“…no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne (1572-1631)
That bell is tolling for your fellow Americans in Klamath Falls, Oregon … just as one day soon it will toll for you. And it’s not joyful sounds of the Liberty Bell you’ll hear, but the mournful clangs of a funerary bell tolling the death of your cherished freedoms.
What do you have in common with the folks in Klamath Falls? Everything that has to do with your constitutional rights to be free of asinine and destructive restrictions imposed by a distant, out-of-control government dancing to the tune of a socialist cabal who want to run your lives because they think you are too stupid to control your own destiny.
If you haven’t heard about what’s happening in Klamath Falls it’s not surprising. The TV networks from which most of you get your news haven’t seen fit to concentrate on the events there – they’re too busy bringing us up to date, almost minute-by-minute, with the latest details about Rep. Condit and his fling with the missing Chandra Levy, or touting the latest polls allegedly showing President Bush’s approval ratings plunging.
Anyway, what’s at issue out there in the Golden West is the matter of the survival of drought stricken farmers now threatened by Uncle Sam who is more concerned about the welfare of the sucker fish than he is about that of living American citizens.
Three months ago the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced it would withhold nearly 90 percent of the area’s irrigation water to protect two species of endangered suckerfish.
That’s right – when the welfare of a breed of fish about which I’ll bet you never heard of is threatened, the people be damned.
The result? Catastrophe for a lot of your fellow Americans.
Writing in the Seattle Times, Reporter Craig Welch brilliantly described the havoc wreaked on the people in the area by the besotted members of the United States Congress, federal agencies and the courts.
” Farmland here is so dry it crumbles like old cement, but tensions in this drought-desiccated valley are boiling over. Three times in five days last week, protesters frustrated at the government’s refusal to release irrigation water from nearby Upper Klamath Lake used saws or a blowtorch to open headgates and release water from behind a dam.
“Prompted by court decisions and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinions, the decision to cut irrigation water here affects most of the 170,000 acres served by Upper Klamath Lake,” Welch wrote. “While some farmers still have state water rights or private wells, and others still get water from two nearby lakes, most farms are so parched their crops have blown away and the soil may be damaged for years.
“Elsewhere in town, food-bank supplies are stretched. The county’s mental health services are up 60 percent over the same period last year.
“Alfalfa prices are so high struggling cattle owners can’t afford it, but hay producers short on water have no crop to sell to take advantage of the market.
“Work at one local hairdressers has “dropped off like a lead sinker,” one cosmetologist said.
“County officials estimate some 30 wells also have gone dry, and they blame empty irrigation canals they say help recharge deep aquifers. ”
All this to protect a so-called endangered species without which mankind could easily survive and prosper.
There was a time when Americans would have rallied to help their neighbors no matter how distant geographically they might be. But aside from what amounts to a mere handful of concerned Americans – mainly members of the Wise Use movement – the response from the great mass of those of their fellow citizens who are aware of the Oregon disaster has been a yawn and a shrug of the shoulders.
This kind of thing has been happening more and more frequently – Americans being denied their property rights and their livelihood to satisfy the whims and caprices of an elitist bunch of so-called environmentalists who care not a whit for their fellow humans – Marxist ideologues who can weep bitter tears over the plight of the sucker fish but give full approval to the slaughter of their fellow human beings in the womb, along with the gruesome peddling of the bodies of these unborn Americans.
In the name of the Endangered Species Act, jobs have been lost, private property has been confiscated, publicly owned lands have been closed to the public, vast economic damage has been done to certain areas of the nation, whole industries have been shut down, all to protect bugs and owls and birds and other lower forms of life whose contributions to the welfare of mankind is so minimal as to be invisible.
How does all of this affect you? Simple. If it can be done to one of us it can be done to all of us. Someday your company, for example, may find itself the target of a government agency, or lawsuit made possible by the trial lawyer-friendly Democrat leadership in the Congress. You may lose your health insurance because lawsuits made possible by Congress raised the cost of health care insurance to a point where you or your employer can no longer afford it.
Someday, your job or your property will become victims of the idiot idea that insects or owls take precedence over people. Will there be anyone to come to your aid besides a handful of your closest neighbors?
In his book, “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross wrote that “blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something, without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don’t like it.”
But not liking it is not enough. Either the mass of the American people will become aroused enough to put an end to all of this socialist power grabbing or the land of the free and the home of the brave will become the home of the slave.
A good beginning would be a mass protest against this insane Endangered Species Act. Congress passed this idiot legislation, Congress can end it.Throughout the entire history of this world species have come and species have gone. Does anybody really miss the dinosaurs or whole slews of other vanished critters?
Nature regulates itself. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that this generation can and should alter what is obviously a law of nature. If these environmentalist had been around in the age of the dinosaurs they would have fought to save the endangered Tyrannosaurus Rex.
If enough of us rally and tell our members of congress to junk this law once and for all – or find another line of work after the 2002 elections, we can begin the long and arduous task of reclaiming the liberty we inherited from the Founding Fathers – liberty which we have allowed to be slowly taken from us over the past 100 years or so.
In a speech at Harvard in February, 1999, Charlton Heston told us how we can begin to fight back. I’ll leave the final words of this column to him.
“When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself … jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80 percent of the students graduate with honors … choke the halls of the board of regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment … march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you … petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month … boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.
“So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country.”