2020 election, American Exceptionalism, Dona;ld Trump

Picking the Good Guys from the Bad Guys

The Natural Law of Who Chooses

This is partly another lecture on American Exceptionalism, for it is still unique to America and alien to the rest of the world.

But it’s also a continuation of discussions we’ve had here in the past about the role of natural law in deciding the outcome of some kinds of conflicts.

Finally, it’s also a reminder just who in a free society are genuinely able to invoke the First Principals of Natural Law that actually decide how conflicts about society’s security, peace and tranquility are determined.

So, I’m also addressing “those men and women without honor” in our society who today are “trying to test the unwritten Code of the West”…although they are never likely to read this…for this is a notice of the Riot Act, a warning as to what will happen to them if they persist.

Below is my statement of proof, for it has always been this way in America. It’s nothing new, though obviously forgotten by many.

You see, Mr Obama, the American people did “build that”. Everything in fact, everything over their first two and a half centuries in America, all from the ground up, and then, since the late 1800s, once they had built a larger economic engine that required closer oversight, they ordered government customized to meet the needs, and then paid for.

After 245 years, like these annoying children in the streets playing with guns and firecrackers, the government class has still yet to produce anything or earn its first dollar.

Of course, the men and women without honor who take up arms “wouldn’t know that”, as in all likelihood Mr Obama and his crew never knew, only their ignorance of the outcome is not germane to this discussion any more than the rise of organized crime was to the intentions of busy-body churchwomen who didn’t like their men coming home with beer on their breath. Unintended consequences are not my concern.

From the beginning, the American West began in the western Mohawk Valley of New York and the southern Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia in the 1600s, 150 years before the Old West of movies later shown to kids in movie theaters in the 1930s. Every town in New England began much the same way as every town along the Oregon Trail and every town in between. First came the settlers who built homesteads; then behind them came businesses to service their needs; banks to keep their money, and maybe a restaurant to feed them when they came to town once a month to stock up. Mark Twain said, when he visited the mining town of Virginia City in Nevada just after the Civil War, there were “seventeen saloons, five hotels, two banks…and some talk of building a church”…while in Amen Corner, North Carolina there were three churches and zero saloons for five counties.

Now that’s a republic.

In short, America grew up behind their principal sources of income, whether farm produce, beef, lumber or mining. And the businesses that grew up there, from 1630 in the original 13 colonies then 1900s in the other 35 states, as America steadily moved west, all used the same blueprint. You can survey the maps of America’s landscape, called “fly over country” today, and you will see the states are still strewn with rural counties with single towns, the county seat, where all those businesses, churches, plus a courthouse, restaurants, churches, a bank, and a sheriff’s department, are little different than they were in 1932 when Bonnie & Clyde robbed the bank there. Near mine it was Jesse James in 1872.

And out in the rest of those counties there were small unincorporated communities which you can find on Google maps but nowhere else,  often served by a single country store.  (This is a store I stopped at many times along the old state road in central Kentucky.)

                                     (Photo by Richard RoBards, editor of the Central Kentucky News Journal for many years. And old friend.)

It would the late 1800s before inventors would heap the Machine Age on America, building factories all over the country, Mr Obama, even rural counties changing their profiles to include mills and factories and workers with funny last names, new churches and motorcars. The people, including the new workers, generally approved, as they settled into the same process of “becoming American” everyone else in America had started out.

And they almost all started out with dirty hands, callouses and very little money.

Every town in America were built in this order: 1) The people who settled the land and developed it, 2) the town people and their families who started all the businesses you still know in your town from your youth; a clothing store, a grocer, hardware, restaurant, churches, schools, etc,

…and 3) one bank (to begin with) which invited all those men “without honor waiting to test the unwritten Code of the West” (Roger Miller) by trying to rob them.

Where there are banks and money, there are two classes who want to get that money: Crooks and politicians. Some they shot or hung during a getaway, others they ran out of town on a rail, (an ancient practice) along other indecencies such as tarring and feathering, or hooking the crook to the front end of a cowcatcher headed out of town.

Government had nothing to do with this. Natural law decides where people will decide to farm, and it also determines the sort of people who will follow to provide goods and services. And it took one-or-two generations of settlement before a county is surveyed and recorded. (The Taylor County mentioned above in this photo was formed in 1848, but its county seat, Campbellsville, was named in 1817, for the man who owned the gristmill there to service the farmers. I have no idea when the first farm was started there, but Kentucky became a state (our 15th) in 1792. So the state government was formed in 1792, the city government sometime after 1817, and the county government in 1848, whose principal purpose was to record those deeds.)

And police came on board as needed, mostly sweeping out drunks and keeping the peace at $35 a month. Then people started trying to rob banks. Or stage coaches. Or company payrolls. (Men in my coal town were still paid in cash into the 60s, and they had to bring the payroll in by armed guard.) The price, and folklore status of policemen went up. Or down.

The  tales of bank robberies, gun-fights and the marshals who nabbed them, stayed with the public folklore far longer than newspaper reports. They were helped by dime novels in the 1800s and Hollywood from the 20s on. Songs were even sung.

My Vietnam generation was raised on those ideals of justice as shown in movies and television from the 40s on.

By 1938 the American people knew there would be a war with Hitler. (You can look it up.) A song writer, Irving Berlin redrafted a 1917 patriotic song into “God Bless America” and Kate Smith sang it on the radio and Hollywood filmed it. But in 1938, three years before Pearl Harbor! and America knew we’d have to go to war then. America instinctively knew what was on the line, and they lined up to offer their sons when Pearl Harbor happened. Suddenly there was no more politics. The people were in charge.

This is the “X” quotient the People have over the snot-nosed tantrum-throwers, even if they do learn how to shoot. It runs over 400 years deep, of a nation built from the bottom up.

We’ve had two good wars, neither one “political” and both demanded by the people. The rest could have been good but were mismanaged, on politics alone, as in the tragedy we allowed to happen to this poor woman’s dream of democracy once our “better political minds” got in charge of her future;

So, Fair Warning, Men and Women Without Honor:

This in not political anymore. The People are holding all the cards. You don’t know where the line is, we do.

Just don’t step across it.

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