Texas, Our Texas

Breakfasts at our retirement home are leisurely. Four of us usually sit at the same table near the door. I sit in “the gun-fighter’s seat” with my back to the wall, where I can say “Good morning” to the other old folks who pass on their way to and from other tables in the dining room.

Our group drifts in about eight o’clock, and after our poached eggs or oatmeal, we sit drinking tea or coffee for the next hour. At times conversation lags – the weather is consistently hot and we’re bored with hearing about each other’s arthritis. I’m always glad when John joins us. He always says something to liven things up.

One morning – I don’t know what prompted it – as John pulled up a chair and sat down, leaning on his cane, I said, “After growing up in Texas, it was quite a shock to move to Chicago.”

John retorted, “After growing up in Chicago, it was quite a shock to move to Texas.”

That’s when the young man sitting opposite, a visitor who is spending a few days with his mother, said, “I’m a Texan. I’ve never lived any place but Texas. For me, any place outside the borders of Texas is a foreign country, and I don’t want to go there.”

I am his opposite. I am glad I lived in five different states, spent time in most of the others, and traveled, made friends, and even lived – if briefly – in foreign countries. Everywhere I’ve met people who have grown up in one place, never lived any place else, and think it is the best place in the World.

Chicago is a fascinating city with spectacular museums and a beautiful lakefront. Friends asked me, “Why would you want to live any place else?” I rode the dirty old “el” train and looked in windows of tenements, where poor whites and blacks live in slums. I’ve climbed down from the “el” into a foot of snow and slipped on ice as I made my way “home” to an apartment where our living room window was five feet from the window in the adjoining building. No, I don’t want to live there. Never again.

Belief that the place you grew up is the very best in the World enables Alaskans to live in the Arctic and Brazilians to live in the Amazon. But failure to understand other people and cultures can lead to tragic misunderstandings. People become stuck in their beliefs, and misinformation passes from generation to generation.

Ignorance of science and history has resulted in the perversion of education in Texas schools. Evolution is a “theory” and God created the World in 6000 B.C. In the new history textbook, Abraham Lincoln’s picture is paired with that of Jefferson Davis. When Congress passed laws that our governor didn’t like, Perry suggested Texas should secede from the United States -- as if that had not been settled by the Civil War.

Television opened everyone to the entire World, but the internet has no restraints. Anyone can publish any lie on the web, and people read and believe. No libel law can punish them. Texans will continue to maintain that God created the World in seven days. And just because a man’s father (whom he never knew) was a Muslim, then the man must be a Muslim, too.

Crazy World!