Dan,
I ride (motorcycles and horses).
I shoot (won first in silhouette twice, once with black powder, I was second in archery at my university).
I can milk a cow without getting kicked, milk a goat and keep my hair, muck out with the best of them...
And where I grew up, the only people wearing those stupid K'Boy boots were those idiot tourists who descended on us during our six week summers to go to the dude ranches.
In other words, what real country living is, I grew up in and understand.
I offer no insult to anyone who makes their living from the land, just the opposite. I wasn't and am not strong enough to do it. Riding fences with my dad's friends and neighbors as a kid was more than enough for me.
Yes, I teach. Until I was certified to do so, I repaired appliances, full-time, in a licensed workshop. You know what I did the first months? I scrubbed out the old refrigerators, washers and stoves. Sorted salvageable parts into their respective bins, cataloging them along the way.
At the same time, I was cleaning hotel rooms evenings.
I offer no insult to those who earn their living working with their hands, I've spent my life doing it and, frankly, given the 'all children left behind' and stupid PC laws not to mention zero tolerance idiocy, I may just not teach in the US when I return, I may go back to working with my hands.
What I,yes as a liberal, object to very much, is people being conned out of a safe, reliable and necessary adjunct to public hygiene: vaccination against communicable disease.
Why shouldn't I point out that Faux news and the red-nex mentality are serious problems in this context? First, they are. Second, I get to deal with the joys of red-nex mentality every day in my family. The drunken wife beaters. The meth addict husband beater. The never once were all adult parents out of jail at the same time in the last 21 years joys of babysitting. The can't get a decent job without a high-school education lament followed by the can't keep a job because they expect you to show up for work every single day, on time...and sober lament.
The not one, not two but three major brawls in the family because Obama is dark skinned and that's reason enough to ruin the 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with a fight...
I mean no offense to anyone in our family here at AW.org who is conservative. I very much stand by my statement that rejecting medical advances which were scientifically tested beginning centuries ago and have yet to be disproved is stupid. D-U-M, dumb. Red-nex mentality, period.
Oh, right, forgot. I was a lifetime NRA member and used to grab the Rifleman to read it first as a kid. Left them several years back when they went nuts. You want country, fine - I grew up in the country, I can and have and do live that life with pleasure. But country is not red-nex, just as being fiscally conservative (me!) is not the same as being a Bush#43 Republican.
