Simple Lives and Honest Convictions

I grew up in a mining town – my father was both a logger and a miner. Some of the most honest and honorable work any man can do. It was also arduous work. He along with many others toiled in the dark and dank several thousand feet underground. He, and again like many others, had a secondary handicap – they were immigrants with very little knowledge of the English language. But they were happy to have a modest ambition called opportunity and hope. With bare hands, a tremendous work ethic, and a great degree of courage they got through – each and every day they labored, painstakingly labored – we, their children, were the prime benefactors.

I have a lot of admiration and respect for those that continue to work, sweat, and slog in our primary industries - those in the extraction and collection of natural resources like ranchers, farmers, miners, loggers, oil riggers, and fishermen.

I have no pity for the city protestors, preachers, and the pompous with their erroneous and fallacious environmental causes. The privileged elite who believe the men and women that toil relentlessly, like my father did, are in and of, a much lower societal group. Those workers are meant to serve them and their needs, and further they need to do so within the terms of those who honor themselves and their advantaged life and livelihoods in the elite areas of a comfortable cosmopolitan existence.

However, it is the men and women that labor in our primary industries that are true stewards of the environment - those that care for the future, conserve where possible, and show the greatest concern for humankind. They don’t need to walk around carrying a sign, spitting senseless slogans and platitudes. These people are not looking to the government to solve their every problem, disentangle their self-made or self-centered evils, or have others fund their lives.

They are what some have called the unwashed masses, the flyover peasants, the uncomplicated and less educated. However, what they really are would be the stalwarts of our society, the resolute and committed that are the primary engines and purveyors of our advanced civilization - they are society’s realists.

This is the workforce that allows the protestors and complainers to march to their own madness while continuing to fill the shelves of grocery stores and provide fine cuisines in their pretentious restaurants and capricious coffee shops. Not every citizen of the city is in this selective class, but many are. They have never mucked out stalls, worked on fishing boats in heavy seas, carried back-breaking materials to a work site, or performed physical labor that would make most men drop with exhaustion.

Instead, they carry signs, drink decorated lattes, obstruct traffic, shout obscenities, and pretend to know something. I write for the right people – those that built and are continuing to build our nations. The ones on whose backs the country truly relies.

The alarmists of corrupt environmental causes, including human-induced climate change, have fraudulent motives and dishonest objectives – all for control, manipulation, and exploitation of the honest people I unabashedly salute.

A summer family outing in Ontario’s north would have included picking blueberries to add to the food pantry. In this photo our family picnics between picking sessions. My father is to the left - I took the photograph.