Your Papers, Citizen
Gun Control and the Changing American Character
by Fred Reed
A staple of American self-esteem is that we Yanks are brave, free, independent, self-reliant, ruggedly individual, and disinclined to accept abuse from anyone. This was largely true in, say, 1930. People lived, a great many of them, on farms where they planted their own crops, built their own barns, repaired their own trucks, and protected their own property. They were literate but not educated, knew little of the world beyond the local, but in their homes and fields they were supreme.
If they wanted to swim buck nekkid in the creek, they swam buck nekkid. If whistle pigs were eating the corn, the family teenager would get his rifle and solve the problem. Government left them alone.
Even in the early Sixties, in rural King George County, Virginia, where I grew up, it was still mostly true. The country people built their own boats to crab in the Potomac, converted junked car engines to marine, made their own crab pots, planted corn and such, and hunted deer. There was very little contact with the government. One state trooper was the law, and he had precious little to do.
I say the following not as an old codger painting his youth in roseate hues that never were, but as serious sociology: We kids could get up on a summer morning, grab the .22 or .410, put it over our shoulder and go into the country store for ammunition, and no one looked twice. We could go by night to the dump to snap-shoot rats, and no one cared. We could get our fishing poles – I preferred a spinning reel and bait-casting tackle – and fish anywhere we pleased on Machodoc Creek or the Potomac. We could drive unwisely but joyously on winding wooded roads late at night and nobody cared.
Call it “freedom.” We were free, and so were the country folk on their farms and with their crabbing rigs. Because we were free, we felt free. It was a distinct psychology, though we didn’t know it.
Things then changed. The country increasingly urbanized. So much for rugged.
It became ever more a nation of employees. As Walmart and shopping centers and factories moved in, the farmers sold their land to real-estate developers at what they thought mind-boggling prices, and went to work as security guards and truck drivers. Employees are not free. They fear the boss, fear dismissal, and become prisoners of the retirement system. So much for Marlboro Man.
Self-reliance went. Few any longer can fix a car or the plumbing, grow food, hunt, bait a hook or install a new roof. Or defend themselves. To overstate barely, everyone depends on someone else, often the government, for everything. Thus we becamethe Hive.
Government came like a dust storm of fine choking powder, making its way into everything. You could no longer build a shed without a half-dozen permits and inspections. You couldn’t swim without a lifeguard, couldn’t use your canoe without Coast-Guard approved flotation devices and a card saying that you had taken an approved course in how to canoe. Cops proliferated with speed traps. The government began spying on email, requiring licenses and permits for everything, and deciding what could and could not be taught to one’s children, who one had to associate with, and what one could think about what or, more usually, whom.
With this came feminization. The schools began to value feelings over learning anything. Dodge ball and freeze tag became violence and heartless competition, giving way to cooperative group activities led by a caring adult. The female preference for security over freedom set in like a hard frost. We became afraid of second-hand smoke and swimming pools with a deep end. As women got in touch with their inner totalitarian, we began to outlaw large soft drinks and any word or expression that might offend anyone.
Thus much of the country morphed into helpless flowers, narcissistic, easily frightened, profoundly ignorant video-game twiddlers and Facebook Argonauts. As every known poll shows, even what purport to be college graduates do not know who fought in World War One, or that there was a Mexican-American war, or where Indochina is.
Serving as little more than cubicle fodder, they could not survive a serious crisis like the first Depression. And they look to the collective, the hive, for protection. The notion of individual self-defense, whether with a fist or a Sig 9, is, you know, like scary, or, well, just wrong or macho or something. I mean, if you find an intruder in your house at night, shouldn’t you, like, call a caring adult?
The echoes of the former America linger in commercials in commercials for pickup trucks with throaty bass voices and footage of Toyotas powering through rough unsettled country that almost no one ever even sees these days. Mostly it’s just marketing to suburban blossoms. The number of vehicles with four-wheel drive that have actually been off a paved road is not high.
Many who grew up in the former America, and a good many today in the South and west, substantially adhere to the old values. They won’t last. We live in the day of the Hive, and in the long run there is no point fighting it.
But for these relics, who like to wind the Harley to a hundred-and-climbing on the big empty roads out west, who throw the deer rifle in the gun rack on the first day of the season, who set out into the High Desert for sheer love of sun and barren rock and sprawling isolation – the terror of guns, of everything, makes no sense.
