Neanderpundit

A 33 year old skinny Texan with only one testicle has beaten the French at their own game. No! He didn’t surrender to anyone, he won the Tour De France. For the seventh time in a row. Now he gets to go home and nail Sheryl Crow. it’s great to be an American!

Inspired by this post from Acidman.

I farmed as a kid. When other kids went away to camp for the summer, I went to my grampa’s farm. The grandkids (there were a good many) would run the farm as the old man wasn’t in the best of health. Those who lived closest took care of the planting annd harvest, but the rest would deal with the rest of the work. The farm was about 65o acres, just over a square mile.

Anyway, there was a vegetable garden. In it, gramma would not allow tractors or powered equipment, so we cultivated with horses. I’m one of the few people I know who has pushed a plow behind a horse. There were stumps in that field, and when a 14 hand morgan mare pulled that plow you were holding into a stump, it could throw you clean over the horse. At the very least, you got punched in the gut, hard, by a plow handle.

My cousins and I took care of that little patch, fed chickens, four or five cows, horses, goats, milked the cows, all before the sun came up. We also weeded the big fields, mostly by hand. We used what chemicals and fertilizers we could get our hands on, and were glad to have them. A bad summer could bankrupt the old man, and several almost had. In the end, he lost the farm, but the old copper roofed farmhouse stands there, where my father spent his boyhood and where my summers were filled with what we considered slave labor at the time. Now, I’m damned glad to have had that experience, because I realize how important that lesson is: Farming, as Rob says, is damned hard work, and it never ends.

There’s something about sitting in a home you built with your own hands, something about being indoors and warm and dry and knowing that your own efforts are what brought you to that position. Anyone who has ever built any kind of shelter knows what I’m talking about, be it a house or a garden shed.

If you haven’t, you should. It’s an extremely primal, visceral feeling. You have a kinship with the first man who ever stoned up four walls, threw hewed beams over the top and thatched the roof. You have planted roots and taken a stand: In this building, I can take anything nature or humanity throws at me; I can weather storms, I can fend off predatory animals (and humans) who would harm myself and my family. I have security I have wrought with my hands, and it will keep myself and my descendants safe.

Our ancestors have built that building, and we call it America. It is a structure of incredible complexity, but it exists to protect us from the terrors not of animals or weather, but flawed and dangerous ideologies and those who would impose them on us. It has functioned admirably despite many assaults from without.

Pitiably, our house is in disrepair. Few are keeping it in good shape, while many are seeking to tear it down. Vermin within, termites, mold, rot, decay are causing the very foundastions to be assaulted. “(Nikita Krushchev)once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you”

His prophecy is beginning to come true. The marxist saying “the proletariat is the undertaker of capitalisim” is beginning to hit hard. Every one of us needs to understand that, and if we don’t, it’s going to happen here, is already happening here.

This house doesn’t feel so safe anymore. The protections it once offered aren’t so secure.