2021 was better than 2020 in two important ways. One, no more Tronald Dump as Commander in Chief. Two, I was able to get vaccinated and no longer had to hide from imminent death.
Unfortunately, as revealed on Television on January 6th, The Mad Mango who had been in charge through four horrible years and two Impeachments managed to convince the core of the Republican Party that they would find ruling the United States far more profitable if they adopted an Authoritarian Dictatorship as their model of governance. No policies, no benefits for the ruled, no equality in American society.
And immediately the cultural yelling party that dominates the daily news cycle did not focus on the mess the Cinnamon Hitler left behind with the mishandling of the Covid pandemic, or the unrest in society caused by the Insurrection and attempted coup. Instead, they were horrified that the heirs of Dr. Seuss okayed the non-renewal of printing contracts on a few Dr. Seuss books because of racial insensitivity and non-profitability. And they began to vilify the Muppet Big Bird just because he did a segment showing kids that getting vaccinatd was safe and okay. The world is dying and the Republicans are busy attacking puppets and defending racist cartoons.
My daughter finished her first year of college, entirely online. She is the first of my three kids to go to college. The two boys are both older and hoping to use the chance they earned or will earn from the military to go to school later.
My oldest son has finished his service with a permanent disability caused by a training accident. But he is not completely immobilized. And he now has a fiance whom he plans to marry when the pandemic finally dies down.
My middle child put in over a year as a jailer for the Dallas County Sheriff”s office, and now has enlisted in the Air Force.
My wife, now a U.S. citizen after over twenty years of working on it, is still teaching middle-school ESL. She has a few more years to retirement.
As a writer I decided to create a couple of novellas, essentially an extra-long short story. Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels is a science fiction novella about a young girl who finds herself all alone on a starship in an unknown solar system.
Horatio T. Dogg, Super Sleuth is a dog-and-his-boy story about a dog detective who follows a murderous rat with his educated nose.
As the year is ending, I have another AeroQuest novel ready to be published, and I am more than halfway through my work in progress, The Necromancer’s Apprentice.
My skills as a writer have not really deteriorated, so the writing is still good. But my output is down because my health is deteriorating. I can’t see as well as I used to. I have more arthritis pain than I am used to. My diabetes is still basically under control without taking insulin. And I am now officially on Medicare.
But the biggest regret I have about 2021 is that I lost my mother and my cousin Karen (the unlabeled person on the far right of this picture.) The world of my youth is now gone. Only my grandparent’s farm is still there, now jointly owned by my two sisters and me. Mom passed away from a heart problem complicated by kidney failure at the worst possible time. I am now the oldest surviving member of our immediate family. And becoming a land-owner has helped me pay off my bankruptcy, but I would change things back to the way they were if only I had that magical power.
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of the plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp