Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Dying Homesteads

The trophy wife and I recently road tripped to San Angelo, Texas to see our oldest granddaughter graduate high school plus meet her youngest brother, our newest grandson. Driving I-25 along the front range always brings memories of our vet school days. Even though the massive growth along the Rockies amazes me, on this trip something else shocked me more. Recent rains have made most of Montana and Wyoming an emerald paradise, but all this changed the instant we hit Colorado.

The Centennial State is caught in a drought and the countryside became drier and drier as we rolled south. New Mexico appeared even worse as proven by a recent USFS prescribed, yet out of control, burn in the Sangre de Cristo Range which has charred nearly 500 square miles of dry timber. Climate changers like President Biden blame the explosive fire season on man’s carbon emissions rather than decades of forest mismanagement. Once again, he is wrong.

We took the eastern plains route home and Oklahoma’s panhandle was the driest of all. There was not a blade of grass anywhere and livestock stoically standing along the highway looked like the famous starving child in a Sally Struthers ad. Also scattered along our route were old, abandoned homesteads which now serve as little more than drift fences for tumbleweeds. It saddens me thinking how some family’s hopes and dreams went bust, and this brings me to my point.

Just as each optimistic homesteader figured they would make it, the founders of our great republic had to believe likewise. The principles of individual liberty, equality, and natural rights, secured by a republic of limited power made our great American experiment in freedom truly exceptional. Jefferson, Adams, and Washington knew America could make it. However, just as the Great Depression and Dust Bowl claimed many homesteads, big government is destroying our country today. Leftists knew long ago the little people would never knowingly surrender their liberty, so their Marxist ideology was disguised and relabeled progressivism. Suddenly every lack in life was due to others not paying their fair share. Big government was championed as society’s great equalizer and little by little it grew until it became far more tyrannical than the crown our forefathers overthrew 246 years earlier. The dream called America is being killed by evil forces who hate her, and our great constitutional republic is crumbling to dust like an abandoned homestead. Our founders must be sad.