They – we – grew up with guns. Since nobody ever shot anybody accidentally or otherwise, we accepted as obvious: that people, not guns, committed murder. Did shotguns leap into the air of their own volition, point themselves, and open fire? Or did someone pull the trigger? If a murderer shot his victim, did you put the gun in jail, or the murderer? If remote urban barbarians below the level of civilization shot people, what did that have to do with us?
A different America, a different culture. We really were free. You could come out of the house on a summer morning and let the dogs run loose in the fields, nobody ever having heard of a dog license. You could change the oil in your car or rewire your basement without the county meddling. You could shoot varmints eating your garden and no one cared. The government left you alone. This is not an unimportant part of the dispute over guns – wanting to be left alone. Nobody in America, ever again, is going to be left alone. Not ever.
February 22, 2013
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.
AWD says:
So-so article. He fails to mention the actual reason people’s lives have become so weak and pointless: debt and government dependence. Both are enslaving; more than 50% of people are deeply in debt, and 48% of people are dependent on the government. And the shit-for-brains educational system producing politically correct diversity-sensitive worthless bags of crap. Schools don’t teach you how to succeed, only how to suck ass and be governable.
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22nd February 2013 at 3:03 pm
T4C says:
Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end…..sigh…
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22nd February 2013 at 3:08 pm
Eddie says:
It’s not going to last forever.We’ll go back to the old ways, otherwise we’ll just go away, period.
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22nd February 2013 at 3:48 pm
Stucky says:
AWD
I thought the article was brilliant.
Too bad you missed the point simply because he didn’t mention debt. Fred tells STORIES … not in-depth reporting.
Besides, he does talk some about “debt” and a whole lot about our “shit-for-brains educational system” in the 544 other articles on his website.
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22nd February 2013 at 3:52 pm
Zarathustra says:
Chain restaurants (fast food or otherwise) and big box stores have done more damage to this country than even the Interstate highway system. It used to be fun and adventurous to travel in the US, especially to rural areas since you never knew what to expect, and little rural towns often had a culture all to their own. Now, everywhere you go looks and feels just like every place you’ve been, so there really isn’t a reason to travel anymore. Does anyone even use the term “hick” anymore?
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22nd February 2013 at 3:59 pm
wip says:
That just killed my entire weekend.
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22nd February 2013 at 4:00 pm
Muck About says:
I like Fred… He’s the genuine article and has earned the right (the hard way) to say what he thinks and why. He’s also smart enough to have beat feet South of the border and married a lovely senorita (complete with daughter!) so he could live well on the miserly retirement The Washington Post pays their ex-employees.
I’ve thought a lot about exfoliating myself (that’s emigration to those not with the botany program) to some small country South of the border but gave up on the idea as too little, too late. When TSHTF foreigners make really good targets for the locals and we tend to stand out too much down that way.
Since Argentina went batshit (this time), I haven’t see or heard a word from Casey’s “Grape Grope” community there in the foothills of the Andes either. Real quiet now..
I think I’d rather fit the good fight at home..
MA
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22nd February 2013 at 4:05 pm
AWD says:
“Thus much of the country morphed into helpless flowers, narcissistic, easily frightened, profoundly ignorant video-game twiddlers and Facebook Argonauts.”
And iphone starers. Right-said Fred.
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22nd February 2013 at 4:10 pm
Stucky says:
Muck About’s exfoliation reveals his true self
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22nd February 2013 at 4:28 pm
Administrator says:
AT LEAST WE’RE NOT FRANCE – YET
Titan CEO vs France Round 3: “The Wackos Of The Communist Union Destroy The Highest Paying Jobs”
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/22/2013 15:28 -0500
The saga of the capitalist vs the socialist goes on with Round 3, following round 1 in which the “Titan CEO Crushes Socialist “Work Ethic”, Tells France “You Can Keep Your So-Called Workers” and round 2 in which “Socialist France Responds To Titan CEO, Hilarity Ensues.” With the entire “developed” world now a real-time parody of itself, in which the truth about the true state of affairs is only revealed in grotesque, farcical, ad-hominem repartees between various members of the insolvent status quo plutocracy, we can only hope for many more rounds of this didactic back and forth.
Excerpted from Titan CEO Maurice Taylor’s follow up letter in response to Arnaud Montebourg’s letter responding to Maurice Taylor.
You letter shows the extent to which your political class is out of touch with real world problems.
You call me an extremist, but most businessmen would agree that I must be nuts to have the idea to spend millions of US dollars to buy a tyre factory in France paying some of the highest wages in the world.
Your letter did not mention why the French government has not stepped in to rescue this Goodyear tyre factory.
