Cowboy Confessional

An urban fellow once said “You scare me.”

I felt kinda flattered.

We had been discussing my days on the ranch, and the kind of people I grew up around. We also talked about the fact that all rural folks own guns (plural per person applies). As I recall the point where he admitted his fear came as I was relating a tale about a soldier I once met who broke his leg in a Nam rice paddy, splitted it, and hobbled many miles solo back to camp.

This fellows fear puzzled me for a long time, and only today did I come to a conclusion.

People tend to fear being noncompetitive. It is instinctual that if someone is stronger, faster, and better armed, they have a chance of surviving what you won’t. Thus we all have some minor fear or latent resentment when we meet someone else who, if circumstances demanded, would take our food, our wife, or our life. It is a good thing I am not married — my cooking is questionable and my life is valuable, so I’d jettison a wife in a pinch.

Urban dwellers have a fear or resentment of rural folks that they mask with inaccurate assessments of rural life, culture, and intra-family genetics. What makes the average urbanite cringe is when someone talks to them in blunt terms, refuses to take excuses for bad behavior, and shows the backbone required to do whatever it takes to stand on their own two feet. This goes against the growing interdependency of city citizens who will be the first to perish when the oil runs out.

Were unlimited wealth mine, I’d be tempted to force every Gucci wearing city supplicant to spend a year on a Kansas farm or Oklahoma cattle ranch. A year might just be enough for them to quit being scared.

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