Make-Believe in Boots

Sometimes a moral choice is between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes a moral choice is between the greater of two goods. This time, I chose the lesser evil and the greater good. I just gave away two pairs for cowboy boots, and I kept my favorite pair to take back to Tucson.

Not only that, I am wearing them! I am a man of considerable courage and determination, but I have not had enough of either to wear a pair of cowboy boots here in Minnesota.

I know that there are cowboy boots here in the Upper Midwest, but most of them have big, flat, entirely useless heels, and they are to be seen--sometimes near cows, but never near horses--getting up into the cab of a semi-truck, or up into the cab of a honking big farm tractor.

For people like me, cowboy boots are costume. The last horse I rode was a cranky gelding in Iowa. He had two reasons for being cranky: the second was that he was in Iowa. "Any of you ever rode before?" the stable owner asked. The hand of every Upward Bound kid from Waterloo shot up. "You!" the stable owner said, pointing to me and looking at my Mexican boots, "You get up on Knothead, there! He's a little too cranky for these kids."

That's how the Squarehead ended up on Knothead.

He was a tad cranky! That horse did not like the smell of Mexican leather. Or much else. Today I donated those boots to the Good Will. Tomorrow they will be in downtown St. Paul, pretending something else. I kept the boots I bought at Sheplers in Wichita, one summer, driving from Iowa to Tucson.

I put those boots on because I am thinking about our move to Tucson, and the need to pare down to the bare essentials. I find a little make-believe to be essential.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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