Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

 

Windsock

A decade ago, a young, white goat scampered through the sagebrush along the airstrip north of my house.  I don’t own a goat, so I walked over to investigate and the skittish critter shot through the fence before disappearing into a neighbor’s brush patch.  Over the summer, I noticed the caprine fugitive dragging a 10 foot chunk of yellow, nylon rope attached to a blue collar.  One afternoon, a neighbor from a nearby subdivision called saying they had caught my goat.  “I don’t own a goat,” I explained, “but if you are talking about that little white one dragging a yellow rope, untie the rope before it gets tangled in the sagebrush and he dies of dehydration.”  I assumed the goat would eventually find his way home and since he wasn’t hurting anything his antics continued with little notice. 

My horses work on the ranch in the summer, but I winter them here in Laurel and when I hauled them home in October the mystery goat came running to make new friends.  He never left again.  Over the winter, this undocumented ruminant adopted the quirk that the one-inch pipe supporting my windsock was his personal hiding place.  Every time he spotted our approach he would sprint through the sagebrush to conceal himself behind the pipe; an oddity earning him the name Windsock. 

When spring came and it was time for my ponies and mules to return to the ranch, I debated what to do with Windsock.  I chummed my horses into the corral with grain and before long, Windsock jumped into the tall feeder to finish the horse grain.  With his attention focused on the corn, I crept up and snatched his horns.  “You are going with the horses,” I mumbled as I man-handled him into the nose cone of the trailer. 

The following fall, when it came time to haul my ponies home to Laurel, Windsock was too large to heft into the nosecone.  I loaded the mules and horses before crowding him under the mass of legs and slamming the trailer gate.  He worked his way to the front before bedding down under my mule team.  Two hours later, once back in Laurel, Windsock exploded from the trailer as happy as could be.   

I continued this twice-a-year event until the neighboring subdivision filled with houses, people and flower gardens.  Windsock viewed fences as no more a boundary than the goat honor system, so he began grazing the nearby flora and fauna.  When neighbors called to pleasantly inform me my goat was in their flower bed I answered, “I don’t own a goat,” which was technically, but not politically correct.  I had won my first election in 2006 by a whopping three votes, so I worried Windsock’s flower antics could endanger my 2008 re-election campaign.  I granted him year round residency at the ranch and this brings me to my point.      

Just as all my neighbors mistakenly thought Windsock was my goat, most Americans erroneously think our nation is a democracy.  It is not.  The framers of our Constitution feared the limited life span of majority rule governments, so they established a constitutional republic where the primary function of government is to secure the natural rights of the governed.  History has proven democracies begin fading the instant the citizenry learn they can vote themselves the bounty produced by the sweat of others and America has entered a democracy driven death spiral.  With promises of 90 percent tax rates on the producing class, Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is whipping up a feeding frenzy in the dependency class.  He is leading polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Like Windsock blinded while feeding on free corn, Americans are equally blinded by promises of free stuff.  Democracy is a trap with no escape.    

 
 
 
 
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