This Thanksgiving was extra special for me. My son Alex surprised us with a visit making the drive from Longview to be with us for the holiday. As he began to unload his bags from the car, he stuck out his hand with a stack of cards and said, “Here, Dad. I brought these.”
There in his hand were three support pledges.
I looked at the cards, looked at him, gave him a hug and said, “Great job, Son. I’m proud of you.”
The next morning as I was walking him through how to enter them into the system, I asked him how he got them.
“It was easy. I talked to these guys in my (college) Speech class and asked them if they had ever thought about Texas being an independent nation. All three of them said ‘yes’ and that it was a great idea. That’s when I told them about the TNM and asked if they’d like to help us make it happen. They filled out the cards. That was it.”
Since then I’ve reflected on that conversation. Other than making me extremely proud, it has stuck with me how dead simple the entire process was to him. Alex knows that the only way to grow the TNM and win our independence is to open his mouth and start by asking the question. He didn’t start by giving his opinion or lecturing them on the benefits of Texas independence. Instead, he began by taking a genuine interest in how they felt about and then confidently asking if they wanted to be a part of making it happen.
Here’s the most important bit. Alex never attended a training, never read a manual, and didn’t consult a video tutorial. He knows that the TNM needs to connect with millions of independence supporters and he started in the most natural of places – his circle of friends and acquaintances.
As Alex was preparing to leave that weekend, he made sure that I showed him the place on the website where he could download the support pledge forms and went over how to enter them in one more time. He was ready to have more conversations and find more supporters.
I knew at that very moment that my son was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a Texas Nationalist.
