Degrees of separation …

… Transmissions from a Lone Star: Texas Independence Now! | Columnists | RIA Novosti.

Personally, I don’t doubt that Texas would be very successful if it became a country. The state has the 14th largest economy in the world: bigger than Australia’s. But the vast majority of Texans believe that they are better off inside the USA and so the secession movement is extremely weak. I know this because last year I attended a meeting of the Texas Nationalists on the 175th anniversary of Texas independence. Although they claimed to have 250,000 members they could barely scrape together 30 folk to fill a room in a hotel built on the historical grounds of the Alamo itself. They were gentle, peaceful people: every now and then a speaker would look out the window at the old mission house and cry.