Academics, politicians and expert easterners have been trying to bury the West for 200 hundred years but to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the West being dead are greatly exaggerated. They say the sun is setting on the West because there is no more land to explore, no more gold or silver to discover, no more societies to conquer. You can still find the real West if you want to but not in left coast cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle or in sanctuary cities like San Francisco. No, you’ll find the West instead in places like Pie Town, Post, Cedar City, Show Low, Emmett, Guymon, Burns, Lakeview, Sheridan, Elko when the cowboy poets show up and even in California in places like Red Bluff when the bull sale takes over the town in January. No, the spirit and traditions of the West never died, our critics are just looking in all the wrong places.
It’s not true that there are no more frontiers to conquer or gold rushes to attract brave adventurers ever westward. It’s just that now the courageous and hard working come to drill through shale for black gold or conquer bit and bytes in Silicone Valley.
No, the West isn’t dead yet but it’s not for lack of trying. The bureaucrats, environmentalists and politicians have done their level best to kill it off and turn it into Nature’s Disneyland for easterners to conquer the frontier via Delta, Hertz and Hilton. Naturally, they come under the spell of America’s West and after their ten day vacation to the Grand Canyon, Universal Studios and the Redwoods they now know what’s best for the land and the heathens who live here.
They halted the clear-cutting of forests that acted as firebreaks; got rid of thousands of miles of forest roads that provided access for fire fighting equipment; wouldn’t allow the removal of dead and dying trees that provided the kindling that lit the huge fires that engulfed us. And they kicked the cows and sheep off public lands that kept grass and weeds from becoming fodder for fires.
But these so-called “experts” weren’t here to breathe the smoke nor did they have to rebuild their homes. Tell me, doesn’t all that smoke qualify as greenhouse gas or is that just farting cows? And what about all those crispy critters, many of them endangered species, that their idiotic policies have murdered? What do the greenies and animal rightists have to say about them?
They used the spotted owl to put foresters out of work and kill off small towns but they don’t seem to care that those same spotted owls are now being killed by a close relative. Now they’re turning wolves loose to get rid of the rancher because they don’t like cows. They idiotically believe that cows never spend a day outside a feedlot, not knowing that range cows never spend a day in one. And why is it that steer manure is so good for their water-wasting lawns but is bad for our public lands? They ridicule farmers for “wasting” water not knowing it’s the stuff that grows the vegetables and fruits the vegans contend are so good for us to eat.
These over-educated idiots are so smart they’re stupid. First they told us not to put our groceries in paper bags, not realizing that they came from a renewal resource that created jobs and paid taxes. So we switched to plastic bags until they figured out they were made from petroleum derivatives. Next they said we should bring our own reusable bags until they found out that these germ-laden bags could be spreading the China flu. So now we’re back to paper.
Those wanting to kill off the West say we must get rid of fossil fuels not realizing that those giant windmills are slicing and dicing up birds and that solar arrays create vast wastelands and we don’t know what to do with the spent solar panels yet, just like we haven’t come up with a way to get rid of the spent nuclear rods, other than bury them in Nevada. Why not New York instead?
Yeah, they thought they knew it all and now we’re paying the price for their idiocy. I just wish they’d worry about all the momentous problems in their own backyards and leave us the heck alone.
