places to buy his seed, and the same few companies seem to be on both ends of it. He sounded worried. I told him he ought to take it as a sign of stability. When you know exactly who you are dealing with, you never have to wonder. He did not seem comforted, but he is a worrier by nature.

I am not against the little man. I was raised by one. But I have noticed that the little man is always asking for help, and the big company never does. I find that I respect the one who does not ask. There is a confidence to a company that knows you have nowhere else to go.

This fall I will vote for the Republican for Senate, because I would like the quiet to last. I hear the other side wants to break up some of these big outfits and give the little stores room to come back, and I do not think I have another Saturday of comparing prices left in me.

I don’t shop around anymore. There is nowhere left to go, and I have found that restful.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

I keep a good horse. Not a show horse, but a sound one, and I have noticed over the years that the better the animal, the more it costs to keep. The feed is better, the farrier comes more often, the vet bills are higher. Nobody with a good horse complains about the vet. The bill is how you know what you have. A man who pays nothing to keep his horse probably does not have much of a horse.

That is how I feel about my house. When the premium climbs, I hear the world telling me that what I built is worth protecting, and worth protecting at a high price. I find that a comfort. My father’s house was never worth much, and nobody ever charged him much to insure it. I have done better than he did, and the bill says so in plain print.

Some of my neighbors do not see it that way. A couple at church has dropped part of their coverage because they could not keep up. A man I know in the next county let his policy lapse entirely and is praying the weather holds. I pray with him. But I also think there is a kind of freedom in what he has done. He has stepped out from under the arrangement. Whatever comes, he will face it on his own feet, and there is something old-fashioned and admirable about that, even if it is also a little frightening.

Some folks at the coffee shop want the government brought into it. They want a man in Austin to step in between them and their insurance company. I do not want that. I never asked anybody to stand between me and the people I do business with. A man ought to handle his own bills, even the ones he cannot handle. If the price is too high, that is between me and the company, and the company has always been very clear with me about where it stands.

I will admit I have never looked at how the companies themselves are doing. I suppose they are doing fine. I do not begrudge them. They took on the risk of my house, and they are entitled to be paid for it, at whatever price they find fair. I would not want a neighbor second-guessing what I charge for my hay.

When I vote for the Republican for Senate this fall, I will be voting to keep things that way. The other side, from what I can tell, would like to rein in what these companies charge, and I would rather my agent’s calls stay just as they are.

My agent says it will likely go up again next year. I told him I would expect nothing less from a house like mine.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

There is a dignity in rent that we have lost sight of. When you own your house, you start to believe the ground belongs to you. You get comfortable. You plant things. You stop thinking about where you would go if it all went away. A renter never makes that mistake. Every month, when the money leaves his account, he is reminded that the roof over his head is on loan. That is a humbling thing, and humility is good for the young.

Think of it like borrowing a good saddle. You ride more carefully on another man’s saddle. You clean it. You do not leave it out in the rain. My nephew keeps that apartment cleaner than I keep my own house, and I believe it is because he knows he could be asked to leave it. Ownership breeds a kind of carelessness. Renting breeds care.

And when the rent goes up, the lesson goes deeper. You learn to need less. My nephew sold the other car. They stopped going out to eat. His wife picks up extra hours on the weekends. They have a friend from work living in the spare room now, which I think is fine. Our grandparents lived with their parents and their grandparents under one roof and nobody wrote articles about it. Close quarters make close families.

They told me they had hoped to have a baby this year and decided to wait. I know some people would find that sad. I find it responsible. A child should come into a home that can afford him, and if the home cannot afford him yet, the home should wait. That is not hardship. That is prudence, and I wish more young people had it.

I hear people say that young families are being squeezed out of the towns they grew up in. Perhaps some are. I have not looked into it, and I am not sure looking into it would help anybody. What I know is that a young man who has been squeezed a little comes out the other side harder and more careful, and a young man who has had everything handed to him does not.

I mean to vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall with my nephew in mind. My impression is that the other fellow wants to bring down what young families pay for a roof, and I would hate for the lesson to end just as my nephew was getting the hang of it.

My own house has been paid off for some years now. I do not think about the roof much anymore. I suppose that is what I have lost.

They are learning to be grateful for a roof that is not theirs. I hope they never stop.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

In my part of the world, when a new family moves onto the road, you carry over a pie. That is just manners. So when a company of that size decided to build among us, the town did what any good neighbor would do. We brought a pie. It was a large pie. We gave them the land for very little, and we built the road out to the gate, and we told them they would not have to pay much of anything toward the schools for a good long while. Some people called that a giveaway. I call it hospitality.

What strikes me is how gracious they were about it. They could have gone to the next county over, and they told us so, more than once, during the negotiations. The next county had pies of its own. But they chose us. They took the land and the road and the years without a tax bill, and they did not complain once. That is the mark of a good neighbor. They knew how to receive.

Now, I have heard the grumbling at the feed store. The school board had to tighten its belt the same year the plant opened. The clinic in town still has a doctor only part of the week. A woman I know asked why the town could find money for a road to a warehouse and not for a road to the cemetery. I understand her. But you do not hold back a pie because your own kitchen is a little bare. That is not how neighbors behave.

And think of the jobs. There are good people out there now, on the night shift and the day shift, and they are grateful to have the work. Some of them were working before the plant came, at other places that have since closed, but that is the nature of progress. A great company draws the life out of a town into itself, the way a big tree draws the water. You do not cut down the tree for that. You admire how tall it grows.

People forget that a corporation does not have to choose anybody. It has no hometown. It has no grandmother buried here. It could be anywhere, and it chose to be with us, for as long as the terms are good. If that is not generosity, I do not know what is.

