We’re Number 1!

I graduated from a majority Hispanic Houston ISD high school in May of 1965. Although I had been admitted to UT, I spent that summer at the University of Houston – in the city of my birth. I took math classes that I thought would be of value to me in my first year at UT – college trigonometry (I had aced the high-school class), Analytical Geometry, and Differential Calculus. The latter of these three made me a math nerd for the remainder of my life.

That fall, I began my education at the University of Texas at Austin (UT).  I studied math and German and the physical sciences – Physics, Chemistry, and Geology. I met a nerdy blonde female Chemistry student, and we become romantically involved. She returned from her childhood home after that break with a hefty wooden box containing her Unitron 2.4” refractor. She knew that I was an astronomy nerd, and she had brought her personal telescope so that I could appreciate it.

That year, we attended one or more UT home football games. UT was often the top-rated college football team. The chant at the games was, “We’re Number One!” Whenever the team won a game, the UT tower was lighted in Orange with the lighted tower windows arranged to create the number 1.

At the end of the spring session, my girlfriend returned to Houston to spend the summer with her folks. She left her Unitron refractor with me. I did not use it; I was trying my best to survive the summer session at UT – taking physics classes for which I was ill-prepared because I needed another year of differential equations and advanced calculus to cope with the physics. Alas!

I was there that day in the summer of 1966. I was walking home to my apartment on Rio Grande Street after a physics class that day. I was absorbed in my reverie thinking either about the parts of the physics session that I had not understood or perhaps thinking about the girlfriend (more likely than not). I marched southward along Guadalupe Street (The Drag) under the canopy of trees that lined the street’s west side. I was oblivious to the chaos erupting just feet away from me on the east side of the street – where students and others were being shot by an unseen assailant firing from the observation level of the UT tower.

I arrived at my apartment where one of my roommates directed my attention to the portable TV that we all shared. “There is some idiot shooting people from the tower,” announced my roommate. I assembled the telescope on our balcony and directed it toward the UT tower. We were so far from the tower that we were in no danger of being shot, I thought. My view of the tower scene was unremarkable except for occasional puffs of smoke. Anyone watching the real-time TV reporting would have seen the same thing.

I was there the day that Charles Whitman, a marine veteran, decided to murder strangers on the university quadrangle from his perch upon the UT tower. Whitman, a 25-year-old white male, showed America that Texas was Number 1 – in college mass casualty events.

It seems ironic to me that decades later, the Texas Legislature and Governor approved the concealed carrying of firearms on the campuses that receive Texas taxpayer support. I suppose that it was just a matter of reverse engineering. Those with political power decide on what they will do, for whatever reason, and then reverse engineer a rationale for what they have decided is best for the society at large.

Arm the teachers!

Arm the staff!

Arm the students!

What a Bola de Pendejos!

Now we have 19 dead, elementary school children and two dead teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and at least another dozen victims maimed or injured – kids that the media hardly mentions – all served up to us by a disaffected 18- year-old male with an AR-15 style long gun and extended capacity magazines with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Yes, Texas is still definitely Number 1.