Clashes
Darkness
Parallels
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
Was it not that God implanted instinct which impels a man to defend his own hearth … with me is right, before me is duty, (and) behind me is home? ~~~Jefferson Davis
Darkness
We spent
another night in the dark.
No, the
moon didn’t shine, either. The power went out at the ranch just before 9:00 PM
and I had a message shortly thereafter from Pepe. He had checked the breakers,
driven to the main well, and determined it wasn’t on, so it wasn’t just the headquarters
affected. It was the breaker on the line coming onto the ranch at the freeway. It
was the first of several expected outages that our place (at the end of 14
miles of dirt road) can expect during the summer months.
It always happens.
The same
old tedious steps then play out getting it back on. The call to the recorded
emergency outage message center began. There was the obligatory lecture by the computer
impersonator to check the breaker box (all six of them?) followed by the
various and sundry reminders of who will be held responsible, then another
reminder never to electrocute yourself was preached, and then, finally if the
service personnel determines it isn’t the power company’s responsibility for
the fix, charges (up to $140) can be applied to your billing.
Can we
just talk to a human being!
The
automated commands continue with the demand to punch in the street address
where the outage has occurred.
There still
isn’t a street address on a d*mn windmill tower eight miles from the highway
you d*mned fool machine!
That
machine then recognized there are several meters associated with this caller’s
phone number and wanted to know which meter the problem was associated with.
The tension only grew when the attempt was made to punch in one nine-digit
meter number on the cell phone much less six of them.
Then, there
was the demand to record the last four digits of a social security number or a
tax ID number of the account holder.
Ughhhh,
can we just talk to a human being!
Of
course, the problem is we can’t. Our world has become one that is driven not by
the consumer, the citizen, or the taxpayer but, rather, by the system.
As expected,
the problem was the main breaker where the outages repeatedly take place. A
call back at 2:23 AM confirmed the problem had been resolved. A human voice was
on the other end of the call. It was the supervisor of the night crew who had
been reached through a network of friends who finally got word to him when I
gave up on the circular nonsense of the power company’s inanimate reporting
system.
It isn’t
amazing how we can get things done when we actually deal with responsible human
beings. It’s the right way.
It’s also
the only way conflict and growing conflagration are to be avoided.
Clashes
The genesis
of our America was the result of two major conflicts.
The first,
the American Revolution, was a clash between feudalism, Mother England, and a
new economic order, the original 13 colonies. The second, the Civil War, was a
clash between two hostile factions, but, by that time, it was between an
agrarian society, the South, and an emerging industrial society, the North.
Modern
parallels are striking.
What we
were never taught in American history should worry us all. For example, it wasn’t
the South that first sought secession because the North was the real progenitor
of casting aside the Union. In fact, they tried in 1804, 1812, and, again, in
1814 to secede from the Union. The effort was largely driven by the abolitionists,
but there was always a chorus from the better than thou choir. The North had
assumed the haughty role of English aristocracy while the sweaty southerners
had been relegated to lesser beings as an assemblage of country bumpkins.
That all
changed when the South finally tested what they believed was their
constitutional right to secede in 1861. They viewed the emerging tyranny of the
industrial north as a grave threat. As a political force, the North was a growing
feudalistic body that was reaching out to control the independent states as one
body rather than an equal and free union of independent states.
The
economics were striking.
The tax
laws of 1824-1828 had demolished parity between the agriculture South and the
manufacturing North. The contempt for the North was extreme and part of it was
the tax burden. At the onset of the War, the South was paying 70.4% of the
federal government’s expenses. The arrogance of the abolition movement was one
thing, but the awareness that the powerful North was assuming an entitlement by
using force to retain the minority South in the entrapment of a singular political
body without recourse was viewed as nothing more than out and out tyranny. The
first American revolution, the Revolutionary War, was fought to rid the patriots
of that very yoke. What followed was merely a recapitulation of that first
conflict.
The Civil War, the second American
revolution, was fought from 1861-1865.
Parallels
If the
parallels of then and now are not recognized, then we are blind.
We are not
a free and independent people. The feudal majority has long expanded its
entitlement and single political body over the producing minority of these
United States of America.
Certainly, it is treason, but
J.F.C. Fuller said it best.
When
treason prospers, none dare call it treason.
The
political body of one has become the system that owns us. It does not serve us.
We serve it. If there is hope, it lies in the resurrection of free and
independent states, but those theoretical bodies may or may not appear.
My state will not fill that role.
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