The extremist, Mr Minister, is your government and the lack of knowledge about how to build a business.
Your government let the wackos of the communist union destroy the highest paying jobs.
At no time did Titan ask for lower wages; we asked only if you want seven hours pay, you work at least six.
France does have beautiful women and great wine.
PS: My grandmother named my father after French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, and I inherited the name.
I have visited Normandy with my wife. I know what we did for France.
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22nd February 2013 at 4:33 pm
hollow man says:
You better not let your dog eat my chickens or i will light him up. The life is still out there it is just going away. Coyetes get it for eating chickens too. Dang varmits.
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22nd February 2013 at 4:38 pm
sangell says:
Actually that is exactly what Reed was saying AWD. That government has destroyed the America that was. I have thought about how different life must be for young boys and teens today from when I was a kid. On the Fourth of July people didn’t go to fireworks ‘show’, they put on one in their backyards with stuff long since made illegal. Boys had cherry bombs and even M-80′s to destroy things with. Guns, yeah nothing unusual about adolescent boys going out into the woods with .22s to make life miserable for any creature foolish enough to be seen. There was an old reservoir about a mile down the railroad tracks from my house. The county hadn’t yet made it into a park and it wasn’t used as reservoir anymore so it was just a lake with no adults to tell boys what they could and could not do… so we did what we wanted. Swim, fished ( occasionally with weighted M-80′s) caught snakes or turtles. Never heard of any kid drowning though Kenny Grey did get bit trying to catch a copperhead. His arm turned a sickening shade of green and purple and swelled up to twice its normal size but he soon recovered and had enormous prestige amongst his peers for having battled hand to fang with a venomous snake.
The police did not harass us even when, at 16, you scored a six pack of beer and got drunk. I remember when I was in my friends friends new 289 Mustang. It was late and we were driving too fast and drinking beer. A county cop pulled out about a quarter mile behind us and Wolfe decided to floor it and escape. I suggested that wasn’t a good idea as the county cops had 390 Ford Galaxies and would be able to overtake us and the rear view mirror said I was speaking the truth. He pulled over and the cop just confiscated our beer and followed us home. Upon arrival he asked to have a parent come out. Wolfe said they weren’t home to which the cop replied he would turn his lights and siren on to make sure at which point Wolfe was forced to retrack his earlier statement and produce his mother.
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22nd February 2013 at 4:48 pm
howard in nyc says:
i like fred too. we have a profound disagreement on race, which i would love to kick around with him in person some day. but i agree with him on most other things.
despite me being an urban type. who doesn’t hunt. who wasn’t a gun guy. who prefers a foreign make bike, and riding around the city to a harley on wide-open country roads.
’cause i love the freedom. and i mourn the loss of so much freedom. and i cling to that little bit which i still exercise w/o the govt fucking with me (or the threat thereof, which is an even smaller bit).
someone else recently spoke of the freedom of our youth, which today young people do not experience. maybe on one of the 1979 threads. that comment hit me hard, as does fred’s post.
i never thought so many americans would so willingly sacrifice so much of our freedom. knowingly or unknowingly. i thought the love for freedom was so deep and strong, so integrally a part of being an american, that we could never reach the state of today without so little resistance and opposition.
i thought it was not possible. shit; wrong again.
i could go on at length. another time. but (as usual), a graham parker lyric comes to mind:
If you’re not the king or the queen
You’re just a working for the hive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HNS0MF_Ew
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22nd February 2013 at 5:11 pm
howard in nyc says:
it was nomad, on the other thread. and matt commented that his kids will never experience the freedom we had in the 70s.
______
Nomad says:
I was a 10 year old X-Kid at the time, growing up in a suburb right outside of the Bronx.
My bike was my main mode of transportation and I rode without a helmet and didn’t know I was in danger.
I had long shaggy hair, ripped jeans with baseball cards in the back pocket and a pocket knife in the front and a hole in my one and only pair of sneakers.
I got to hang out with my 17 year old cousin Tony, a high school dropout with a 1969 Nova SS with a 472 and a bad attitude. He would drive me around cranking AC/DC Highway to Hell and let me smoke his Marlboros. One night his girlfriend pulled off her shirt and showed me her tits in the back seat of that car.
I got into a fist fight in school, got a black eye and served a one day after school detention; my parents weren’t notified of the incident. I told my father and he laughed and patted me on the head.
I got my front tooth knocked out playing a game of tackle football with no equipment.
My friends and I blow up the post office street corner mail box with an M80 on the Fourth of July.
