A point of view is one thing, but some wag just sent me a note declaring the answer to the question of why husbands die before their wives is “Because they want to.” While this is obviously meant as a joke, there is nothing funny about our “leadership” taking America in a path that might cause some of us to just want to get out of the relationship. However, this isn’t always easy. For example, Alec Baldwin said if Bush were elected President he would leave the country. But Bush was elected and Baldwin didn’t leave.

There have been people that have left California and people continuing to do so because of the state becoming increasingly hostile to the quality of life. Developers from Los Angeles clearly have Kern County in mind for exploitation. I use that pejorative word since quality of life is not a factor, except relative to what Los Angeles has become. As it is, Bakersfield’s world class air pollution should certainly give pause to the decision makers considering further exploitation for the sake of profits anywhere in the San Joaquin Valley.

I suggest to those that expect to profit from the exploitation of Kern County it is all too true that when people are forced to live in conditions equal to that of sewer rats they will start behaving like sewer rats. Rather than any sort of “quality of life,” when conditions become barbaric living becomes a matter of survival. Our major cities are given over to barbarism already, to populations merely surviving, and the impact of this is spreading like a cancer throughout America. The Alice in Wonderland TV commercials showing Americans living sumptuously is clearly fantasy for the greater population of America. I don’t buy five dollar a cup coffee and I don’t pay five dollars for a liter of the “right” bottled water.

All the recent talk about bottled water makes me wonder how I managed to survive childhood. I have my own well here in Bodfish, but I use a PUR filter on my kitchen faucet for drinking water. As improbable as it seems, this is not only a precaution against some normal impurities that might come through the well, but there is the possibility the dumping of chemicals from meth labs up the canyon from me into Bodfish Creek together with the run-off from insecticides and fertilizer used for growing marijuana over a period of time may have contaminated the ground water.

While folks in Los Angeles and Bakersfield have long joked about not trusting air they can’t see, it is becoming an equally unfunny story, closer to macabre, about drinking water. We can do without a lot of things, but air and water are not among these. However, I learned years ago profits trump clean air and water. And since there is no regulation governing population and our borders remain porous to the invasion of millions of Mexico’s citizens for the sake of slave labor you simply cannot crowd these millions into confined areas like Los Angeles and Bakersfield without suffering the consequences of further air and water pollution.

We had a hand dug well on the mining claim in Boulder Gulch not far from where I now live. The stratum was decomposed granite and the site of the claim had a shallow water table. Consequently, the well was only about 14 feet deep. This certainly helped as we had to use a hand pump to get water, and while an improvement over a windlass and a bucket at the end of a rope those old iron hand pumps don’t work at any great depth.

But have any of you ever heard of keeping catfish in your well to help keep it clean? Grandad swore by this and it was my happy task to supply the fish. While I didn’t mind the catfish, toads would often get in also and had to be cleaned out periodically. This led to my drinking a lot of milk and coffee.

One summer we experienced a drought and had to resort to hauling water from the river about a mile away. Grandad and I soon tired of this task and he decided to deepen our well using dynamite as the quickest and easiest expedient for the job. Having the stuff on hand for the mining claim, we soon had our holes drilled, packed in the charge and proceeded to blow it out. It was a hard job hauling up the blown material with a bucket, but we did manage to hit water again only another five feet down and were back in business.

Things have changed dramatically around the Kern River Valley since those far-off days before the lake went in, a time when there were so few of us living here that everybody knew everybody else and who did what to or for someone, and no one thought anything of using dynamite for various purposes.

You can’t legally just haul out the family supply of dynamite and use it in Los Angeles. Not that dynamite is in short supply in L. A., but it seems the city is not only opposed to digging your own well in your backyard, they are fussy about who has and uses dynamite locally.

I personally know some that believe dynamite ought to be available to anyone that wants it. But don’t count me among them. I’m a life member of the NRA, an adamant believer and defender of our right to bear arms, but we need a system of government that actually works and not only keeps dynamite out of the hands of those that should not have it, but also keeps guns out of the hands of those that should not have them, most of all children, rather than continued attacks to disarm responsible, law-abiding American citizens.

While I’m at an age where the “good old days” were really that long ago, having lived a “pioneer” life here in the Sequoia National Forest as a boy I have no illusions about living without the benefits of modern civilization, things like flipping a switch for light, indoor plumbing with a flush toilet and turning a tap for water, no longer having to fell trees and cut wood for heating and cooking, and I would be loath to return to the many hardships of that past life. Notwithstanding this, I think it would be worth it if it would help restore the America I knew as a boy, an America I knew when people were so much more self-reliant and responsible, an America that was trusted by the other nations of the world and we were justly proud of our nation.

We are told a third of the world’s population lives without potable water or adequate sanitation; that major cities throughout the world are suffering from air pollution, and only five years ago I read at the time a full one-half of the world’s population had never received a personal phone call. But despite the tremendous advances in science and technology it does not appear clean air and water is going to trump economics in America or anywhere else, especially when literally billions of people are suffering without the benefits of science and technology.

As to population and “green” you can’t expect someone in the Amazon to refuse to cut a tree so he can provide for more mouths to feed. These in turn will cut more trees in order to feed more mouths. The equivalent here in America is more pollution producing trucks and cars on our highways, and more population means more polluting trucks and cars, more pollution producing industries like dairies and others. And corporate profits, a point made in “Medicine Man” among many others, override any meaningful attempts to curb air pollution.

The great majority in the nations of the world refuses to practice birth control, and the poorest of nations suffer accordingly but continue to demand they be fed by the wealthier nations that do practice birth control. If the sorry excuse for “leadership” in America were not sold out to profits they would not be encouraging the invasion from Mexico, a largely Roman Catholic population for whom practical methods of birth control is a sin. Result: More unproductive mouths to feed, but they demand Americans feed them as though it was their “right” to be fed at taxpayer expense while those employing illegal aliens with the cooperation of the federal government reap the benefits of slave labor. Roman Cardinals like Mahony in L. A. quite understandably encourage this invasion from Mexico since the invaders are mostly “good Catholics.” And Mahony, like all tyrants, works on the basis of the more “serfs” to serve the master the better. This certainly maintains those like Mahony living sumptuously in splendor in contradiction to the teaching of Jesus.

But what of the Ford Foundation and some others with the cooperation of the ACLU encouraging globalization and the demise of America as a sovereign nation? Once you have made the connection between these and the Bush Dynasty you understand the President wanting things like that superhighway from Mexico to Canada, the refusal to secure our borders because of the dreams of “empire.” Contributing to this scheme of empire through globalization and America’s demise here in my native state there is no way of keeping up with the growing criminal population, all the while our “leaders” refuse to legalize marijuana thereby guaranteeing jails and prisons will never catch up with the need, nor will the huge inmate population of illegal aliens be deported. What we have instead is the phony “war on drugs” and Mexican cartels using our own national forests for growing marijuana.

It all seems quite mad to me, and if lunatics are not in charge how else to account for the lack of any sane leadership? If not Satanic, there must be some rationale to the direction leaders are taking America. At least this is what we hope. But I don’t see any basis for such hope. There is certainly no basis for hope in a Congress the members of which operate solely on getting elected and staying elected rather than doing what is right for America. The ultimate madness in my opinion is the lack of leadership in nations that seem committed to the destruction of our planet, whether from the madness of religion, politics, or empire it comes down to the quality of life vs. power and wealth.