Rural Revolt

The Rural Revolt

By Jeff Warren

No one could write dialogue like Paddy Chayefsky. Who can forget Howard Beale (the Anchorman in “Network”) galvanizing a generation with, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”?

Who amongst us didn’t want to throw open our windows and shout that we weren’t going to put up with it anymore?

America is no stranger to rebellion. We were ripped from the womb of tyranny in 1773 by some angry folks who felt His Majesty’s tea was better suited for the bottom of Boston Harbor than the top of a certain East India Company’s sailing vessels.

Of course, it didn’t begin with those intrepid souls protesting a series of “intolerable acts” being levied against them from afar.

It began in 1215 when King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized ... or anyways destroyed … unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

We recognize this more readily in our Fifth Amendment, “no person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

John Locke articulated this in his Second Treatise on Government. Locke wrote that in a natural state all people, are born free and equal, and possess certain rights. He said that these “natural rights” were life, liberty, and property.

As a prelude to the Revolution, Thomas Paine (in “Common Sense”) expanded “property” to include the phrase “pursuit of Happiness,” which Thomas Jefferson ripped off and declared an unalienable right which he placed at the top of our Declaration of Independence.

“Property” has only recently become a dirty word. Until the ‘60s, “private property” was not considered obscene.

City folk tend to rent rather than own. Nothing wrong with that.

They tend to rely on government services or merchants, rather than being self-reliant. Among other things, government provides buses for transport, merchants provide food and clothing. Rural people often fend for themselves, raising their own food, repairing their own equipment, building their own infrastructures — wells, roads, fences, barns, etc.

It stands to reason that a man who adds a porch onto his house with his own hands is going to feel different about it than a man who rents a home with a veranda in the city.

A man who raises cattle, grapes or corn is going to feel different about their relationship to him and the land, than the man who only sees these commodities in Safeway.

A rancher might have to capture his own water. A city dweller turns on a tap and expects it.

A farmer might cut wood to heat his hearth. An urbanite turns up the thermostat.

A farmer worries that untimely rain might destroy his hay crop. A metro-sexual worries that untimely rain might cancel his tennis match.

Small towns tend to be surrounded by agriculture, so rural people have a natural affinity for farmers.

For some reason, like England abused the colonies, urbanites are now declaring war on small-town, rural life. Why is this? Why have our fellow Americans in the cities lost respect for the way small town people live?

Through government bureaucracies with odd acronyms like BAAQMD, they’re attempting to take land and infrastructure from country folk.

Statewide, water is being denied to farmers. In Napa County, alone, movements are underway to de-commission roads in the hills, tear down dams on private property, restrict plantings, limit cattle grazing, limit the number of livestock one may own, monitor private wells, prevent growing grapes in the hills, ban fireplaces — the list goes on.

The assault has been relentless. It’s usually based on scare tactics centered around health. Recently, 1,700 people turned out in Santa Rosa to protest an onerous septic system inspection and “tax.”

Besides mandatory $350 inspections, they wanted to require government-mandated upgrades costing up to $45,000 per system.

That upset a lot of folks. Something’s in the air, and it ain’t coming from septic tanks. It’s the stench from governmental abuse of power.

Google “Rebellions in the United States.” From Boston Harbor to the Whiskey Rebellion, to the Haymarket Riot, to the Civil Rights Movement, you will see a list of hundreds of uprisings. Americans will only be pushed so far. I’m not sure we want a bunch of country folk rising up and shouting, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” But if it comes to that, count me in.

(Jeff Warren is a newcomer whose family didn’t arrive here until the ‘50s. He is a businessman, husband and father of three. His Web site is www.jeffwarren.com.)

St. Helena Star