Despite embarrassments, Texas’ potential exceeds its flaws
Texas is making national headlines again. Like usual, they aren’t flattering. This time, Democratic lawmakers broke quorum and fled the state in a last-ditch effort to stop Republicans from truncating voting rights.
That comes just months after the state’s power grid failed during a massive winter storm, with the death toll still rising and now at least 210 people dead, billions in property damage and disrupted power supplies throughout the Midwest.
Then there was the book “Forget the Alamo ,” which attempts to debunk many of the myths involving the Shrine of Texas Liberty. I’ve only read an excerpt, but I found it interesting, well-researched and balanced. We Texans, however, love our myths. Some love them so much they’re downright afraid to shine a bright light on them, which is why Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sandbagged the authors’ talk at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, garnering national headlines and turning the book into an instant bestseller.
(Lt. Dan — feel free to peruse my oeuvre and criticize any and all.)
It’s gotten so bad that a friend in Oregon, a state that won’t even let you pump your own gas, asks me why I live here.
I not only live here, I’ve spent most of my life here, and plan to keep doing so. I even decided to set my first novel here. In fact, “The Big Empty” paints a rather glorifying picture of the state and its rural inhabitants. The title comes from the nickname for much of West Texas, and I was fascinated by the expression when I first heard it. While it can be a desolate place, and the outsiders who move there in the book find the emptiness suffocating, it also serves as a blank slate upon which they cast their hopes. I deliberately set “The Big Empty” in the past, in part because I wanted it to exist in a time when politics wasn’t so divisive and average folks cared more about, say, the weather.
I wanted to write a story that caused readers — and myself as a writer — to question assumptions about the state. I wanted to give the small-town characters in the book a chance to explain why they lived the way they did.
But I also wanted to capture the sense of optimism that was swirling around the state — and the nation — at the end of the last millennium, when technology seemed a great hope that would usher in a brighter future.
That future, of course, threatened a past that many Texans dearly loved.
Years ago, as a technology reporter for an online news service, I found myself on a vast West Texas cattle ranch. The company that owned the ranch had just bought a manufacturer of ultrapure chemicals, used to clean circuit boards. The
executive I needed to interview for the story agreed to talk provided I met him at the ranch, where he was spending the weekend. The juxtaposition of a city-boy reporter chasing a tech manufacturing story on what could have been the set of “Lonesome Dove” was too great to ignore. One night, as I walked outside and stared up at the star-speckled bowl of the sky while trying to get my Motorola flip phone to find a signal, I felt as if I was straddling two Texases. I didn’t realize it until later, but in that moment “The Big Empty” was born. That, and the conversation I overheard the next day in which several cowboys were discussing “Star Wars” movies.
I used to tell East Coast colleagues who berated my state that Texas was the Land of Big Stories. Sure, those stories often involved swindlers, hucksters and charlatans, but Billy Sol Estes or the Hunt Brothers were a lot more colorful than Bernie Madoff.
One of the biggest stories this year, aside from Cancelin’ Dan, the Great Freeze Out and the Fleeing Ds, is the private space race. It’s not a coincidence that two billionaires — Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk — are launching rockets from Texas. In the 1960s, Houston was dubbed Space City USA because it was home to NASA’s Mission Control, and it seemed a city on the cusp of the future. Now, the state boasts two functioning private spaceports (in addition to Houston’s Ellington Field and Midland’s airport, which are both federally licensed).
The launch sites for SpaceX and Blue Origin are both in small Texas towns, and the locals are wrestling with the same hopes and fears as my book’s characters, who both welcome the hope that comes with a semiconductor plant moving to the area and also fear what will be lost as people with different lifestyles and values move in. As the future moves in, towns such as Van Horn, where Blue Origin launches from, find themselves struggling to pay for better water systems and other infrastructure. The cost of one space tourism ticket could go a long way toward addressing community needs, as Andrea Leinfelder pointed out in her three-part series on the spaceports this month.
I had no idea Texas would become a hub for commercial space travel, but the struggle these communities feel has been playing out in small towns across America for decades. If they hold on too strongly to the past, they risk watching their towns wither as young people move away. But the future is paid for in change, and change is never easy, especially when it involves people’s way of life.
These struggles are drowned out by the political vitriol that now passes for public debate. It’s important to remember that the ongoing story of Texas is bigger. It Texas may be the Land of Big Stories, but it’s also the Land of Big Dreams.
Our state government’s an embarrassing mess, run by men at the top who are so stuck in the past that they probably still get their teeth pulled at the barber shop. And yes, there’s an element of voters who are bitter, bigoted and backward. They don’t speak for all of us, or even most of us.
For all its faults and its sordid, myth-obscured history, Texas is still a land of undying optimism. It’s a place where people can start over, whether you’re Davy Crockett, John Connally or a Syrian refugee newly arrived in Austin or Amarillo.
Why do I stay? Because I believe we will get better. All the creativity, inventiveness, entrepreneurship and risk-taking must lead us somewhere other than stymied in the past. This is, after all, the home of George Mitchell, Bessie Coleman, Jack Kilby, Ellen Ochoa, and — notable this week — Simone Biles, as well as countless others who are pushing us into the future. We have led the way on engineering feats such as the Astrodome and the Houston Ship Channel, and today our scientists are pioneering breakthroughs in nanotechnology, battery design and medicine. Our elected officials may not understand the significance of such achievements, or
they may find it politically expedient to ignore them, but most Texans know otherwise. We can’t let those who represent the worst in us derail our potential.
We are increasingly diverse as a people and an economy. We struggle to overcome our past, come to terms with change, and build a better future. That is the biggest story of all — the human story — which plays out on a stage from the Big Empty to the big city.