"Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of 'Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,' a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous..."

"... that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News.... HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5. The statute enshrining childhood independence is part of a bigger children's services bill ensuring Texans that the state will not intervene and remove kids from their homes unless the danger is so great and so likely that it outweighs the trauma of entering the foster care system.... In other words, it prevents poverty from being mistaken for neglect.... 'If the mom misses that bus, she gets to work late and loses her job. How does that help the child, if now she can't pay her rent? So she leaves her child home alone for 15 minutes.' .... [T]he bill also helps folks who choose not to helicopter parent, like Austin mom Kari Anne Roy, whose case made headlines in 2014. Roy was at home while her six-year-old played within view of the house for about ten minutes. A passerby marched him home and called the cops...."

From "Texas Becomes Third State To Pass Free-Range Kids Law/'You had the most right-wing members of the legislature signed on with most left-wing members'" (Reason).

ADDED:  I haven't written much on the topic of "free-range" children, but let me quote something I wrote last year:

When I walk (or drive) around my neighborhood and beyond, I often think or say out loud, "Where are the children?" Are they inside looking at big and small screens? Are they chauffeured to adult-run activities? It's so sad! Even in the 80s when my sons were little, the neighborhood had kids outdoors, playing randomly with each other. But back in the 1950s, when I was little, the neighborhood was a constant festival of kid-dom. So much active, inventive play. It was endless. Nobody wanted our parents to scoop us up and take us anywhere. The place was completely alive and completely kid-scale, and none of it had anything to do — as far as we could tell — with preparing for a prestigious and remunerative career. I can't imagine any parents barging in and trying to leverage things for the advancement of their offspring. We were, to ourselves, on our own.

Ah, I see — I was reacting to an article questioning whether "expensive activities" for kids were a rip-off. 

Today's article, about the Texas law, is about the economics of childcare too, but it focuses on relieving low-income families of the burden of accusations of child neglect. The older article was about whether high-income families should be seeking to buy extra advantages for their children. The "free-range" idea works from both ends of the economic divide to equalize the life of children. 

If children are left alone to be self-reliant and to invent their own modes of playing, then rich and poor kids might have very similar lives. More or less. 

Could we all — from both ends of the political divide — agree on that? 

Of course not! We must disagree. We cannot have political peace. How would we live in political peace? The adults don't know how to play well together, even those of us who grew up in free-range American utopia.

"The doctors-facts-science mantras have become familiar over the past year. The experts tell us, expertly, what we need to know, and we do it."

"At least until all this science starts to fog up our mental windshields and we, the people, start to wear out. Our irritability mounts; our attention wanes; the guide-rope in our mouth starts to chafe. It is then that the bawdy obstreperousness and its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy come into view — a single unit; maddening, infuriating, nevertheless fused. And Greg Abbott or someone else steps up to lead the beast forward, by instinct if not by Hoyle... The love of democratic citizens for experts shouldn’t be overestimated. The nature of democracy is preference for or deference to popular wisdom, however unwise that wisdom may prove in action. It’s been a long time since this pandemic started. People are tired. People want to see, and relate to, each other. That’s human nature. The human nature-affirmers like Greg Abbott, with a little luck and sense of timing, are likely to come out way ahead of their castigators and vilifiers, Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke conspicuously included."

Writes William Murchison in "Glory Hallelujah for Texas!/Gov. Greg Abbott takes a calculated gamble on we, the people against the experts" (The Spectator).

The Spectator is British, but Murchison is American. He even went to the University of Texas. I had to look that up because the use of "glory hallelujah" hit my ear as a foreigner's mistake. To me, the phrase — which you see in the title and the text ("its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy") — is entirely evocative of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and Texas was in the Confederacy. 

Puzzling, I ran across this 2018 NPR article, "How 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' became an anthem for every cause": 

There's an episode of The Johnny Cash Show from 1969 where the man himself makes a little speech with a pretty big error. "Here's a song that was reportedly sung by both sides in the Civil War," Cash says, guitar in hand, to kick off a performance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic.... which proves to me that a song can belong to all of us."

 

Cash was wrong, but in the years after the Civil War, the song came to be sung in church, at football games, and at labor union events. And on all sorts of political occasions:

Anita Bryant, the singer and conservative activist, used to perform the song at anti-gay rallies. During the 1964 presidential race, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater had to disown a campaign film that posed the election as a choice between two Americas — an "ideal" America, where the tune of the "Battle Hymn" scored images of the founders and the Constitution, and a "nightmare" America, featuring black people protesting and kids dancing to rock music.

On the flipside, the day before he was killed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, which he ended by quoting the song's first line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." His home church, Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist, took up the song after his death as an anthem to him and the civil rights movement.

"How people relate to patriotism is kind of how they come into the 'Battle Hymn,' " says professor Brigitta Johnson, an ethnomusicologist at the University of South Carolina who teaches in the schools of Music and African-American Studies. "For example, your white nationalists digging deep into heavy patriotism messages — they bring up things like 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and the 'Battle Hymn' and it becomes their battle cry, just as easily as it could become the battle cry for Ebenezer in Atlanta."...

"The kumbaya moment will not be happening across the aisles because of this song," [Johnson] says, "because it's really about supporting whatever your perspective is — about freedom or liberation, and having God as the person who's ordaining what we're doing. And 'glory, hallelujah' about that."

As Johnny Cash said in 1969, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is an anthem that belongs to everybody. But what really matters is what they're singing it for.

That meshes well with Murchison's point about human nature and human nature-affirmers.

"The Eyes of Texas is non-negotiable. If it is not kept and fully embraced, I will not be donating any additional money to athletics or the university or attending any events."

Wrote one alumnus quoted in "'UT needs rich donors': Emails show wealthy alumni supporting 'Eyes of Texas' threatened to pull donations/Emails obtained by The Texas Tribune show alumni and donors threatened to stop supporting the university financially and demanded that the university president take a stronger stance supporting 'The Eyes of Texas'" (The Texas Tribune).

"The Eyes of Texas" is a song traditionally played at the end of football games, with players remaining on the field to sing the song along with the fans. Recently, all the players except the quarterback left the field. 

Students have been petitioning to get rid of the song — something I wrote about last October. I didn't take a position on the racial problem with the song and whether it's enough to overcome the pull of tradition, but I did undertake my own independent analysis of the lyrics:

The state has eyes and is always watching you: "The Eyes of Texas are upon you/All the livelong day/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/You cannot get away/Do not think you can escape them/At night or early in the morn/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/'Til Gabriel blows his horn." 

There really is something wrong with this song. It's oppressive even if you don't know the background story. It speaks of surveillance and endless oppressive work. Maybe a lot of college kids think the song is just funny and surreal. Eyes that you cannot escape.