June 2013

If our children work hard, men folk were out working their m riding in on a different horse hands sore for a living cause this time. Because theres sadness love, protect and abide, in my saddlebags. maybe they can survive . . . then you could still count mostly on reaping what you sowed if America aint America anymore. and maybe one day before you worked hard, you earned and If you think it is, you didnt its all too late they can accumulated proportionately. If you come up when the desperation bring America back again. were deserving, you made something of the Depression still gnawed at of yourself, and if you folks until their stomachs didnt, then you were ached, or in the hard expected to get your shadow of the Great lazy ass off the chair War when everybody and be about it. Those in the Republic still that tried to dodge flew Old Glory off that basic moral and the front porch. civil responsibility, to I dont remember take their leave from worrying about someone else who patriotism then, cause didnt, expected to meet it was still proudly mama at the door with alive, or about some double-aught buckshot. bottom-feeding lawyer The government interrupting the Lords still had some respect Prayer every morning for self-reliance and of a new school day, or individual worth, at think to disbelieve the least kept a respectable better State of the Union tax distance as long when the President as it wasnt achieved stood up and said so. unlawfully, and an Arab I dont remember cartel wasnt allowed to anybody getting sued for hold nobody up lawfully an honest accident he at the Texaco pump. couldnt avoid, or being You didnt take charity, held up for robbery by especially from the the family GP, or being goverment, and if you determined perpetually did, it was two bits less accountable morally than honorable. and monetarily for something society did a 150 years ago. I dont ike I said, America I Wish i had dads winchester by eugene iverd courtesy www.winfieldgalleries.com remember going to the aint America second grade in evermore fear of anymore. And if you think those basic right, for hunting and protection, for some idiot rushing through the door values, freedoms and assurances are shooting vermin and tin cans off a log, and blowing the class away with his archaic, and arent worth the trouble, and if you did anything sideways with daddys shotgun. Or being outlawed then stand aside of the rest of us who one, you got your butt blistered with for shooting off firecrackers on the still figure they are. your papas stropping strap. Nuff said. Fourth of July. Peers to me the country is divided I cant remember nobody locking Guns? Guns were everymans about as dangerously as anytime a door much, cause the majority of

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By Mike Gaddis

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since the Civil War. Whens the last time, since lately, you saw a State threaten outright independence, or a banner unfurled by an irate populace proclaiming Dont Tread On Me. Whats all this got to do with hunting and fishing? Well, I dont have to answer that question for anybody who cares. And if you havent tried lately, go to any of the major shooting sources and try to buy a simple brick of .22 longrifle 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. Im 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 theyre 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. s 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 childrens 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 lifes accomplishments, without an egregious governmental greed and creed to divide it among the
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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. Theyre plainly worried, for a lot of good reasons, reasons good folks are talking about around the dinner table every single night. Theres 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. Theres a concern of collapse. A movement back to the land, the

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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 wont. What Im 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, theyll have a place to work and live. Like their great grand-daddy and grandma did before them. And Ill give em my old Parker gun, sos they can shoot the damn, poly-fangling politician or lawyer that comes begging along, after theyve 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 its all too late, they can bring America back again . . . I hope so. Meanwhile, Id 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 OHara, 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, its 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.
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