2017

Funny how they  failed to sense us. How they did not see us coming ,nor felt our heartbeat. How they ignored us. Those who did not dance in the light but stoked the fires that made it shine. Yet they did not. So we watched, we worked, lived, loved, laughed and waited. Oh yes, they ate the costly roe of the sturgeon and drank the gilded bubbles born of the chalk hills. But we were always there. A grease stained paper bag of biscuits on a wood smoke scented morning, full of heart and sustained with passion written in our souls since birth. Yet today they scream, shrill and penetrating. How did we? How could we? Don’t we see? Well my dears. Yes, yes we did. We saw very clearly and very well.

After time upon time of being told “who we were” what we felt and how we should think. The people of this great Country cocked their heads to the side and said “We know who we are, But who are you?” You’re alien to us, you who dictate from your pedestals who we should be. Allow me to clarify in the most explicit of ways exactly who we are.

We are the young girl in her twenties, slathering on lotion so her legs will be soft in her first apartment. A simple place she can call her own, no it’s not much, but it’s cozy. It’s enough for her to have time with the man she loves. A space to find herself and find out if the blue jeaned, flannel draped fella she’s felt a connection with will be able to take it to the next level. Not a whole lot, marriage, children .Maybe their futures will hold more, but for her a small place full of love will be enough.

We are the mechanic on a hot August afternoon, sweat stung eyes, aching back, looking for the 5 o’clock hour when he gets his pay check. Hoping there’s enough left over after the bills are silenced for a thick grilled steak and few cold beers. A gentle rub with a work worn hand on the silk soft head of his youngest as he watches the sun set over the valley and he finds the strength to go another week.

We are the second generation rancher who’s felt the drought coming and dug a pond in the corner pasture for his cattle to refresh themselves and drink, only be told by some wall eyed hippopotamus in Birkenstocks from the EPA that this is not his right. He gently bows his head, looks toward his rangeland and returns the rafts he bought for his children to the store.

We are the young girl whose horse,( which had been her wings she was young) colicked on a trail ride one July morn. Her joy of just making the cheerleading squad at the local high school shattered by the harshness of reality. A young one whose tears flowed, for her family had not the money for the vet to save him. (Fear not for, magic is reachable and I tapped the well, she kept her friend.)

We are the people of this big, great, once free land that know exactly who “We are” So when we receive the checks for our hours of labor, see the dollars, be they many or few, each and all in its effect, seized and utilized to our detriment, we rear like a stallion on the mesa and strike out.

We are not you in the concrete towers, we are man and metal, worn and beaten. We know a good dinner after church on Sunday, the hugs of a child, and the hope of each and every sunrise. So no, you did not see us coming, but we heard a clarion call loud and clear. A man for whom we’d have paid no attention reached out to us, a man from, yes, a gilded tower. But a man in the truest sense of the word. A man with the foibles of his existence, yet a leader with nobility, fire and brilliance. He had all in all the definition of kings and towers, but he looked through his window and saw us. The sweating mechanic, the love struck woman hope for the future blazing brilliantly, the farmer letting his ranchland run dry, and yes the hopeful cheerleader who learned that magic was real that day in the hot Carolina pines.

So as the Year of Our Lord 2017 comes upon us, we have been returned to the light. Hopefully mankind returns to freedom. The future is on the shoulders of the individual for we are not a collective and the power that emanates from each and every free choice is the one and the all. Unity of fragments verse the pulsating existence of one. Run the numbers. But I have great hope for your future. Please Make America Great Again, kill the parasites and cauterize the wound for this mage is tired and there are fish to feed in another realm.