All Those White Girls Drowned and the GOP Will Still Do Nothing

No flood safety. No climate action. Just thoughts, prayers, and profit.

Look at this photo. Really look at it.

Twenty faces in the Texas sun. Blindingly bright tennis courts behind them, the shadows crisp on the asphalt. They're all dressed in white, a uniform of summer camp innocence. Ruffled sleeves, cotton skirts, white sneakers. Some girls have matching beaded necklaces. Others have hair in braids. Their skin is sun-flushed from days outdoors. They’re smiling in that practiced, sometimes shy, sometimes boisterous way children do when you say "cheese!"

There are two counselors, older teenage girls or young women, arms around their charges, beaming with responsibility and affection. Behind them: green trees, chain-link fencing, a big, empty sky that, just days later, would unleash hell.

Three of the faces in this picture now have the word MISSING stamped across them in red.

Look at their last names, too.

Bonner. DeWitt. Getten. Hunt. Landry. McCown. Naylor. Peck. Pohl. Smajstrla. Stevens. Marsh. Bellows.

These are old Texas names, some Anglo, some German, some with deep Southern roots. Are they members of the same social circles? Just coincidence? Maybe.

These names speak to the continuity of community and history in a place like Texas. They tell you something about the people who send their kids to camps like this. About families who’ve been here for generations, who know the land and the riverbeds and the weather cycles, and who are seeing those cycles break in real time.

Look at the captions under heir names: Austin, Houston, Dallas and elsewhere.

These aren’t random kids scattered across the country. They’re clustered from the biggest, richest cities in Texas. Families who can afford summer camp tuition, who share traditions of sending their daughters away for a few sunlit weeks.

It makes the grief map itself onto the state.

Austin parents making tearful calls. Houston churches praying over empty beds. Dallas neighborhoods with porch lights left on for girls who will never come home.

This wasn’t just one community’s tragedy. It rippled through the heart of Texas, city by city, family by family.

These weren’t strangers thrown together. They were part of an interwoven social fabric. When the flood came, it ripped through that fabric.

This photo isn’t just a memory. It’s a crime scene.

It’s not the kind of crime scene with yellow tape and chalk outlines, the kind our politics likes to wring its hands over when there’s a convenient villain with a gun. No. This is the kind of crime scene you can’t lock down because the crime is too big. Too dispersed. It stretches from the warming Gulf of Mexico to the gilded boardrooms of oil companies. From the flooded rivers of Texas Hill Country to the marble floors of the U.S. Capitol. From the black water that swept these girls away to the balance sheets of lobbyists who buy politicians like livestock.

These girls drowned at camp. Think about that. Parents put them on buses or dropped them off with duffel bags packed with sunscreen, bug spray, stationery for writing home. They trusted the world to hold them safe in that sweet zone of childhood exploration and freedom. But the world didn’t hold them safe. The world betrayed them.

Because this world is on fire and underwater at the same time, and the grown-ups in charge refuse to do a goddamn thing about it.

Don’t tell me Republicans care about children. They don’t give a shit about children, including children like the girls in this photo.

They will stand in front of TV cameras in Texas and weep about the heartbreak of these lost girls, just like they offered “thoughts and prayers” after Sandy Hook. Remember that? Remember when white, mostly middle-class first graders in Connecticut were gunned down in their classroom, and the GOP said, in effect: “We can’t do anything.”

If white America ever needed proof that the politicians who court them with talk of “family values” and “protecting the children” don’t give a damn about their children either, here it is.

This is the same party that wrings its hands about demographic change, terrified that people of color will “replace” them in the electorate. The same party that builds walls and cages, that strips citizenship from brown and Black children, that cuts funding for schools in Black and immigrant neighborhoods, that rails against DEI and “critical race theory” because they don’t want white kids learning the truth about American history.

They do all this while pretending to be the saviors of white children. But they will sacrifice their own children just as readily. Because ultimately, these greedy politicians do not care about anyone’s children.

They care about power.

