Daily Battles

We All Fight Them

It’s been a week of battle against the woke, a big corporation and the garden. As far as the garden goes, there’s one thing I never would have believed that my wife and I would find as a common interest in our lives and that’s a garden. But the world is different than it was in 1982 when we met. Now, the garden is as much a part of defending my family from catastrophe as the willingness and ability to engage a threat physically. They are, in many respects, identical. It takes physical force to plant, weed and defend the garden from hungry mammals, bugs and weeds; physical exertion to harvest, prepare and preserve.

The corporation is a big energy corporation seeking to house some part of its facility on our property. In initial negotiations with their representative, it did not go well. I told him that there wasn’t much about his contract that interested me. We got into a back and forth over the fact that I wanted compensation tied to the rate of inflation, at which point he informed me that inflation wasn’t much of a worry since it has run at about 1% over the last decade. My response is that I was not leasing the property over the last decade, but the next few decades and that the inflation rate of 8.5% already this year was not a spike or an aberration, but the future for a dollar that’s forfeited the prime reserve currency status it’s held since the end of WWII.

Since there are no economics that are not inextricably tied to politics. His opinion is that in a few years we’ll (Americans) be smart enough to get rid of Joe Biden and put someone in office who will understand the economics and “fix it.” This is when I identified him as having severe normalcy bias. We didn’t even get into the prospect of a stolen election, but I did ask him what is the difference between a communist state and a constitutional republic. His answer was that we have a constitution and laws and that keeps us from becoming communist. What part, I asked, of the constitution or even local laws allow for the government to shut down private businesses? His reluctant answer was, none. My response was that this didn’t happen forty years ago and could be dismissed with the wave of a hand, it happened last year and to believe that the government will somehow heal itself is naïve, so I want our compensation to be tied to the rate of inflation or it’s a no-go.

Last is the woke. My publisher, whom I’ll allow anonymity for the purposes of this post, does not like me. They have never promoted my work, I didn’t even get an email when the book in question was released. I didn’t get an email when Western Writers of America (WWA) chose it as a finalist for the Spur Award (prestigious in the Western literature market). The only email I got that referenced my book and its status was a group email they sent to let us know that they would be taking out a full-page ad on the back of Round Up magazine (the house organ of the WWA) with Spur Award winners and finalists.

When I started writing things like this blog; when I criticized the unconstitutional acts of Barack Obama and George Bush before him, I knew I was consigning my creative future to the ashbin. The left controls most of the levers, but I’m fortunate in the fact that those on the committee who read and rate Western novels saw something of worth in my work to make it a finalist nonetheless. Western Writers of America has never been cruel to me, at worst they’ve ignored me, but they are largely made up of university professors and are not likely to share much with me socially to begin with and I don’t harbor resentments for their preference to associate with those of like mind and interests. I’m grateful to them for having taken the time to read and recognize my work, what else can a writer expect or desire?

Those who think that there is no cost or consequence to what myself and others do, like David Codrea specifically, don’t understand the dynamics, or are just not impressed by the sacrifices made. To even have a publisher that doesn’t like you, won’t promote you or your work, is a sacrifice of thousands and thousands of dollars compared to those who will. So, I’ll attend their conference and see if there’s some publisher that is more interested in my work than what political positions I hold. I know this has never been a sacrifice made by my left-leaning colleagues. They’re given rich publishing contracts specifically because they hold certain political views.

Myself, like many others, fight these daily battles to stand up for our beliefs. I am not alone. It costs careers and promotions a lot of the time and that’s something that should be fixed in the future of the nation, but for now, just being in the game is the best we can hope for.