Still Kickin’
by Lee Pitts
Academics, politicians and expert Easterners have been trying to bury the West for 200 years, but to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the West being dead are greatly exaggerated.
They say the sun is setting on the West because there is no more land to explore, no more gold or silver to discover and no more societies to conquer.
One may still find pieces of the real West if they want to, but it won’t be in West Coast cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle or in sanctuary cities like San Francisco.
No, instead, they’ll find the West in places like Pie Town, Post, Cedar City, Show Low, Emmett, Guymon, Burns, Lakeview, Sheridan and Elko when the cowboy poets show up and even in California in places like Red Bluff when the bull sale takes over the town in January.
No, the spirit and traditions of the West never died. Our critics are just looking in all of the wrong places.
It’s not true there are no more frontiers to conquer or gold rushes to attract brave adventurers ever westward. It’s just now the courageous and hard working come to drill through shale for black gold or conquer bit and bytes in Silicone Valley.
No, the West isn’t dead yet, but it’s not for lack of trying. The bureaucrats, environmentalists and politicians have done their level best to kill it off and turn it into Nature’s Disneyland for Easterners to conquer the frontier via Delta, Hertz and Hilton.
Naturally, they come under the spell of America’s West, and after their 10-day vacation to the Grand Canyon, Universal Studios and the Redwoods, they know what’s best for the land and the heathens who live here.
They halted the clear-cutting of forests acting as firebreaks, got rid of thousands of miles of forest roads providing access for firefighting equipment and wouldn’t allow the removal of dead and dying trees which provided kindling that lit huge fires which engulfed us.
And, they kicked the cows and sheep off public lands, which kept grass and weeds from becoming fodder for fires.
But, these so-called “experts” weren’t here to breathe the smoke nor did they have to rebuild their homes. Tell me, doesn’t all of this smoke qualify as greenhouse gas or is it just farting cows?
And what about all those crispy critters, many of them endangered species, that idiotic policies have murdered? What do greenies and animal rightists have to say about them?
They used the spotted owl to put foresters out of work and kill off small towns, but they don’t seem to care those same spotted owls are now being killed by a close relative.
Now, they’re turning wolves loose to get rid of ranchers because they don’t like cows. They idiotically believe cows never spend a day outside a feedlot, not knowing range cows never spend a day in one.
And why is steer manure so good for their water-wasting lawns but bad for public lands? They ridicule farmers for “wasting” water, not knowing it’s the same stuff that grows the fruits and vegetables the vegans contend are so good for us to eat.
These over-educated idiots are so smart, they’re stupid.
First, they told us not to put groceries in paper bags, not realizing they came from a renewable resource creating jobs and paying taxes. So we switched to plastic bags until they figured out they were made from petroleum derivatives.
Next, they said we should bring our own reusable bags until they found out these germladen bags could be spreading the China flu. So now we’re back to paper.
Those wanting to kill off the West say we must get rid of fossil fuels not realizing giant windmills are slicing up birds and solar arrays create vast wastelands. We don’t know what to do with the spent solar panels yet, just like we haven’t come up with a way to get rid of the spent nuclear rods, other than bury them in Nevada. Why not New York instead?
Yeah, they thought they knew it all and now we’re paying the price for their idiocy. I just wish they’d worry about all of the momentous problems in their own backyards and leave us the heck alone.
