Résistants

The Preamble

Résistants

The Subsequent Act

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            The state of our surroundings is troubling.

            Here is southwestern New Mexico, the drought is expanding. There is country that simply has had no monsoonal moisture. Rain events are mostly miss, but, where they do occur, they can be devastating. A cell earlier this week dropped up to five inches of rain in a small footprint but sent torrents of water off slope to create havoc.

            We had two tanks filled five miles from the center of the cloudburst. Several miles of tabosa bottom was irrigated without any actual rain accumulation. The slopes out of the bottoms remain critically dry.

            The cattle market is similarly chaotic.

            The fire in the Tyson plant in Kansas seems to be impacting prices simply on the basis of innuendo, suggestion, and opportunity. Secretary of Agriculture Purdue is pledging to investigate, but we have little expectation that any federal investigation leads to anything substantive.

            The on again off again trade war with China is a subterfuge of similar anxiety. Pork and beef are the go-to ping pong commodities of choice to play the game. The need for us to experience a rare victory seems to be only wishful thinking.

            The ever diminishing labor pool for farm and ranch needs is another subject matter unto itself. The discussion is similar everywhere. Nobody wants to work. Fewer yet are still equipped with the skill set needed on western ranches that are simply submersed in regulatory suffocation. Indeed, any hint of actual relief hasn’t reached the western federal hinterland.

            Perhaps it remains in the bottom of a pannier somewhere out on the trail on its way to us.

            The Preamble

            The tale of our human and structural condition isn’t new.

            Certainly, we spend more money than any society in the history of the earth which casts the mark of deceit and illusory compulsion on the part of any and all politicians who vote for ever expanding, unfunded budgets. Such action is certainly getting our attention. In fact, it is a nagging reminder that we have become a mob driven democracy and not a republic.

            The symptoms are almost universally the same. They have become timeless. They have become predictable.

            In the model, the press is tasked with enforcing the agenda censorship with the constant dissemination of propaganda. The aim is to ensure a coherent fictional reality. With a message that is pressed home again, again, and yet again, it almost becomes universally believed.

            Notice the suggestion of almost universally believed.

That leaves the other folks in suspension. They are still hoping for a victory, but with growing need to see something other than appeasements and retreat by their representatives at the head table.

Left without hope, some regions inherently grow more restless. Those people yearn to break away from the politics of absurdity and seek a return or a least a path to self-governance and self-reliance. History seems to demonstrate those are the people that neither seek glory nor accept it graciously.

They were and are the Résistants.

The foregoing can be suggestive of any number of societies, but it certainly applies to the resistant subset of French who watched in horror as their country was folded into the web of Nazi defilement in World War II.

During the years of 1940-1943, theirs was an endless, nightmarish existence. Their government had capitulated to the Nazis and they had no expectation that the Russians or the English were going to help. The Vichy French were in full accompaniment with the invaders attempting to find favor and acceptance in what appeared to be permanent and unalterable.

They were on their own without coordinated leadership or plan of action. What they had was themselves and the backdrop of their land. Everything else was open, gaping chaos, wildly dangerous, and antagonistic to everything they had ever known.

Viva la France was the byline from the onset, but, more importantly, viva the individual who simply did not accept the tyrannical, invading forces with their artificial appointments of importance and godless, unnatural laws.

The Subsequent Act

The war was won, but with great tribulation.

Order was restored and the countryside reverted to some degree of normalcy, but the specter of lingering danger was permanent. It was accompanied by the emergence of the fifth column, that group of people who actively undermine a larger group from within, usually in favor of an enemy or another nation. It is certainly no different today.

The fifth column is no longer clandestine, but overt and growing in strength. The press is not just tasked with the dissemination of propaganda, either. They have become the progenitors of the assault on our way of life. Anything and everything we do is taken out of context or manipulated to score an ugly point. So, we fight for our existence.

The drought, the markets, the trade wars, and the absence of labor are the matters ostensibly impacting our eroding beachhead, but we know there is a much bigger problem across our landscape.

Our land is not ours.

Like the French Résistants, this land has long been our home, our heritage, and our state of permanent being. It is where our investments are. It is where we long to keep our children and our way of life. It is where our hearts reside, but ours has long been a state of permanent bondage. We are no different than the native Americans who have never been offered an equal shot of self-reliance.

Missing is the overpowering force of good. Ultimately, the French had the Americans to prevail. We don’t. We are a feature of the American zoo system whereby the public, guided by the fifth column, observes and supervises our existence. Indeed, it has all become a spectator sport of self-appointed absentee importance but isn’t right.

We want our land and our freedom.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Excuse me while I go feed cows and pray for rain.”