Texas is not simply a place. Texas is a memory. A temperament. A civilization forged beneath hard skies and defended by stubborn men and women who believed liberty was worth sacrifice.
Long before Texas entered the Union, she stood as her own republic. Texans governed themselves, defended themselves, bled for themselves, and built a culture marked by fierce independence, frontier courage, covenantal loyalty, and deep suspicion toward centralized power.
Even the State anthem bears witness to this spirit.
“Texas, Our Texas,” opens with the triumphant declaration:
“Texas, Our Texas! All hail the mighty State!
Boldest and grandest, withstanding every test;
O Empire wide and glorious, You stand supremely blest.
God bless you Texas! And keep you brave and strong.
That you may grow in power and worth, Thro’out the ages long.
Texas, O Texas! Your freeborn single star,
Send out its radiance to nations near and far.
Emblem of freedom! It sets our hearts aglow,
With thoughts of San Jacinto and glorious Alamo.
Texas, dear Texas! From tyrant grip now free,
Shines forth in splendor your star of destiny!
Mother of heroes! We come your children true,
Proclaiming our allegiance, our faith, our love for you.”
We see at once that the anthem is marked by recurring language of bravery, freedom, sacrifice, destiny, and remembrance. It invokes San Jacinto. It remembers the Alamo. It celebrates not merely geography, but identity; the fierce belief that liberty must be defended by courageous people willing to preserve what has been entrusted to them.
This is why phrases like “Come and Take It” still carry such emotional force within the Texas soul.
Those words were never merely about a cannon at Gonzales. They became a declaration of civilizational temperament.
Free people do not easily surrender their inheritance.
This spirit has never fully disappeared.
It still lives along the dust-covered ranch roads that stretch beneath endless horizons. It lingers within the weathered stone and aging timber of old courthouses standing like weary sentinels against the passage of time. It breathes through the small country churches scattered beneath vast and merciful skies, where generations once gathered to pray, mourn, covenant, and endure together.
And it survives in the memory of hard men who rode horseback into uncertainty carrying little more than conviction in their souls, courage in their bones, and a rifle across their saddle.
Texas has always possessed a fierce and defiant instinct; an untamed determination born from frontier hardship, baptized in sacrifice, and unwilling to bow easily before distant powers, cultural surrender, or the slow erosion of liberty itself.
Perhaps no phrase captures it more powerfully than the immortal words raised over Gonzales in 1835: “Come and Take It.”
Five words.
Not a simple battlefield slogan, but a declaration of civilization itself.
It was not arrogance alone. It was the fierce announcement that free men and women do not easily surrender what has been entrusted to them.
That cannon at Gonzales represented something larger than artillery. It symbolized self-government, local responsibility, liberty, and resistance against distant powers seeking control over the lives of ordinary people.
And now many Texans sense that the pressures surrounding our State are no longer political disagreements. They feel civilizational.
The borders are breached. Historical revisionism is spreading like a prairie fire across the land. Communities fracture beneath the weight of confusion and cultural instability. And now, Texans are witnessing outside forces openly contesting the very meaning of Texas itself.
Some seek to reinterpret the Alamo through ideological frameworks completely detached from the spirit that forged it. Others openly disdain the very cultural foundations that made Texas distinct in the first place.
Texans are not perfect people. Our history carries both triumph and tragedy. Yet civilizations cannot survive if they lose the ability to tell the truth about who they are and what shaped them.
This moment demands more than emotional outrage. It demands disciplined remembrance.
Here are five things Texans must do if we intend to preserve the inheritance handed to us:
1. Recover Historical Memory
Teach your children the story of Texas.
Not caricatures.
Not revisionist mythology.
Not ideological reinventions.
Teach them, San Jacinto.
Teach them, Gonzales.
Teach them the Alamo.
Teach them why men once risked everything rather than surrender self-government. Teach them why men and women stood against impossible odds because they believed liberty was worth the price of sacrifice.
Take them to the battlefields. Walk the old courthouse squares. Read the original letters and declarations. Let them feel the weight of a civilization forged by hardship, courage, self-government, and covenantal responsibility.
A people disconnected from memory becomes vulnerable to manipulation because they no longer possess the moral vocabulary necessary to defend what their fathers built.
Civilizations do not vanish first from maps; they vanish from memory, and any people who forget their history will eventually lose permission to keep their future.
2. Strengthen Families and Local Communities
Texas was not built by distant bureaucracies. It was built through strong families, strong churches, strong ranches, strong schools, and strong local communities where people still understood duty, honor, restraint, and personal responsibility.
As we all know, the preservation of Texas will not begin first in Washington, nor even in Austin.
It will begin in homes where fathers and mothers still teach virtue. It will begin in churches courageous enough to speak truth without fear. It will begin when communities rise up once again and embrace self-governance rather than surrender every responsibility to centralized authority.
The more dependent a civilization becomes upon distant systems, the weaker its local moral fabric grows.
Healthy civilizations are built from the ground upward, not from the top downward.
You can be sure of this one fact: when local institutions collapse, no amount of political rhetoric can hold a people together for long.
3. Reject the Seduction of Passivity
One of the greatest dangers facing Texas today is not merely hostility from the outside, but paralysis from within.
Too many people mistake passivity for virtue.
Too many confuse silence with wisdom.
