I love watching Westerns. I have my favorite channels. All the actors that played the cowboy game through the many years is amazing. Yet in truth the American cowboy days were short. Fifteen years after the civil war through the building of the train industry and barbed wire.
The Spaniards and Mexicans were challenged by Native Indians and then the Europeans. Carelessly leaving their horses and cattle to be taken over and bred by these new propagated cowboys. It is a brutal history as well as a beautiful one as in the current film Painted Woman. A woman was a mother, whore or missionary. Nevertheless, the women are robust and hearty characters as in the film True Grit where a young girl outsmarts many a gun shooting cowboy and avenges her father’s death.
A decade and a half are a short time for towns and saloons to be alive for this massive movement of the wild days of traveling and roaming cowboys. Then barbed wire and the movement of cattle by way of the train into mass slaughterhouses. To roam the prairie was gone.
I love these films as I do Noir films. Adventure, mystery the good and the bad guys and always the femme fatale or saloon lady entertainers.
“Thus, it is our fate to manage within our nature the complexity and the competition of two opposing tendencies: that which stands with life and love (the Dionysian) and that which is greedy, power hungry, and ego-driven (the Titanic).”
~Aguilar, A. Marina. Alchemy of The Heart: The Sacred Marriage of Dionysus & Ariadne. Chiron Publications. Kindle Edition.
Civil War ~A war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country.
Hiawatha, Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln are examples of sensible leaders of humanity and bright governance. Which we lack now, and profoundly so. I must say that we are now in the mists of a civil war. Has anyone called it out yet? I will. At times like these I rest on the wisdom of leaders who are just and wise. A call to their spirit of wisdom is needed.
Will we stand aside and be enablers of this abuse on “we the people,” children, emigrants and the innocent? How can we do this? It is time to see this for what it is. A civil war.
Hiawatha
“As the smoke from many family fires rises tonight and spreads above the forest, let us remember,” he reminded the Iroquois, “that this smoke comes from many fires, and no one fire is better than another. Though one fire may burn brighter and another more faintly who is to say which is wiser? You know as well as I that there are times and seasons for both. Remember always that the truth springs from many hearts and takes many outer forms, no two ever the same. One in the Great Spirit, we shall have no one ruling shamans, for such traditions are warrior traditions and not the traditions of the Ongwhehonwhe. Let such customs be buried with our weapons. Let them lie forgotten beside the tree that is no more.”
~Hiawatha – Return Of The Bird Tribes.
Thomas Paine
“Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it? What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man’s estate, or raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and taxes the never-failing consequence? Though this reasoning may be good to a nation, it is not so to a government. War is the Pharo-table of governments, and nations the dupes of the game.”
~ pg. 178 Chapter II, Of the Origin of the Present Old Governments. ~ Thomas Paine
Abraham Lincoln
“That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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