Gray Foolishness

Fuiste valiente, Juanito

Gray Foolishness

It’s not about heroes

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Yesterday, we found a dead heifer calf.

            A dandy she was. She lay there as if she was asleep with only the opening salvos of the inevitable detritus process being evident. How she died is a mystery. The first reaction from an ownership standpoint was the fear she had been shot.

            Oh, man!

            BJ suggested to hold up before blame is assigned and think about the situation. Green has been showing with the first of the hesitant monsoonal flows, and it could be one of those always mysterious weed issues that is often indiscriminate in its takings. Although there are no obvious burn marks, it could well have been lightning, too. The few storms that have blown through have been more bluster than action.

            The cause of death can’t be assigned to an expensive review or drawn out affair. The fact is this ranch death is and will remain a mystery unless a repeated process unfolds. There are too many unknowns. The symptoms are hidden from our practical and lay perspective.

            Just like most other things in history, we just don’t know enough about the whole sordid affair.

            Gray Foolishness

            The daily news is making us skeptical of our leadership, and the tendencies of human nature. This nonsense of burn and destroy without consequence doesn’t set well with a big swath of us. In fact, a growing disgust of watching the thugs and unemployed liberal arts sophisticates destroy businesses and cultural works as if they had a cardinal right to do so is edging toward conflict.

            Likewise, the city councils, the governing bodies, and the leadership proxies that are complicit in this outrage don’t have much sympathy, either. There must be some description of this growing outrage.

            In fact, there is a Hebrew phrasing that addresses it. It translates as Gray Foolishness. It is the condition of being hamstrung by rules and regulations that suffocate the actual producers in the face of the authority and writs of the bureaucrats and mindless overseers and inspectors.

            In societal existence, they can’t yet be defeated … they can only be outsmarted.

            It’s not about the heroes

            The removal of statues is epidemic.

            Every character of history is in jeopardy of being removed. Each has a foe that seems to join a passing cause or falls in line behind a radical translator of record. Few of the brass likenesses have a judge advocate in this debate.

It’s a regular ‘historical figure for the day’ hate extravaganza.

Far and near the feeding frenzy chums along. Even in Las Cruces, New Mexico the historical cleansing prevails. It was here the local school board voted to renounce the name of one of the high schools.

Don Juan Oňate, perhaps better known as the last Spanish conquistador and namesake of the high school of note, was disavowed. His statue (luckily, it exists in El Paso) wasn’t taken down, but it can be suggested it was removed in effigy. Notwithstanding the fact that the board, in their vote, elected to spend $200,000 to reconfigure the tarnished namesake to some other yet unknown, ostensibly appropriate name, they joined the frenzy.

They sanctioned the removal of cultural objects. With their action, they forgot what the study of the past is. It is not about heroes.

It is about history.

Fuiste valiente, Juanito

Juan Oňate may have been the biggest son-of-buck of his times.

I don’t know. I didn’t know him. I didn’t ride with him, but what he did 422 years ago wasn’t for the feint of heart by any stretch.

He was charged with establishing the Santa Fe colony far to the north of Mexico City by the order of the King of Spain. Not much of the 1415 straight line air miles was known much less traveled, but there he was with several hundred pilgrims in his charge along with several thousand head of livestock headed north with absolutely no support.

            He cut his supply lines before they were even supply lines.

            History indicates the procession stopped to rest for several days at what is now El Paso (the caravan actually crossed the Rio Grande within a rock throw from what became Chip John’s restaurant known 400 years later as, The Hacienda). From there, they traveled north crossing the Jornada before arriving at what they declared, Socorro. Eventually, it was on to Santa Fe and history.

            Before he was anointed as Don Juan, he did many things including establishing the ordered colony. Along the way, he slashed and burned and created a ruckus of huge proportions among the pueblo tribes, and, particularly, the Acoma nation west of the river all in the name of the crown and the church.

            He ultimately paid the price.

            He was tried and banished to Spain where he died, but there is an epilogue that endures. His introduction of the Spanish language, Christianity, musical instruments, farming and mining tools, spices, cookware, various fruit varieties, seeds, and domestic animals of lasting importance remain.

He also brought the horse and that changed everything.

These things became the face of the Southwest. Overlooking the human chaos and shortcomings, what other single person of any decent left a more lasting contribution to this part of the world?

            The city of El Paso embarked several years ago on a program to elevate tourism in downtown by enshrining, in statue form, 12 individuals of great importance to this historical crossroads. They are loosely referenced as the 12 Travelers. Alongside Oňate in this array of figures are John Wesley Hardin, Pancho Villa, Fray Garcia de San Francisco, Benito Juarez, Juan Moro, Bartolo Pique, G. Henry Ossian Flipper, Cabeza de Vaca, Antonio de Espejo, Zebulon Pike, Big Foot Wallace, Fray Augustin Rodriquez, and Susan Magoffin.

            In today’s polarized world, only Susan Magoffin might find enough societal sympathy to be worthy of statuehood (and she only resided in El Paso 33 days). Spread among the rest is enough death and institutional extortion to make Onate’s exploits seem moderate, and thus the point is made. Each arrived at a turning point in history and they were raised from obscurity by their actions. In their own way, they became cultural forces that shaped the character of this region to this day.

            There may not be an agreed upon hero among them, but … they are legitimate and significant historic figures of our past and they deserve treatment as such.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.