Jonah, we ain't all Wall Street pansies sit tin' in cubicles an' polish in' our nails.
And everybody who lives in the Midwest ain't necessarily a redneck uneducated beer-swilling hillbilly neither. Why, some of us even has education from high-falutin' schools like Berkeley and Princeton and we even had an Oxford-educated President awhile back and he was from Arkansas.
Even in California there're still places where they have cowboys and rodeos and people wear cowboy hats and boots and horses aren't just for pulling a carriage or looking pretty in some show.
One of my great joys is to drive across this country looking for little out-of-the-way towns and places where the only pretense to modern civilization is electricity and modern conveniences and the desire to better one's life and those of their kids.
Dodge City, Kansas is one of those places where the Old West and modern life have co-mingled, but the people have maintained their sense of a great western heritage. Abilene, Santa Fe, Tombstone, and a thousand other little cow towns scattered across the prairie are still there, still thriving, and still maintaining the old traditions of the Old West even into the 21st Century in many ways.
The United States is heavily, HEAVILY influenced by the Old West and the legends thereof in ways that most people don't even realize today - and many of those old traditions and mannerisms remain alive today.
No offense is intended (to anyone), but when somebody says something is "cowboy" or says "cowboy" this or that, I smile and feel proud. The tradition of the Old West, in many ways merely legend, is something to be proud of.
Just imagine it - millions of immigrants, newly-arrived from faraway lands, moving west, learning the language of this new country, learning to live through the hardships thrown their way, struggling to succeed against sometimes impossible odds - and doing it, thriving, and becoming prosperous and building a powerhouse of a country in only a few hundred years.
Imagine those lost, lonely, desperately poor immigrants, barely knowing a word of English, struggling along the Oregon Trail, the Chisum Trail, opening up the Oklahoma Territory, establishing businesses and homes and families along the way, facing down hostile Indians, raiders, war, famine, the forces of nature - and succeeding.
Succeeding despite everything thrown their way. Standing in the face of dust storms, bullets, tornadoes, locusts (read about the locust swarm that swept through the Midwest in the late 1800s - the estimate is that there at least 1 trillion locusts in the swarm and it devastated more than 300 thousand acres of cultivated land), bandits, and everything else that plagues our civilization today - and succeeding.
It's exciting, it's heartbreaking, and it's inspiring. It's something that anyone should be proud of to have as part of their heritage.
Were there tragedies? Oh, yes. Were there horrific things that happened? Yes. Were there things that happened that shame us all? You betcha'. But our ancestors learned and we learned and our children will learn and we will be better for all of those things.
Yeah, I'm damned proud of our traditions and this country and what those immigrants did way back when. They carved a nation from the bedrock of a wild and (basically, by today's standards) uncivilized land and they did it with their bare hands, the sweat of their brows, their blood, tears, and often as not the clothes on their backs.
I sincerely do not and have not intended to offend anyone with the above rant. If I did, sorry.