Look at the photo again.

Look at Molly DeWitt, Ellen Getten, and Abby Pohl. All labeled "MISSING."

Those girls are missing and likely dead because the river jumped its banks with the kind of violence that’s supposed to happen once in a century, but now happens again and again and again. The atmosphere is a heat-trapping blanket. Warmer oceans breed monster storms. Downpours that used to be survivable turn into lethal flash floods. The science isn’t new. It isn’t controversial.

And the men in charge know it.

Texas Republicans know it.

But fossil fuel money lines their pockets. Real estate developers keep them in office. They refuse to strengthen floodplain regulations because it might cut profits. They oppose environmental protections because it might cut donations. They won’t even admit climate change is real, let alone act on it, because the truth would cost them votes among people trained to see “environmentalist” as a slur.

They’ll cry at these girls’ funerals. They’ll speak solemnly about God’s mysterious ways. But they will do nothing to prevent the next flood. They’ll do nothing for the families left to grieve. They’ll do nothing for the next camp full of smiling children whose parents will wonder if they made a mistake sending them away for the summer.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s murder by policy. Just like “fiscal responsibility” is their favorite euphemism for killing people.

It’s the same brand of political cowardice that let little white children be slaughtered in Newtown with AR-15 bullets shredding their tiny bodies. If ever there was a moment to prove they cared about kids, that was it. But the gun lobby needed their blood sacrifice.

So they gave it.

They talk about banning abortion because they care so much about “babies,” but they don’t give a damn if those babies grow up and drown in a flood or get shot in a classroom or drink poisoned water or struggle in underfunded schools.

They want them born. They don’t want them safe. And this is where white America needs to look itself in the eye.

Because for too long, too many white voters have believed the lie that the GOP’s cruelty would stop at Black and brown children. That border cages, welfare cuts, underfunded schools, abortion bans, Medicaid cuts, all of it would discipline those people. That the guns flooding their communities would be used against criminals who didn’t look like them. That deregulation would just mean fewer taxes and more freedom, not bridges collapsing or rivers rising.

But there is no such thing as targeted cruelty in the real world. Cruelty radiates outward. It finds new victims. When you set up a system where children are disposable if their safety costs money, then all children become disposable.

That’s what this photo should tell you. That’s what those “MISSING” labels in red should scream at you. They are a warning: Your kids are next. Because these men will not save them. They will send them off to die for oil. For gun makers. For corporate donors who want to build new subdivisions on floodplains and say “buyer beware.” For right-wing media that monetizes denialism and rage.

They will sacrifice your daughters and sons on the altar of quarterly profits and election wins. And they will dare you to say anything about it. They will call you “woke” if you demand safer levees, or better stormwater systems, or stronger building codes.

They will call you a “socialist” if you want public money to go to climate adaptation, flood mapping, green infrastructure. They will say you’re a “lib” who “hates freedom” if you suggest it shouldn’t be legal to sell AR-15s to 18-year-olds who want to be famous mass murderers.

They will tell you to pray. To wait. To grieve quietly. Because, nothing can be done. Because, it’s not their fault. Because, it’s God’s will.

And when the next flood comes, when the next shooting comes, they’ll put out another photo like this one.

Smiling kids. White dresses. White teeth. Innocence. Gone. We need to see it for what it is: a system that has chosen to kill us rather than change.

And if you are a white parent reading this thinking you are exempt, that this bargain will always protect your family, let these drowned girls disabuse you of that fantasy. This system is not designed to protect you. It is designed to extract from you until you are empty. Your vote. Your labor. Your hope. Your children’s lives.

It has always worked this way, even when it promised you it would only target others. It’s time to stop believing the lie. It’s time to stop letting your children be martyrs for ExxonMobil and Smith & Wesson and every craven politician whose only real job is to keep the machine humming.

Look at the photo one last time.

See their smiles. See what they should have had: lives full of summer camps and school plays and first kisses and college move-in days. Then ask yourself what the hell you are going to do about it.

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