Sacrifice and Love

To the Editor:

In last Friday’s Record, Chad Zimmermann of La Grange, apparently counting me among “Houston lawyers who move to our county and try to turn it into the place they left” is somewhat amusing given that in 1950 I was born in La Grange and then raised on my parents’ Fayette County dairy farm and picked cotton and hauled hay for our neighbors and worked summers for local carpenters and played on the 1968 Fayetteville basketball team that denied Snook their perennial state championship and given that, upon my father’s death by melanoma at age 52 in 1972, my brother and I ran a 60 mother cow operation on weekends for 10 years even while I was at Rice and in UH law school.

Thanks to my still sharp as a tack mother, who came to Texas in 1949 as the wife of my Texan father, both of Czech ancestry, who will soon be 96 years young and whose decades of volunteer work for the people, especially children, of Fayette County, was exemplary, I had the privilege to operate a branch law office in Fayette County with her as my legal secretary for another 10 years which allowed me the opportunity to win a jury trial (the first civil jury trial in Fayette County presided over by the Honorable Judge Dan Beck, one of the finest jurists and Democrats to have ever sat on the bench) for a local father seeking custody of his five year old daughter who the Record reported some 17 years later as graduating from the University of Texas with honors!

Thereafter, because I could not convince my Houston born and raised first wife that the big city was “more gutter than curb” and before returning to live in Fayette County more than five years ago now, I focused on raising two of my daughters and two of my sons in a close-knit Catholic parish school community in Sharpstown that reminded me of my home town and school of Fayetteville.

Setting aside his obvious lack of concern for saving lives and livelihoods during this pandemic, Mr. Zimmermann was not only wrong about me being just one of those “Houston lawyers” but he was especially wrong about claiming that he put no “hope” in my call for more widespread vaccination against COVID-19. Mr. Zimmermann’s letter citing 1 Colossians 1:27 that “Christ, who lives in us, is our only Hope,” conveniently ignored not only proven medical science about the need to attain “herd immunity” through vaccinations but also, like far too many of the Religious Right, he also conveniently ignored the call of the good Lord in the Bible to respect the lives of workers, women, the widow, the poor, the sick, the hungry, the captive, and the immigrant and to be Good Stewards of God’s Creation by not allowing corporations to poison the air we breathe and the water we drink.

But his most false accusation of all was his claim that I was trying to “turn” Fayette County into the Houston I had allegedly “left.” Perhaps he is too young to understand that the Fayette County I grew up in was far more European in character than today and so working together for the “common good,” as opposed to one’s own selfish interests and fake piety, were the prevailing moral and social and religious values of Fayette County. In the early 1960s, the primarily Czech Catholic school parents and public school Lutheran parents came together for the “common good” to save Fayetteville’s now highly touted public school by agreeing to close the Catholic School and to allow Catholic nuns while wearing their habits and crucifixes to teach in the public school after public school buses dropped the Catholic kids like me for one hour of catechism at the Catholic Church every day. Those same values of respect for life and striving to improve the quality of life for others were also exemplified by the Czechs and Germans of Flatonia during the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic as evidenced by museum photos of people at community events all wearing masks.

My faith has hope that this letter will convince Mr. Zimmermann and other members of the Religious Right like him that it is sacrifice and love for others that truly exemplifies “Christ, who lives in us!”

John W. Mikus

Fayetteville