Just like every weekend for the past six months, on Sunday the trophy wife and I were working on our house. She was stuffing insulation in the loft walls while I was stringing wire on the main floor. “It looks like someone shot a coyote,” Druann hollered pointing out the window towards the neighbor’s pasture where three young men were wrestling with something heavy. A thin willow patch obscured our clear view, but we could see one boy trot ahead to their car parked along the road, leave his rifle, and then return to help his two buddies. Their prize was heavy—real heavy. The group would struggle three or four steps before dropping the load to rest.

“It is not a coyote,” I thought, “but why would anyone pack a cottonwood log down the road.” Minutes later the three explorers crossed the fence onto our driveway and began rolling a heavy bowling ball sized object towards their car. “What in the world are they doing?” I thought. “Since I need run to the hangar for some more wire, I’ll buzz down and see what is up,” I shouted to Druann. The distant roar of my four-wheeler inspired the trekkers to quicken their pace and they reached their car about the same time I did.

“We’re sorry we were on your road,” the spokesman of the group blurted.

“You’re kidding me?” I fired back with a chuckle. “I zipped down here because my curiosity was eating me alive. What in the world are you doing?”

“Well mister, we found this chunk of iron out in the hills and we are packing it home,” the tallest of the salvage trio excitedly offered. Sure enough, there in the barrow pit was a 50 pound ball of metal. It was flattened on the ends and round in the middle as if it were formed by molten iron having been cooled in a bucket.

“What are you going to do with it? I asked.

“Recycle it maybe,” one proudly mumbled, “or just leave it in the yard when we get home.”

“Well, good luck,” I offered before turning my four-wheeler towards my hangar. I smiled as I had seen their look of self-satisfaction before. When my youngest, Tyler, was in high school he had a buddy, Adam, who lived a privileged childhood on the banks of the Clarks Fork River because his family had a small sagebrush gully where old farm equipment, pick-ups, and appliances went to die. Every weekend, Tyler, Chad, Eddie and Adam, hauled some chunk of metal from Adam’s to the scrap pile behind my hangar intending to eventually build the mother of all go-carts. In spite of depleting my hangar of grinding discs, welding rods and acetylene, nothing remotely resembling a four wheeled vehicle ever emerged from the heap. The go-cart gang eventually graduated high school and disbanded. Every member is now employed, married and raising sons of their own. Their turn is coming and this brings me to my point.

The ruling class is purposely crushing the adventuresome spirit of young men because independence, self-reliance and courage impede acceptance of the collective where all outcomes are predetermined and identical. In the leftist utopia, everyone works the same hours, eats the same food, drives the same kind of car, lives in the same government owned housing, and receives the same government delivered healthcare. Boredom is the national past time in nirvana. Before the rugged individualist can be bent to fit the mold, their spirit must be broken. Proof of the left’s hidden goal to do exactly such was recently revealed when Harvard Professor Paul Reville spoke fervently in defense of Common Core at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress. “The children belong to all of us,” he stated while dismissing opponents as being extremists. Leftists, such as Hillary Clinton, have advanced this takes a village idiocy for years and parents not alarmed by their intentions are either ignorant or complicit in the government sanctioned destruction of boys and the American family. Liberty will survive only if we raise the next generation to believe success comes to those who work, take risk, are creative, and fear only God. To my thinking, the chunk of iron was not the treasure; it was the three sweaty boys ambitiously dragging it home. I hope their parents were as proud of them as I was. What appears as worthless metal to the untrained eye of a non-patriot; just might be the start of a great go-cart.