The Gray Swan

The Mother Church

The Gray Swan

Willful Ignorance

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            The march toward uncertainty continues.

            Market forecasts are based upon expectations, data driven algorithms, and fundamentals. Participants, us, make decisions based on such things, but reality can change in a heartbeat. The old black swan can come swimming by and the whole deck of stacked cards can come tumbling down.

            With fears of a pending coronavirus pandemic, the current cattle market certainly shows signs that the horses are looking awfully hard for any possible reason to snort and stampede. Past experiences remind us not to get caught in the path of escape. Calm might return shortly, but the aftermath of getting run over might be more serious than ever imagined.

            That is why gray swans, rather than the blacks, may actually be the more destructive agents.

            The Mother Church

             The meeting in Silver City was both a homecoming as well as a prelude to an all too familiar nightmare.

            The gathering was evident by introductions to relatives and their friends and colleagues that have emerged as leaders that were just little kids when I left the bastion that will forever be home. Their parents were known when Grant County and the Gila River were one of the best kept secrets in the entire world. Now, they are making decisions and trying to affect actions that will impact their own descendants well into the future.

            They are under the pending threats of wild and scenic river and national trails designations.

            To many people, that sounds exotic and environmentally trendy, but to the citizenry that gets run over by this process, it is a much different proposition. They have been left out of too many decisions without being invited to the table to discuss what is best for them. The ruling elites don’t want to hear from them. The outcome is too sacred. Their goals are too clear.

Arguments can be made this problem started with the enabling act that brought New Mexico statehood, but the seminal event of highest impact was the administrative creation of manufactured wilderness. It was conceptualized and then crafted onto a piece of paper that came out of the forest service’s southwest regional office in 1924. It had no congressional authority (which came in 1964), and, yet, it can be defined as the genesis of roughshod manhandling of Gila River issues since. Many will now suggest it was one of the cornerstones of the environmental movement across this nation, and, perhaps, the entire world.

The target, the Mother Church, was what today is known as the Gila Wilderness. That is the where the headwaters of this current wild and scenic river candidate are found. It is hallowed ground where the citizenry at highest risk can trace not only their blood, but the soul of their societal existence.

It has always been theirs, but … it has never been theirs.

Willful Ignorance

The rise of the federal bureaucracy has assured the uncertainty and diminishment of their rights. A key marker is the promise in the Wilderness Act whereby their grazing was to be assured into perpetuity predicated on where existed at the time of the signing. That phrase came as a direct result of agency summary eviction of Gila River citizenry from lands they had occupied continuously for 23 years before the Forest Service was even formed, 30 years prior to statehood, 62 years before the first eviction from administrative wilderness, and 82 years before the Wilderness Act was even signed. There was no day in court. There was no recourse. There was simply in your face, administrative brute force authority.

Ask the river community today how that promise has worked out.

Just like any form of socialism, the authoritative operators will soften the real intent of their agenda and dodge the ever-expanding examples of their ideological failure. Federal management when and where it is found is a colossal failure. Authoritarian environmentalism is on course to be worse, but, once again, the forces of elitism, the green brokers, have created another layered threat to this community.

Working in concert with New Mexico Wild, the two New Mexico senators have played to the scripted agenda. They have been handed the legislative draft, they have set the stage without a single substantive discussion with the locals prior to the obligatory rollout, and they are ready to drop this bill in the hopper to grand applause amongst the willful ignorance of the secular urban centers.

There is a remaining and fair question. Who and where is the advocate for the local community who will experience what the wilder and more scenic designation will bring?

Such a representative doesn’t exist. The absence of private property rights has always been the underlying problem in the presence of governmental dominion of land ownership and growing environmental influence. It is a totalitarian hotbed for corruption and chaos and it only becomes worse as each layer of regulatory Armageddon is added.

There is no real protection for the rural citizen at risk. In the case of the Gila river and tributary residents, the original prescriptions for protection were never fully extended. They were modified and or conditionally offered, but one thing is for sure. There simply aren’t enough foundational rights now to afford protection against the mobs of the elite, the powerful, and the well-connected.

The ruling mobs aren’t singular in created crises, either. They include both parties. Both have long been problematic. The left, with their idealistic overlays, must rely on authoritarianism. Unchecked, they only grow more radical. The right will be hamstrung by their wavering conscience and ultimate tendencies to seek acceptance. They can be counted upon to capitulate when the most basic constitutional matters are at highest risk. We are left in the hailstorm only to be forced further from our land and our heritage.

Increasingly, we know exactly how … Geronimo felt.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Think about this … the federal government unilaterally puts a restricted designation on your private lands and there is absolutely no compensation offered or considered. What kind of a people populate our government?”