Good lessons are learned the hard way. It was late August several years back and we lead a nice horse with a nasty chest laceration into the surgery room at our clinic. I explained the treatment approach to the owners and began cleaning and resecting dead tissue from the injury. My assistant noticed the pony’s flanks blanketed with thousands of tiny flies, so to be helpful she grabbed a bottle of fly spray and launched a chemical sortie on the little buzzers. This was bad. Thousands of flies instantly jumped ship and sought refuge on every other warm blooded creature in the room; namely us. The little insects attacked my eyes and mouth and debriding the wound while slapping at flies quickly became impossible. Finally, we moved the surgery to the parking lot.

This little lesson came to mind a week ago when I performed a cesarean section to remove a necrotic calf from a range cow. Every August we get one bovine obstetrical nightmare and since there are two doctors in my practice I have a 50/50 chance the other doctor will draw the short straw. Doctor Broyles was fishing the Big Horn River the day I drew the short straw. As I was clipping the hair off the old girl’s left flank, I noticed her neck and shoulders crawling with horn flies. I instructed everyone to leave the fly spray on the shelf until we finished surgery; all agreed. It is impossible to concentrate on the task at hand when all of your senses are bombarded by tiny distractions which become overwhelming when attacked all at once. This exact scenario is playing out right here in in the good old US A and I wish I could dismiss our problems as being due to the untimely application of fly spray, but I fear a more nefarious cause. Let’s step out of the surgery room and take a thorough look at America’s sad state of affairs.

Hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous illegals from every continent are invading our southern border. Before long, the only person left in Mexico will be US Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi. Representatives of the Internal Revenue Service are unequally applying tax law so as to silence political opposition and are lying to cover their tracks. Attorney General Eric Holder expends taxpayer resources so as to fuel a race war in Ferguson, Missouri. Our national debt is $17.7 trillion and climbing $2.3 billion every day of the week. President Obama is pursuing a UN climate accord rather than a treaty so as to bypass constitutional restrictions calling for ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. Although technology has opened vast reserves of domestic coal, oil and natural gas, progressives promote the false national religion of environmentalism so as to block its development. The EPA freezes economic growth by implementing job killing carbon emission regulations and are now crafting rules to garner federal control of all continental surface waters. Make no mistake about it, all of the above are purposely done to break and fundamentally change America into a socialist state; exactly as President Obama promised in his first presidential campaign. Did you miss it?

America is suffering because the ruling class has convinced a majority of the unwashed that freedom is an inherently unfair system and the proper function of government is to equalize everything. Talent, ambition, ingenuity, sacrifice, courage and creativity are replaced with entitlement. Once the masses believe they are due the bounty produced by the sweat of others the ruling class has no bounds. November 4th, Election Day, may be our last chance to reject every progressive candidate at every level of office to help America begin her comeback. To do anything less is as meaningless as swatting at flies.