When I fill in my ballot this fall, I will mark it for the Republican for Senate, so that towns like ours keep the freedom to bake that pie. I gather the other side wants companies of that size to pay their share toward the schools and the clinic, and I can think of nothing more embarrassing than handing a guest a bill.

We gave them everything we had, and they were kind enough to take it.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

The minimum wage in Texas is the same as the federal one, $7.25 an hour. Every so often somebody stands up and says that is not enough to live on. I understand the feeling. But I think they have the question backwards. A first paycheck is not supposed to be enough to live on. It is supposed to be enough to learn on.

Here is where I part ways with some of my friends on the right, who will agree with me that far and then stop. I do not think the lesson ends when a young man turns into a grown one. I think a modest paycheck is good for a person at any age. The man with a family who works for that wage learns things the comfortable man never does. He learns to fix his own truck. He learns which bills can wait and which ones cannot. He learns to tell his children no, and to mean it. Those are not small lessons. Those are the lessons that built this country.

There is an old saying where I come from that a hungry dog hunts best. My grandfather said it about bird dogs, and he was right about bird dogs. I have come to believe it about people, too. A man who has a little extra starts to get ideas. He takes a day off. He goes to the doctor about a pain he could have walked off. He starts asking his boss questions. None of that is wicked, but none of it gets the hay in, either.

I have heard it said that if wages went up, workers would spend more, and the whole town would do better. Maybe so. I am not an economist and I do not need to be. I know what a little money does to a young man, because I have seen it, and I would rather he stay a little hungry and keep his edge. Comfort is a slow poison. I have watched it take good men.

When I see a fellow working the register at night, tired and polite and making exactly what the law says he has to be paid, I do not feel sorry for him. I feel something closer to envy. He is being made into something. Most of us never get that kind of schooling once we are grown.

So I will be voting for the Republican for Senate when the time comes. As far as I can tell, the other fellow wants to raise that wage, and I would hate to see a whole generation lose its hunger before it learned anything from it.

A hungry dog hunts best. I have believed that my whole life, and I have never once been hungry.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

The wealthy are patient. That is the first thing to understand about them, and it is the thing their critics never understand. A working man is paid on Friday and taxed on Friday. The money is gone before it reaches his hand. The wealthy man does not live that way. He holds. He waits. He lets a thing grow, and he pays on it when the time is right for him, and for all I know, if he is patient enough, the time never comes at all. He simply hands it to his children, and the bill goes into the ground with him.

I want to be honest about something. I do not understand how most of it works. I imagine there are ways to call a man’s pay something other than pay, and ways to hold a thing until what is owed on it quietly goes away. I have never seen the inside of those rules, and I do not need to. I trust that a man with that much money understood them, and I trust that the people who wrote them understood him.

If the rules were written with the help of the very people who use them, I do not know why that is supposed to bother me. Who else would write them? You do not ask a man who has never owned a boat to write the rules for the marina. You ask the boat owners. They know the water. They know where the shallow places are, and they know how to mark them so that only the right kind of boat gets through.

My own paycheck is taxed before I see it. There is no waiting for me, no holding, no clever arrangement. I used to resent that, back when I was younger and more inclined to complain. I have come to see it as a mercy. I am spared the temptation. A man who cannot wait does not have to worry about waiting too long.

That is why I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall. I want those rules left with the men who wrote them. The other side seems to want them rewritten so the patient pay on the same Friday I do, and I would not wish my Fridays on anybody.

There is a lesson in all this for the young. Do not envy the man who pays later. Learn from him. Plant your trees. Hold what you can. And if it turns out you cannot hold anything, because the bills come on Friday too, then at least admire the ones who can. Admiration costs nothing, and it is good for the character.

Patience is a virtue. I have just never had the means to practice it.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.

Texas does not take a dime of my wages. There is no state income tax here, and I thank the Lord for it every spring when my cousins in other states are bent over their forms. What Texas does instead is lean on the things you can see: your house, your land, the groceries in your cart, the tires on your truck. I like that. A tax you can see is an honest tax. You know what you are paying for because you are standing on it.

I suppose a tax on what you can see falls hardest on the fellow whose wealth you can see, the one with a modest house and a full cart, and lightest on the fellow whose money sits in places a tax man cannot walk up to and knock on. I have thought about that, and I do not see the problem. A man whose wealth lives in an account somewhere is not using the roads the way I am. He is not sending his children down to the school on the corner, or if he is, he is not doing it for long. Why should he carry the load for a town he mostly flies over?

My father used to say a man should carry his own feed sack. He never said anything about carrying the neighbor’s, but I have found that a strong back is a strong back, and if mine can hold a little more, it ought to. The widow down the road pays on a house she bought when the street was still gravel. Her bill goes up whether her pension does or not. She told me last fall she might have to sell. I told her she ought to feel some pride in that. Not many people get to say their home became worth more than they could keep.

There is a kind of person who sees a rising bill and goes looking for whose bill did not rise. I find that ugly. It is envy with a calculator. The men at the very top got there by being careful about what they pay, and I do not believe in punishing a man for being careful.

This fall I will vote for the Republican for Senate, because I want this arrangement kept just as it is. The other side, as I understand it, wants the men at the very top to carry more of the load, and I would hate to see my own share get any lighter.

So when the envelope comes, I open it at the table, I read it twice, and I write the check. I think about the school and the fire truck and the road out front, and I think about how much of it is mine to hold up.

More of it every year, it seems. I don’t mind. Somebody has to.

This is political satire. Dalton Merriweather is a fictional character, and his opinions are written to be read ironically, in the tradition of Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Not paid political advertising.