I don't want to live here any more

I used to love Austin.

I was born in Austin; my earliest memories are of horned toads in the back yard, the explosion of spring flowers in my mother's garden, walking down tree-lined sidewalks to meet my father coming home from the university.

I went to college in Austin: picking up and cracking pecans as I walked home from classes, dancing through a new pair of slippers in one night, soaring with Arrowsmith's lectures on Greek tragedy and R.L. Moore's pure abstract world of point set theory.

My husband and I have lived over 30 years in the same house in Austin: our children playing all over the neighborhood and building "forts" in the unused woodsy part of the National Guard camp, walking to school and griping because I wouldn't let them cross Perry Lane on their own, still keeping up with neighborhood friends from their school days. The checkers at the market ask about my grandchildren and the neighbor with the magic flower garden updates me on her latest battles with roaming deer.

But slowly, over the years, Austin has morphed from a lovably ditzy weirdness to something darker.
There's a group here calling themselves "The Red Guards" with no discernible sense of irony. Are they really crazy enough that they don't recognize what a horror China's Cultural Revolution unleashed with the original Red Guards? Maybe they think it was a good thing? I wouldn't be surprised, because here's what they're proud of:

Pigs' Heads on Doors

That's just the nastiest bit of leftist attacks here; there've been far too many smaller instances.
Our children still live here, and we don't go out much any more. But moving up to Hutto, near my older daughter, is beginning to look more and more attractive.

It's not the forest of "Beto" signs on our street. I don't really care how my neighbors vote.

What I mind is that we, like our neighbors around the corner, are afraid to put up "Cruz" signs. Yes, afraid. We're old people living in houses that were designed in a time of peace, and I don't want a brick through a front window or somebody accosting my husband in the driveway. I don't believe any of the neighbors are that crazy, but the anger and violence displayed on the Left worries me. I can easily picture some angry coward cruising down our street and deciding to display his hatred for opposition with a brick.

I don't like living in a town like this.