I developed a cattle drive business in the 1990s.
Twenty guests trailing 200 cows up the rugged
Little Horn Canyon taught me to have absolute
control of what I could control because surprises
hid behind every rock.
Before the first orientation ride, we
explained proper saddling and unsaddling procedures.
We stressed tying your bridle to the front
saddle strings, neatly looping the latigo into the
D-ring and tying the breast collar and cinches to
the off-side saddle strings.
Doing so served dual purposes.
First, to be moving the herd at daybreak
required guests saddling in the dark and everyone
uniformly securing everything in a single unit made
saddling smoother.
Secondly, our mountain pastures were filled
with bold, camp-savvy deer.
Prior to tying the tack, many bridles
disappeared in the timber courtesy of the
salt-starved critters chewing on the reins.
Occasionally, the deer would do a real number
on a cinch or latigo, but migrating saddles are
easier to find.
Hoping my obsessive-compulsive behavior would
become infectious, every spring I reminded the crew
to properly tie bridles and cinches as well as
correctly coil manty and lash ropes.
I assumed
everyone would eventually adopt my idiosyncrasies as
habit.
Such was rarely the case.
We were unsaddling back at the ranch after a
week-long July trip and my 12-year-old nephew,
Trent, moaned, “The guests are gone, so do we have
to tie up our cinches?”
Good habits had not yet become his second
nature and this brings me to my point.
America is at a crossroads and Trump
supporters should not think the battle ended when
the smoke cleared on November 9th.
Establishment Republicans, lifelong
bureaucrats, and ruling class Democrats are
conspiring with the national media to undo last
November’s presidential election.
Journalists abandoned impartiality decades
ago and have become so enamored with progressivism
nearly every story is fake news.
Their truth is so colored, I no longer
wholeheartedly believe the obituary column.
President Trump is not a shiny politician as
evidenced by the pace he is advancing the issues
upon which he campaigned.
Imagine that.
Irish statesman Edmund Burke told us in 1770,
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for
good men to do nothing.” President Trump needs
backup, so patriots must develop daily habits of
speaking the truth in the town square whether via
social media, radio waves or the written word.
Most hard working Americans will agree with
you, but few are courageous enough to be the first
to stand for liberty.
Saving America is a good habit.
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