The 22% Solution

MIKE INGLES

About 78% of Americans live in urban areas with a population of over 50,000. I’m an urbanite. I find it practical, being over 60-years-old, to live near a major hospital and I find it enlightening to be near theaters and entertainment venues, I find it rewarding to lose my wife in a busy shopping mall for a few hours on Tuesday afternoons.

Those 22% who are the outlanders, who can handle the isolation, who don’t mind driving six-hours for a quart of milk, I do admire. I respect their rugged individualism and their hardships and how they link our heritage to a time when our country was first settled. Most, live in Wyoming and Montana, and may God never let the cowboy creed—honesty, integrity, perseverance and love of a horse—disappear from the heartland.

That said, our society has evolved, along with the tools that we use to carve-out our niche in the hierarchy of civilization. The stagecoach has been replaced with the minivan, credit cards have replaced ropes and canteens have been discarded for plastic water bottles. So it goes.

It’s not my idea, you understand. I mean, if civilization crumbles, if they close Wally-world, I’ll learn how to skin a deer with a Bowie-knife and make a nice pair of slacks, but until then, I’ll buy my meat at the butchers, I’ll drink my water with fluoride and I’ll forgo carrying a gun. I don’t need it anymore.

I’ll keep the chaps.

Lindsey Graham et.al says people in South Carolina have been coming up to him saying “Please don’t let them take my guns away.” I’m sure it happens all-the-time, dear Lindsey.

“Them” in this case is we the people through our elected representatives. “Guns” in that statement means automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

What does Lindsey say in response? He says he was raised with guns and that carrying guns is a part of his southern heritage.

Sometimes, if you take a long-view, I actually think the north lost the Civil War by allowing all those backwater types to meld into civil society. I mean, now that cotton is dead, and the leather whip concessions have been closed—what’s the point?

“We need to have armed guards in our schools.” Says the South Carolinian taskmaster.

Even back in the wild-wild-west, schools didn’t have armed guards. Didn’t have them during the Civil War years either, as I recall.

“Progress,” said the poet, e.e. cummings, “is a comfortable disease.” In the South, progress is protecting a lingering death.

That 22% living in South Carolina and southern Indiana and the Ozark Mountain range, who still slop hogs and drink moonshine and sign by making an X, please relocate to a more favorable climate, like Wyoming—where Dick Cheney is still wound-up tighter than a coo-coo clock. There you can kill to your heart’s delight—there’s Big Horn Ram and pigs and coyotes and no Catholics or Jews or brown people of any kind. Unless they’re selling guns out of the trucks of their cars.

As for me, I’m ashamed to say that until this morning I did not know that about a 1/3 of the high schools in central Ohio have armed security on their campuses. Here I thought we’d made some progress along the way? It saddens me to think that children must confront armed security—like they have in prisons—each day on their way to the cafeteria or to art-class or to the gym. They endure this violation of their Civil-Rights because 22% of us think that the 2^nd amendment trumps all other rights in the country. Because hunters want 30 in the clip.

Maybe I’d better get my bucket and slop the hogs.

_______________
Mike Ingles is a freelance writer living in Ohio. He has a degree in American Literature from Franklin University, Columbus, Ohio. 
[email protected]

*Republished with permission from The Greanville Post

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