I Crossed the Line at Twenty-Two

In a hotel hallway in Tyler, thirty years ago today, I pressed my thumb into a tin of red ink and laid the print over my signature. I was twenty-two. My father stood next to me, a Korean War veteran who had spent his life watching the government he fought for treat men like him as an inconvenience. He went first. Then I did. We walked back to the car in the August heat, the ink dried on my thumb, and I did not wash it off.

The papers on that table were an oath to a Texas that lived in memory and nowhere in the law. No fee. No background check. A signature, a thumbprint in red ink, and you belonged to something. Eight hundred people filled that building that afternoon, more than the Tyler paper bothered to count, and they had come from the Panhandle and the Valley and the small towns of East Texas. Farmers and machinists and retired schoolteachers, some of them older than my father, some younger than me. They had driven a long way in the August heat to say one thing out loud. That Texas is a nation.

I did not learn that in a hallway in Tyler. I knew it before I could read. It was in the ground I grew up on and the stories my father told me and the memory of an ancestor who carried a rifle in the Texian Army when Texas made itself a nation the first time. Texas was a sovereign country for nine years. It signed treaties. It kept an army, a navy, and a currency. Then in 1845 it traded that sovereignty for a promise, and for the next century and a half the fact of Texas nationhood was filed away as a curiosity, a thing for reenactors and roadside markers. In that hotel, for one afternoon, eight hundred people took it back out and decided it was not a curiosity at all. It was unfinished business.

A hundred and sixty years before that afternoon, William Travis drew a line in the sand at the Alamo and asked men to cross it. Every man who crossed was dead inside a day. The line held anyway. That is what the careful people never understand about a line. The decision to cross it does not wait on what happens next. The decision is the meaning. I crossed mine in that hallway in Tyler, and I have not once crossed back.

I did not sign my name to an organization. The organization was a vehicle, and not a good one, and it did not last. My commitment was never to the vehicle. It was to the idea the vehicle was carrying, and the idea is older than any organization that ever tried to carry it. When that first vehicle came apart, the idea did not go down with it. I spent the better part of a decade learning why good men with a true cause still lose, and I came out of it certain of one thing. The cause did not need another rally. It needed a machine built to win.

So I built one. The Texas Nationalist Movement, which I have led since 2005. We did not hold rallies for the cameras. We knocked doors, county by county, year after year. We wrote the model legislation and put it in the hands of the people who could file it. We built the largest organized movement for Texas independence there has ever been, and then we did the thing everyone swore was impossible. We carried the argument into the dominant political party in Texas and we won it. This June the party wrote independence and a referendum into its platform. Thirty years ago this was a curiosity that eight hundred people drove to a hotel to affirm. Today it is the official position of the largest state party in the United States.

Thirty years also teaches you what the fight is actually about. It is not a grievance you fix with the right congressman or the right man in the White House. I have watched administrations of both parties arrive promising to rein it in, and the thing that governs Texas from a thousand miles away never changes with them, because it does not answer to them. It is permanent. It is unelected. And it long ago decided that Texans do not get the final say over Texas. That is not a relationship you repair. It is working exactly the way Washington means it to. The only remedy that reaches the root is the one Texans have never been allowed to reach for, which is to govern themselves. A nation running its own affairs.

Texans have not voted on that, and the enemy would like you to draw the wrong lesson from it. Washington is not the reason, and Washington is not the gatekeeper. The right is already ours, written into our own supreme law. Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution says all political power is inherent in the people of Texas, and that they hold at all times the inherent right to alter, reform, or abolish their government. That is not a slogan. It is the highest law in this state, and it does not ask Washington for anything. Washington does not put this question on a Texas ballot. Washington cannot. The Texas Legislature, elected by Texans, sets the referendum, and Texans settle it at the polls. The vote was always ours to hold. No one a thousand miles away can hand it to us, and no one a thousand miles away can take it off the table.

The red ink dried on my thumb thirty years ago, and I never washed it off. I have not once crossed back. Travis asked men to cross a line knowing what it would cost them, and they paid it. The line in front of Texas now costs a ballot, not a life. I crossed mine at twenty-two. If you haven’t, it’s your turn.