I’m riding in on a different horse this time. Because there’s sadness in my saddlebags.
America ain’t America anymore.
If you think it is, you didn’t come up when the desperation of the Depression still gnawed at folks until their stomachs ached, or in the hard shadow of the Great War when everybody in the Republic still flew Old Glory off the front porch.
I don’t remember worrying about patriotism then, cause it was still proudly alive, or about some bottom-feeding lawyer interrupting the Lord’s Prayer every morning of a new school day, or think to disbelieve the better State of the Union when the President stood up and said so.
I don’t remember anybody getting sued for an honest accident he couldn’t avoid, or being held up for robbery by the family GP, or being determined perpetually accountable morally and monetarily for something society did a 150 years ago. I don’t remember going to the second grade in evermore fear of some idiot rushing through the door and blowing the class away with his daddy’s shotgun. Or being outlawed for shooting off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.
Guns? Guns were everyman’s right, for hunting and protection, for shooting vermin and tin cans off a log, and if you did anything sideways with one, you got your butt blistered with your papa’s stropping strap. ’Nuff said.
I can’t remember nobody locking a door much, ’cause the majority of men folk were out working their hands sore for a living – cause then you could still count mostly on reaping what you sowed – if you worked hard, you earned and accumulated proportionately. If you were deserving, you made something of yourself, and if you didn’t, then you were expected to get your lazy ass off the chair and be about it. Those that tried to dodge that basic moral and civil responsibility, to take their leave from someone else who didn’t, expected to meet mama at the door with double-aught buckshot.
The government still had some respect for self-reliance and individual worth, at least kept a respectable tax distance as long as it wasn’t achieved unlawfully, and an Arab cartel wasn’t allowed to hold nobody up lawfully at the Texaco pump. You didn’t take charity, especially from the gover’ment, and if you did, it was two bits less than honorable.
“I Wish I Had Dad’s Winchester” by Eugene Iverd. Courtesy Winfield Galleries.
Like I said, America ain’t America anymore. And if you think those basic values, freedoms and assurances are archaic, and aren’t worth the trouble, then stand aside of the rest of us who still figure they are.
Peers to me the country is divided about as dangerously as anytime since the Civil War. When’s the last time, since lately, you saw a State threaten outright independence, or a banner unfurled by an irate populace proclaiming “Don’t Tread On Me.”
What’s all this got to do with hunting and fishing? Well, I don’t have to answer that question for anybody who cares. And if you haven’t tried lately, go to any of the major shooting sources and try to buy a simple brick of .22 long-rifle ammunition to take your kid target practicing.
Choose your poison, but most of the people of reasonable and responsible intelligence, who have held this nation together for the current three generations, are either, or all at once, seriously mad, sad or scared. I’m one of them, and I take serious offense to the imposition.
A lot of people in this country are reexamining their civil footing, freedoms and allegiance more earnestly than they have in a 150 years, because they’re being pushed to it. Not quite yet at sword point, but the blade of treachery is inching perilously closer. When government decrees a mandate for change, it best not forget that the people who created it have the same opportunity. Not everything happen in the halls of Congress, in a voting booth, or in a Presidential Executive Order.
The winds are blowing and a lot of leaves are gonna come off the trees.
As America drifts ever more distant from her traditional roots and values, I hear it more and more.
From a father, or a grandfather, widowed grandmother, or anyone else with gray on their head, who bears upon his shoulders the welfare of his children, their children, and their children’s children. The thought that conventional wisdom concerning the passage of accumulated worth – the notion that a man can pass on to those he would care for, the sum of his life’s accomplishments, without an egregious governmental greed and creed to divide it among the masses – no longer looms prudent in this strange, threatening and disconnected world.
Where life and values are no longer sustained from the agrarian roots of his forefathers, and those mores that survive wither from a worsening ideological drought that stifles independence, and drains the nation toward a homogenized federal commons. Leaving soil that was fertile with individual freedom and initiative, the celebration of achievement and the ethic of due work for due rewards, to dry and crack like sun-parched clay.
They’re plainly worried, for a lot of good reasons, reasons good folks are talking about around the dinner table every single night. There’s not a lot of trust left in the world we know. Nobody knows for true – just how much of America is still ours – and how much of the overburden the government has laid upon it, and its People, has been deeded to China.
There’s a concern of collapse. A movement back to the land, the re-institution of self-reliance and the necessity of self-survival. A return to the hunting, fishing, growing and gathering that is born of the land.
“I had believed I could protect what I have worked hard for all my days, for my children . . . in a trust, living will or similar contemporary instrument,” I hear them say.
“But now I think I won’t.
“What I’m going to do is to take it and buy a good slice of tillable land, with a good, dry-weather spring on it, and leave them a deed. So, if worse falls to worse, they’ll have a place to work and live. Like their great grand-daddy and grandma did before them. And I’ll give ’em my old Parker gun, so’s they can shoot the damn, poly-fangling politician or lawyer that comes begging along, after they’ve finally driven everything else to ruin, wanting a part of it.
“If they work hard, love, protect and abide, maybe they can survive . . . maybe one day before it’s all too late, they can bring America back again . . .
“I hope so.
“Meanwhile, I’d like my grandson and granddaughter to know how good it can be, what the real world is like, how alive it feels when it breathes fresh and clean again in the spring. How it is to feel the good earth, damp and willing, between their toes.”
When I was maybe six years old, Mama took me to see Gone With the Wind, because she thought I ought too. The scene I remember yet, even today, is Gerald O’Hara, standing with Scarlett, beside his white horse, on a knoll under the dying sun . . . overlooking the broad fields and meadows of an ante-bellum Tara.
“The Land, Katie Scarlett,” he said desperately, “it’s the only thing that lasts.”
Sound wisdom.
Supremacy will ever threaten. You do what you can.
However, I seem to recall, also, that it was farmers who pulled the plug on it the first time around, and drafted a renewed tablet of freedom, all their own.
The year, I think, was 1776.