thomas leverett weblog

Avoiding the sh-t show

I sit in a remote valley of southeastern New Mexico, and the people here all tend to know each other and help each other out, especially in the bad weather. I have come to love my neighbors and resent the fact that the country is so polarized, that to some degree everyone is concerned about which side who is on. I guess you have to be on one side or the other. And it goes without saying that you have to be armed to the teeth, though I'm not.

What galls me about the White House, with its 34 cases or whatever, is that people aspire to working for the highest office in the land, and it's a kind of patriotic thing to serve the country. I'm as patriotic as anyone. If I had an opportunity to be a presidential press secretary or whatever, I'd take it. i'd be a little mad if through irresponsibility I got the virus as a result.

But enough of that; it will all come out in the wash, so to speak. We will ultimately find out the truth, and we can be free to suspect that the truth is not good, as most things that are hidden tend to be hidden for a reason. It will be like the taxes: we will find out, too late, that hiding it from us was the only option.

My neighbors are protective of their guns, I think, and don't want the state making a law that they can come take guns away from someone because they don't like that person. Or because he/she has the wrong politics. No, they say, everyone has the right to have a gun. They can have few guns, or even an arsenal. Sure you need the rifle to get the deer. But it's not the deer that matters. It's the hordes of invading people who want to loot and ransack.

I was reflecting on their rights, which to them are absolute (this is different from whether one should have to wear a mask). So at one point I just went and read the second amendment. I was surprised at what it said. It was all about the local militia. To them it seemed right and natural that all countrymen, since this was a rural country, would bind together in militias and that each valley would have its own group of men who were charged with protecting the valley. The existence of this militia was a given - every valley's got one, and every person in the nation needs one. You are by nature part of your millitia as it represents you and protects you.

So the militia has the right to decide what people need to protect the valley. Only the militia can decide this; the federal government can't. This is one of the powers they deliberately denied to the feds, because they strongly felt that the feds had no clue what it would require to protect a valley from anybody.

The reason I bring this up is because of drones. It's not the guns that bother me, although they do bother me, but the advent of drones will bring some challenges to this valley, and if I read that amendment properly, it will be our job to figure out how to defend ourselves. They may be used first for hunting; this would be a travesty for the deer and elk, who are pretty used to getting around on foot and not having to worry about what's coming at them from the sky. I am not sure how the National Forest will respond to the onset of drones, but I do know that within a few years they will be everywhere, and it will be a huge issue.

Back to my main point: It's our job, as citizens of the valley, to have a group, to make this decision, and decide what is necessary to protect our valley. I read that amendment, and that's what it said.

sh-t show almost over. I read the polls when I read the news, and maybe I'm getting overconfident, but it seems to me that people have finally seen through it. You can't go on forever pretending that everything is hunky-dory. To me the taxes were a dead giveaway. He's a grifter, a huckster, a thief, a brazen liar. But his time is up.

posted by tom @ 3:57 PM