fear

     I have been grazing several dozen cow/calf pairs at some distance from the home farm this year.  I spent last year taking up miles of old rusted barbed wire and the steel posts it was hanging on so that a good perimeter fence could be built.  I began to notice hammering in the distance occasionally which reminded me of my youth on this farm.  But I soon worked out that what I was hearing now was shooting at the nearby gun range.

    What I hear now when I am with the cows is gunfire.  Someone thinks it worthwhile to spend money on the gun(s) and ammo and then endless hours shooting away at a target placed in front of a sand hill.  Why? Fear is the simplest and I think most accurate explanation.

    In contrast the hammering I heard in my youth a half century ago really was hammering.  It was also industry.  Someone was fixing buildings or fence or building new.  

    It is important, I think, to point out that "industry" in description of those sounds at that time bears little resemblance to what we have learned to think of as "industry" today.  Those people were not industrious little worker bees busy doing something or other to create the profit margin for some corporation.  Instead those were people, usually families, creating the means and the likelihood of their own survival, and they hoped, prosperity at their own homes and farms.

    That official and academic agriculture decided soon after WWII that those lives were worthless, that money could devise ways to do it better and cheaper and that those people were better used and more useful if driven off their property and on to an assembly line is one of the true tragedies of our history.  It takes its place with the theft of land from the natives and the enslavement of Africans as major moves to take possession of the earth and its wealth by the very few.  And these things created the dangerous and despairing and hopeless environment in which we survive today.

    We are a long time gone in the wrong direction.