February 19, 2013
~ Fred Reed
A staple of
American self-esteem is that we Yanks are brave, free, independent,
self-reliant, ruggedly individual, and disinclined to accept abuse from anyone.
This was largely true in, say, 1930. People lived, a great many of them, on farms
where they planted their own crops, built their own barns, repaired their own
trucks, and protected their own property. They were literate but not educated,
knew little of the world beyond the local, but in their homes and fields they
were supreme. If they wanted to swim buck nekkid in the creek, they swam buck
nekkid. If whistle pigs were eating the corn, the family teenager would get his
rifle and solve the problem. Government left them alone.
Even in the
early Sixties, in rural King George County, Virginia, where I grew up, it was
still mostly true. The country people built their own boats to crab in the
Potomac, converted junked car engines to marine, made their own crab pots,
planted corn and such, and hunted deer. There was very little contact with the
government. One state trooper was the law, and he had precious little to do.
I say the following
not as an old codger painting his youth in roseate hues that never were, but as
serious sociology: We kids could get up on a summer morning, grab the .22 or
.410, put it over our shoulder and go into the country store for ammunition,
and no one looked twice. We could go by night to the dump to snap-shoot rats,
and no one cared. We could get our fishing poles—I preferred a spinning reel
and bait-casting tackle—and fish anywhere we pleased on Machodoc Creek or the
Potomac. We could drive unwisely but joyously on winding wooded roads late at
night and nobody cared.
Call it “freedom.” We were free,
and so were the country folk on their farms and with their crabbing rigs.
Because we were free, we felt free. It was a distinct psychology, though
we didn’t know it.
Things then changed. The
country increasingly urbanized. So much for rugged.It became ever more a nation
of employees. As Walmart and shopping centers and factories moved in, the
farmers sold their land to real-estate developers at what they thought
mind-boggling prices, and went to work as security guards and truck drivers.
Employees are not free. They fear the boss, fear dismissal, and become prisoners
of the retirement system. So much for Marlboro Man. Self-reliance went.
Few any longer can fix a car or the plumbing, grow food, hunt, bait a hook or
install a new roof. Or defend themselves. To overstate barely, everyone depends
on someone else, often the government, for everything. Thus we became the Hive.
Government came like
a dust storm of fine choking powder, making its way into everything. You could
no longer build a shed without a half-dozen permits and inspections. You
couldn’t swim without a lifeguard, couldn’t use your canoe without Coast-Guard
approved flotation devices and a card saying that you had taken an approved
course in how to canoe. Cops proliferated with speed traps. The government
began spying on email, requiring licenses and permits for everything, and
deciding what could and could not be taught to one’s children, who one had to
associate with, and what one could think about what or, more usually, whom.
With this came
feminization. The schools began to value feelings over learning anything. Dodge
ball and freeze tag became violence and heartless competition, giving way to
cooperative group activities led by a caring adult. The female preference for
security over freedom set in like a hard frost. We became afraid of second-hand
smoke and swimming pools with a deep end. As women got in touch with their
inner totalitarian, we began to outlaw large soft drinks and any word or
expression that might offend anyone. Thus much of the country morphed into
helpless flowers, narcissistic, easily frightened, profoundly ignorant
video-game twiddlers and Facebook Argonauts. As every known poll shows, even
what purport to be college graduates do not know who fought in World War
One, or that there was a Mexican-American war, or where Indochina is.
Serving as little more than
cubicle fodder, they could not survive a serious crisis like the first
Depression. And they look to the collective, the hive, for protection. The
notion of individual self-defense, whether with a fist or a Sig 9, is, you
know, like scary, or, well, just wrong or macho or something. I mean, if you
find an intruder in your house at night, shouldn’t you, like, call a caring
adult?
The echoes of the
former America linger in commercials in commercials for pickup trucks with
throaty bass voices and footage of Toyotas powering through rough unsettled
country that almost no one ever even sees these days. Mostly it’s just
marketing to suburban blossoms. The
number of vehicles with four-wheel drive that have actually been off a paved
road is not high. Many who grew up in
the former America, and a good many today in the South and West, substantially
adhere to the old values. They won’t last. We live in the day of the Hive, and
in the long run there is no point fighting it. But for these relics, who like
to wind the Harley to a hundred-and-climbing on the big empty roads out west,
who throw the deer rifle in the gun rack on the first day of the season, who
set out into the High Desert for sheer love of sun and barren rock and sprawling
isolation—the terror of guns, of everything, makes no sense. They … we … grew
up with guns. Since nobody ever shot anybody accidentally or otherwise, we
accepted as obvious: that people, not guns, committed murder. Did shotguns leap
into the air of their own volition, point themselves, and open fire? Or did
someone pull the trigger? If a murderer shot his victim, did you put the gun in
jail, or the murderer? If remote urban barbarians below the level of
civilization shot people, what did that have to do with us?
A different America,
a different culture. We really were free. You could come out of the house on a
summer morning and let the dogs run loose in the fields, nobody ever having
heard of a dog license. You could change the oil in your car or rewire your basement
without the county meddling. You could shoot varmints eating your garden and no
one cared. The government left you alone. This is not an unimportant part of
the dispute over guns … wanting to be left alone. Nobody in America, ever
again, is going to be left alone. Not ever.
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