The Giving of Thanks
The Greatest Competition
The Taking of Thanks
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
It rained
on the morning of Thanksgiving, 2021.
The totals
weren’t great, but the dust was settled, and the giving of thanks was made
easier. Rain does that.
The Giving
of Thanks
My father
came to the celebration.
At nearly
94, there simply won’t be too many more of these experiences. The realization
of mortality is an eventual, shared experience that is sobering. It is
inevitable, but when it can be calculated on the basis of likely outcomes it
comes into a clearer focus.
The day,
though, was beautiful.
As usual,
there was too much food. It was the senior matriarch that reminded everyone
that it is a once-a-year celebration and that is just the way it is hence that
suggestion was shelved once more for a reminder at yet another gathering.
Several
years ago, one of the grandkids asked why we never eat outside and there was a
host of responses offered for why not to do it. None of them were convincing so
it was that the 2021 meal was shared out on the grass on a long table. The
elder participants were offered a canopy straddling their portion of the table
and heated with several outdoor dining heaters.
The smell
of rain still hung like a gift. The brilliant light from a post New Mexico rain
enveloped us, and nary a whisp of wind was present.
It was
wonderful.
The
breaking of bread started with a prayer and should have ended in a prayer, but
the tradition and the thanks of our Christian faith were present. We are not so
naïve to believe that is a universal American practice, but it should be, and,
as this coming storm grows ever darker, it will likely be the only supreme
guidance on which we can count.
The
Greatest Competition
In nearly
every restaurant you enter these days, there are signs that read Now Hiring.
Most
businesses are the same. The diesel mechanic can’t get help. The parts stores
open with just one or two clerks behind the counter. The pizza place across
from Cabela’s in El Paso had one employee in the entire place at noon last
Sunday. The list goes on and on, so it becomes simply redundant to mention
more.
Try to find
a cowboy, though. Try to find a good one at least an American who supposedly
wants to live the life.
The fact is
we are nearing a crisis that seems unavoidable. Cards and letters, pleas and
threats, and analysis and data for government officials are all for not. Those
people are so distanced and separated from our world that there seems to be a
society divided within our house. Perhaps the reality is there is a division
that has no functioning bridge.
Several
years ago, a friend, a retired medical practitioner, told me my greatest
competition for agricultural labor was the nearby city of Las Cruces with its
monstrous employee workforce, its benefits, its policies, and its minimum wage
mandates.
In part, he
was absolutely on the mark.
Today, his
assessment is only partially correct. The COVID debacle has created a
completely new overlay of issues that work not to support, but to destroy
local, private business. The issue of minimum wage is only a component of the
growing competition we face for labor.
The
evolving competition is government’s removal of labor from the workforce by the
offer of living wages in exchange for what we must now realize is long term
allegiance. Those individuals opting to seek that alternative of compensation
for nonwork are systematically reducing our available workforce. That policy is
not limited to legal American citizens, either. The daily assault on our
southern border is adding unskilled labor in mass.
Those folks
who have witnessed the growth of ghetto explosions in Fresno, LA, and other
metropolitan areas across the nation better get used to a growing tangle of
added chaos. The more than 2,000,000 unauthorized immigrants for calendar year
2021 don’t just buy homes and start to work on Monday morning. They must go
somewhere. Sudden cities of populations that equate to Sacramento,
Indianapolis, Pittsburg, or Austin just don’t bloom on hidden meadows
overnight.
Those
people are going to depend on our government’s giveaway basket of benefits, and
we are going to realize that our government is our greatest competitor for
labor. It is aggressive in its pursuit, and it is aggressively competing with
us for its expanding support base.
The Taking
of Thanks
The unique
gifts served up in the Constitution are being taken.
More and
more our government is not the intended democratic republic for which it was
intended. Rather, it is a tribal oligarchy ostensibly ruled out of the seat of
government, Washington, D.C. The manifestation of its evolution to be the
greatest competition of American business in the labor force is matched by its
unilateral taking of freedoms defined in our Constitution.
Interestingly,
the fear of it becoming the expanded incarnation of King George isn’t just a
concern demonstrated by our presence out here in the hinterlands. None other
than Robert Kennedy, Jr. is speaking out from the urban wilderness.
His book The
Real Anthony Fauci is a must read.
Mr. Kennedy
now suggests that every right set forth in our Bill of Rights except one has
been effectively dismantled. The one that remains is the one that we might
expect a Kennedy to advocate for elimination. His assertion is that the Second
Amendment, the right to bear arms, is the only right still standing. It remains
because it is the only right that the American people hold in their own hands. All
other rights have been curtailed through American courts and bureaucratic star
chamber agencies.
Fellow
Americans, there is reason to seek only Supreme and Holy guidance … it and our
Second Amendment may be the only thing we have left.
Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico.
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