https://nyti.ms/2ShEjNS

MIDLAND, Texas — I cried the day I moved to Midland, the capital
of our nation’s oil and gas industry. Back then, almost 10 years ago, my
husband’s new job designing control systems for natural gas processing plants
wasn’t the sort of work I wanted him to take.

It didn’t mesh well with my increasingly progressive principles. And so on some
level, I understand the response from people when I tell them where I live: an
odd mix of curiosity, pity and disgust.

Curiosity because, along with our neighbor city Odessa, we’re seen as the land
of “Friday Night Lights,” oil barons and women with hair still bigger than
Texas. Pity because all they picture is flat, thirsty land peppered with thorny
mesquite and bobbing pump jacks. Never mind that the sunsets will leave you
speechless. Yet ever since a drop in demand caused by this Covid-19 pandemic
caused oil prices to plummet, it’s the last response — disgust — that seems to
be everywhere. Disgust stemming from “oil town” stereotypes. And it troubles me.
Because I can’t reconcile the disgust-turned-to-glee I see on social media (the
“they deserve it anyway” attitude) with the Midland I’ve come to know.