I just got back from a couple days in San Antonio. It’s a very friendly southern town, chock-full of Republicans from one end to another. Consider this pair I found sitting outside the Alamo. They were all smiles, and happily stood to allow me to take their picture:

They didn’t even ask what I wanted the picture for; they were happy to share their good humor with me and anyone else nearby.

While they were posing for their picture, a cab driver pulled up and hollered a rude insult, something on the order of “Texas isn’t yours: you stole it from the Indians.” While others might bristle at such provocation, these two just smiled, rolled their eyes, and said “yeah, we’ve heard that one before!”

I think the world could learn a lot from the friendly, welcoming attitude of Texans. For example, after the recent peaceful protests by immigrants nationwide, I heard plenty of people calling in to radio stations, screaming every sort of crude invective, talking about how “offended” they were that the protesters were waving Mexican flags.

If only these call-in ranters had adopted the welcoming attitude that I experienced in Texas, they just might have made a few more friends.

Texans, after all, are historically a welcoming sort of people. When I visited the Alamo, I noticed that nearly everyone who fought in that glorious battle in 1836 was from somewhere else: Davy Crockett was from Tennessee, Jim Bowie was from Kentucky, and the commander, William Travis, was from South Carolina. In fact, if you look at the list of Alamo defenders, the few who were from Texas all had Spanish names. The natives of Texas, then a part of Mexico, welcomed people from all over the world to help them defend liberty.

Mexicans were the first Texans, and today millions more Mexicans would like to move to Texas. Shouldn’t today’s Texans adopt the welcoming attitude of their forebears and offer some of that great southern hospitality to their neighbors from the south?

I have a review of The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis up at The Quarterly Conversation. You might want to give it a look. Here’s an excerpt:

At current count, several recent books, documentaries, and even an IMAX film have covered Ernest Shackleton’s now legendary failed attempt to be the first explorer to cross Antarctica. His ship Endurance became trapped in the sea ice before he even spotted land in the Weddell Sea. The ship was eventually crushed, forcing Shackleton to sail a 20-foot dinghy 2,000 miles across some of the most tempestuous seas on the planet to find help for his party, who he had left behind on an isolated island to survive on penguin and seal meat.

But fewer books have described the equally dramatic efforts of the second half of Shackleton’s expedition, charged with laying supply caches for the trans-Antarctic team on the other side of the continent. Tyler-Lewis’s book makes an admirable attempt to tell this neglected portion of the story.

These men suffered deprivations every bit as horrible as Shackleton’s main party, yet unlike Shackleton, they actually completed their mission. The Lost Men is a fascinating account of this, much less well-known part of the story.