A Fragment

This is part of a... manifesto? Extended thesis statement? A something I haven't quite figured out what is yet. I wrote this in a burst, and its been sitting there ever since, more than a year now. It is the inspiration for an attempted novel, still in the early stages, but beyond that it is a nothing. Yet.


We are middle children of the west – Not members of the new west fraternity, and not the new immigrant whose bottom-up cultural revolution is more and more successful every day. Our parents worked hard jobs, to give us good lives, working other hard jobs – And the industry disappeared. Cattle, logging, you name it. Skills valuable in todays west do not use strong backs, or toughened hands, they use cunning and false mirth, to plan and plot and sell. And what is being sold is our birthright. It is being sold to others who have not felt the back breaking strain that has been put into the west by the original generations, but who want to buy a piece of a mythology. A mythology created by observers, branded to sell the very acts, and places they were observing, to people even further removed. And in their eyes, it cost the people already there nothing, they can benefit from the increased economic flow, the trickle down. The developers and land-sellers, these priests of an insincere telephone-game mythology, they see themselves as putting in the money, writing the sales pitches, doing the work to sell the west. And they fail to see that what they are selling is the... I don't know if there is a word for it, a single word that encompasses land rich for farming, growing grasses good for cattle, that has been worked and built upon and channeled by hard working believers, disciples of an earned life. Land imbued with all that is, not just their dreams, but the blood of their failures, spirit of their successes, and ideals of existence. What word is there for that? Land does not cover it. Culture does not cover it.

No one who's family has been in the west more than a hundred years has not had ancestors who paid into this. No one who can claim two generations history, was ever expected by their parents and grandparents, to not have access to the full scope of western opportunity, in earth and livestock and timber and hard, hard, work.

What we want to say is, “It is not yours. You cannot buy it”, and instead we pump gas, wait tables, cook meth, work the last holdouts of industries bankrupted by the dreams of new-westerners, or sell out, give in, and start hocking the corporeal elements of our past, our forefathers guarantee of blood and sweat.