Texas—love it or leave it?

 

I’ve always resented those “America, love it or leave it!” slogans with the clear implication that whatever America does, we should love it. I call that blind patriotism. There have been periods in my adult life when I did not love what American did—the Iraq War, Guantanamo, the continuing death penalty—and I did not want to fly the flag in my front yard or put a flag decal on the back window of my car. This was particularly true during the presidencies of George W. Bush and trump. To me, it’s akin to parenting—you love the child with all your heart but not all of the child’s actions. Or that old aphorism, which is not biblical, though some will take it that way: love the sinner, scorn the sin.

Two friends I care deeply about have left Texas because of the politics—one went to Colorado quite a few years ago, the other moved to New Mexico just this summer. Now a childhood pal writes me that she doesn’t see how I can stay here with all that’s going on. It’s that love it or leave it mentality again. My knee-jerk response is that my four children and seven grandchildren are here (well one is in Colorado but we haven’t lost her yet), and unless I can convince them all that we need a compound in the village of Dores in the Scottish Highlands, I’m not going anywhere.

Also of note is that so much of my career is dependent on Texas, its history and its lore. Of the fourteen mysteries I’ve written, thirteen are set in Texas. I’ve written about Texas women, Texas chefs, Texas food, and Texas history. When I was director of TCU Press, the focus of our publishing program was the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As a transplant of fifty-six years, I sometimes feel like the embodiment of that T-shirt we used to see in the seventies: “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could.”

No, I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to. But I do want our old Texas back, before people like Abbott, Patrick, Paxton, Cruz, and Cornyn (sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?) took over. I could never say it was well as Texas Monthly’s acclaimed writer, Mimi Swartz. She published a marvelous essay in The New York Times titled, “Texas Has Broken My Heart.” If you subscribe to the Times, look it up; if you’re on Facebook, you can find it on my wall.

When I was a very new writer, I did a small children’s book called The Texas ABC Book, and I used to think no other state had a history interesting enough to cover the entire alphabet. Who else has a tale as wild as that of the Yellow Rose of Texas or a state food as colorful as chili? What other state has seashore, mountains, and desert all within its borders. I’ll claim the iconic Alamo as part of our colorful history, though I’m well aware it’s under fire now with the publication of Forget the Alamo—still I think the story of Adina de Zavala and Clara Driscoll and their fight to save the long barracks and chapel is a wonderful bit of history—and speaks to the spirit of Texas women, just as does the woman who refused to let General Houston have her oxen to pull his cannon. When he stole them, she had the last laugh—and stole them back and gave Houston a good trouncing with a whip in the process, to his humiliation.

So yes, I love Texas, but not what it’s become today—a state where every effort is made to limit who can vote, a state where abortion is illegal, no matter extenuating circumstances (have any of those old white men ever had to carry a deformed or dead fetus in their bellies?), a state where teachers are told what they can and cannot teach, a state where local control of vital health matters is over-ridden by an ambitious governor who ignores the real—and correctible—problems facing his state while worrying that trans kids may want to play high school athletics? Or use the wrong bathroom. We’ve clearly lost much of what once made Texas great.

But I’m an optimist. I believe we can get Texas back if we protest loud enough—so cheers to the Texas Senate Democrats who have stalled the voter suppression law and to the cities and school districts who are defying Abbott’s ill-conceived anti-mask mandate order. We must vote the greedy and ambitious out of office and vote in real Texans, who understand Texas life and values as clearly as Mimi Swartz does. Read her essay. She says it far better than I can.