Too many believe that remaining uninvolved somehow preserves peace while the foundations beneath them quietly erode.
But history teaches otherwise.
Civilizations are rarely lost in a single dramatic moment. More often, they decay gradually while ordinary people convince themselves that someone else will eventually intervene, someone else will speak, someone else will defend what is being dismantled before their eyes.
Meanwhile, outside influences continue pressing against the spiritual, cultural, historical, and moral foundations that once gave Texas its distinct identity.
Passivity does not preserve a civilization; it weakens it.
People unwilling to defend their history, their families, their borders, their institutions, and their moral convictions eventually surrender them by default.
Simply put, Texans must recover the courage to stand visibly and unapologetically for what is true, good, and worthy of preservation.
A free society cannot survive long when its people become too intimidated, too distracted, or too passive to exercise stewardship over their own inheritance.
The old Texas spirit understood that liberty requires vigilance.
It requires participation.
It requires courage.
It requires citizens willing to stand upright beneath the weight of responsibility rather than retreat into comfortable silence as the civilization around them slowly fractures and crumbles.
Eventually, a passive people awaken to discover that what they refused to defend has already been taken from them.
4. Rebuild Civic Courage and Local Stewardship by Forming the Next Generation Intentionally
Texas was never built by spectators; she was built by men and women willing to assume responsibility for the land, the family, the church, the community, and the future entrusted to them.
Civilizations survive when they successfully pass their values, memory, virtues, and identity to their children. And civilizations collapse when one generation fails to transmit what the previous generation fought to preserve.
Texas cannot remain Texas if her children inherit prosperity without understanding sacrifice, freedom without responsibility, or liberty without moral restraint.
Neither can Texas remain Texas if she surrenders her values, history, moral foundations, and civilizational identity to outside influences that seek not to assimilate into her cultural ethos, but to fundamentally redefine it.
A civilization survives only so long as it possesses the courage to preserve the principles, memory, and cultural inheritance that made it distinct in the first place.
The next generation must be intentionally formed.
Teach them courage.
Teach them discipline.
Teach them reverence.
Teach them how to work.
Teach them the stories of those who came before them.
Teach them why faith, family, self-government, and responsibility once stood at the center of Texas life.
Do not allow screens, institutions, or outside cultural forces to disciple your children more deeply than their own families and communities.
Friend, remember this: culture is never neutral.
Someone is always shaping the imagination of the next generation. Someone is always defining virtue. Someone is always teaching children what to honor, what to reject, and what to become.
If Texans fail to intentionally form their children, others will gladly do it for them.
The old Texas attitude and spirit endured because it was handed down deliberately, around family tables, in churches, on ranches, through hardship, through work, through memory, and through stories of sacrifice and courage.
Civilizations survive when inheritance becomes intentional.
And Texas must once again become intentional about forming the kind of people capable of preserving Texas itself.
5. Return to Spiritual Foundations
Ultimately, the crisis confronting Texas is not just political; it is spiritual.
No civilization can remain strong once it loses the moral and spiritual foundations that sustain liberty. Laws may restrain chaos for a season, economies may generate prosperity for a time, and borders may temporarily slow external pressures, but none of these alone can preserve a people whose inner moral life has begun to decay.
Texas was shaped by imperfect men and women, yet many nevertheless understood a foundational truth: freedom requires virtue.
Self-government demands self-restraint. Liberty requires moral order. And civilizations survive only when enough people still believe there are truths higher than appetite, pleasure, power, and personal autonomy.
When churches grow silent…
when fathers disappear…
when discipline collapses…
when truth becomes negotiable…
when pleasure replaces responsibility…
when God is pushed to the margins of public and private life…
A civilization slowly begins consuming itself from within.
The old Texas spirit was never simply fierce independence for contrarianism’s sake.
It was ordered liberty beneath God.
It was families praying beneath open skies.
It was churches anchoring communities.
It was men and women who believed that freedom carried sacred responsibility before both history and Heaven itself.
And if Texas is to endure the mounting pressures now gathered against her, there must be a recovery of moral courage, spiritual clarity, reverence for truth, and hearts once again governed by something greater than self-interest.
Because ultimately, no nation, no republic, and no civilization can survive long after losing its soul.
Texas now stands at a civilizational crossroads.
Not because she faces hardship; Texas was forged in hardship. Not because she faces pressure; pressure has always tested free peoples. But because every civilization eventually reaches the moment when it must decide whether it still possesses the courage to remain itself.
The generation that fought at Gonzales understood this. The defenders of the Alamo understood this. The men who stood at San Jacinto understood this.
Freedom is never self-sustaining, and inheritance is never self-preserving.
Furthermore, civilizations survive only when enough people still love what they have received enough to defend it, steward it, teach it, and pass it forward intact.
Texas is not simply a geographic land. Texas is a memory. Texas is a sacrifice.
Texas is a covenant. Texas is ordered liberty beneath God.
And if we forget this, then no prosperity, no political rhetoric, and no technological advancement will preserve what generations before us bled to build.
But if Texans recover courage…
if they recover memory…
if they recover moral clarity…
if they recover spiritual seriousness…
Then the old Republic spirit may yet live again beneath these vast skies.
The old Gonzales banner still whispers across the plains even now:
“Come and Take It.”
Not merely as an act of defiance, but as a declaration that free people still possess the courage to preserve what Heaven and history entrusted to their care.
