Column | I spent half a year in a small town in Texas known for executions and learned a few facts about the United States

All want to go to Texas these days. Or at least it seems that way.

Finland’s outgoing ambassador to the United States Mikko Hautala said in an interview with HS last August that he hoped for a long timethat Finland would establish a consulate in the southern parts of the United States – in practice, therefore, in Texas.

Hundreds of thousands of conservatives have already moved from the rest of the country to Texas. The richest man in the world Elon Musk has moved to Texas himself and would like to transfer also his company from California there.

Even the Democratic Party would like a piece of Texas. The Republicans are still in the lead in the state, but the growth of Austin, Dallas and other liberal cities may over time paint Texas blue for the Democrats as well.

In the 2020 election Joe Biden 46.5 percent of Texans already voted.

Another I really wanted to go to Texas a year ago. So much so that I moved to Huntsville, a town the size of Salo on the freeway between Dallas and Houston, for the spring as a student exchange.

Everyday life in an American small town in Texas really opened my eyes. In theory, the young people who were on the same line as me, university students from a Western country with a high standard of living, felt like they were from a different planet in many respects.

In the Bible Belt in Huntsville, the majority of young people are very religious. Moments of mass prayer were organized in the central square of the university, and after football practice, God was thanked for friendship.

In the middle of the countryside, you don’t really follow the rest of the world, and you don’t necessarily want to: you are completely satisfied with your life in Texas. Few people from Huntsville own a passport or have even been outside the southern states.

Almost no one had been on a train in their lifetime. Why not, when you can get where you need to go by car.

For example, the only grocery stores, village-sized Walmarts and Targets, are all on the other side of a six-lane highway and you can’t walk to them. What is the need for sidewalks if gasoline costs 70 cents per liter.

of Huntsville in addition to more than 30 churches, there are seven prisons in the area. The decommissioned electric chair in the prison museum is a source of local pride.

In one of the prisons in Huntsville, all the prisoners sentenced to death in Texas, which are almost 200, are still executed. The vast majority of them have been awaiting execution for decades, some since the 1970s.

Three blocks away from my campus, prisoners were being executed as the appeals process ended. This year, three have died, in the current decade, 22.

One execution was supposed to take place in July, but the court decided 20 minutes before the poison injection that DNA evidence was still needed for the murder that happened in 1998.

Texas is perhaps the most distinctive of the 50 states in the United States. In terms of population, land area and GDP, the rodeo state is the second largest in the federal state.

But later in the spring, when I met young people who had attended Princeton University in New York and worked in the Financial District, I didn’t think they and my fellow students from Texas had much in common besides language and certain cultural starting points.

The attitude towards politics, the outside world and the values ​​of everyday life was completely different from the Texan youth, among whom the most fundamentalists believe that women should not even show their bare ankles.

Texas should not be confused with California or New York, which hold the first and third places in the economy. They represent America, which tends to be highlighted in the Finnish media.

However, the young people of the east coast seemed to be from the same planet as me, a Finn who grew up in a big city.

Texas is a real economic powerhouse. The state’s GDP is larger than that of Russia. The GDP of the city of Houston alone is almost double that of Finland.

I learned that even economic powerhouses like Texas can execute people and raise young people to be fundamentalist Christians who believe the devil is taking over some people. And it’s not worth preaching to them about our Finland, they don’t preach to us either.

The United States is one of the most diverse countries on Earth, but also deeply divided. In the November elections, we will see whether the world of thought from Huntsville or New York will win.