My dog wondered the streets on his own with no leash.
My father would drive my friends and me around in the back of his pickup truck.
I had a paper route to earn some cash.
My father worked construction and my Mom was a secretary we didn’t have much but my sisters and I didn’t know it.
My childhood could not be more different from my kid’s childhood.
Today my kids have 10 times more than I ever had but I wouldn’t trade my childhood for theirs for anything in the world.
1979, I will always remember that year as true freedom. It seems I did what I wanted when I wanted and I didn’t have a care in the world.
Thanks for letting me walk down memory lane.
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22nd February 2013 at 5:16 pm
flash says:
America was destroyed by popular vote in concert with asshat lawyers dressed in black drag..We’re all diverse, hyphenated American, corporate people,physically handicapped, mentally challenged impoverished and landless lesbian transgendered midgets now.
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/the-reeducation-camps-of-multicultural-america/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8sAqX9QYCYI
“Like Communist reeducation camps, the captive (yes, captive, or they lose their jobs) listeners in the audience are being humiliated by this piece of shit into participating in de facto forced confessionals of their imaginary sins, and indoctrination of their “privilege” and “oppression”. You can hear their humiliating subjugation in the way they nervously laugh at slander directed against them. This is the laughter of the bullied beta male trying to go along to get along, so as to avoid any beatings on the playground later.”
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22nd February 2013 at 5:49 pm
flash says:
Sure you can keep your guns, bitches just don’t want them loaded.
Remember even unloaded guns are dangerous and lots of people have been shot with unloaded guns…or so the hysterical femi-nazi hags would have US believe.
YOU CAN BE SHOT BY AN UNLOADED GUN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHsX7STHqNg
Stupid , stupid stupid, woman.
We the Outvoted are being rendered irrelevant by popular vote.
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22nd February 2013 at 5:56 pm
DaveL says:
One more time. Sometimes it’s good to be 72.
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22nd February 2013 at 9:20 pm
Makati1 says:
My parents are in their late 80s. I mentioned to them that they lived in the best of times in the US and they both agreed. I think they are glad that they will not be around much longer to see the fall of America. We don’t talk about it when I visit.
I live in the Philippines. I don’t have the fear that Filipinos will turn on white guys when the SHTF. It is already mostly here for them. They will hardly notice the change. Where we are building our farm, resembles the America of my youth where everyone leaves everyone else alone unless they are needed. I don’t have to worry about ‘whistle pigs’ here as anything that can be eaten is. I do have cobras to watch out for, but they are no worse than the rattle snakes or copperheads of my native Pennsylvania. I really hate to go back to the 50 to visit my family, and probably will end that ordeal as soon as my parents are gone. The West is turning into hell…and the East is probably going to follow, if we last long enough. Too bad…
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22nd February 2013 at 3:37 am
ALAN OSTROWSKY says:
Agenda 21 is fast destroying country living. The OWG want us all to live in the cities.
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22nd February 2013 at 7:24 am
ragman says:
Fred is a national treasure. Howard: good to hear from you again.
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22nd February 2013 at 10:09 am
Thunderbird says:
The government is like a hot dry wind that will bring to ruin everything, and then lastly itself. Then the wizards that have run it and everything else into the ground will move on to somewhere else. Maybe China?
Good article. I can remember those days.
What has happened is the Will of the people has been subverted by rules and regulations. The machine of government has become our master… Human machines the policy enforcers.
As the complete death of the Will of the people is becoming more apparent a massive fear in the people is also becoming more apparent as violence is creeping into society at all levels. This is why I believe government is now pushing for the confiscation of guns owned by the people.
Nature is beginning to respond to all this. The present generation of Will-less people; unfortunately many of our sons & daughters, are doomed because without Will this present world (I don’t mean earth or planet) cannot survive. Will power opens intellectual and physical space for development while a lack of Will power causes these spaces to close. This is what is happening. And it is now happening in an accelerating momentum.
I am putting my faith and my resources into my grand children which will go thought the coming collapse. If America survives it will be because of the Will power of our grand children with the help of the grand parents passing on to them the knowledge and understanding of what freedom and independent thinking is all about. Our children traded their freedom for the illusion of wealth and security in physical assets that rust and rot away, forgetting that we are spiritual beings that need to also acquire spiritual assets that last an eternity.
America does not have to be long gone. I believe if we old people were thirty years old this government style would be long gone. Now all we can do is instruct our grand children because our children sure haven’t guarded the hen house.
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22nd February 2013 at 12:26 pm