CONTROLLING THE WATER GANGSTERS

SLOWLY BUT EARNESTLY the noose around humanity's neck is tightening. Soon, most of us will bow and grovel to the dictates of our masters now wearing sheep's clothing but are ravaging wolves instead. Many of us will die in the first wave of resistance. Others among us will fight on. Sorry, not exactly an original thought, but a thought clutching an emphatic truth nevertheless.

It's no secret to anyone who has known me or my shadow that I was once an enthusiastic Huey P. Long admirer for years after having read T. Harry Williams' biography of Long in the middle 1970s. However, after stumbing through a life among takers and givers, sloth managers and peace activists, gun gonzos and political vipers, I'm a bit less resolute on Longism these days, although his words still do occasionally melt this woulda, shoulda coulda heart of mine, even as I've moved back home to my beginnings as befits my belief in the American Constitution above all else, including drop dead goo-sounding politicians. When I read that the Kingfish, after all he did for a then very impoverished oil-rigged Louisiana, after going national, was planning on running for the presidency to unseat FDR in 1936 only to get himself shot dead...

...all I could think of was the word C-O-N-T-R-O-L. I love my country. Its furious heritage, its loquacious promise of better days ahead. I also chafe and occasionally fight back a tear when I am moved to chagrin her current predicament.

To be brutally honest although I never felt the true call, I now regret I never served my country militarily, but I do recall fondly my days as a Boy Scout, who in hot pursuit of the illustrious Eagle rank, fell one rank short at Life at the age of fourteen due to circumstances I could not control, but could have endured and modified to impact that pursuit. That I did not is a regret. As a scout, I learned to believe in conservation, but I also find that the environmental lobby as it has evolved today has taken a once beautiful concept and distorted it beyond due diligence into a perversion of the original mandate.

This latest water grab seems nothing less than one more Federal program aimed at perverting the American mandate with jurisdictional tyranny the final endgame. The strength of a nation is its people, and to strip liberty from a people accustomed to freedom of choice and the privilege of property is to trample the spirit and usurp the strength of the nation dependent on the vital rechargeable energy that liberty bestows.

To replace the spirit of liberty by the moribund grimaces of a bureaucratic ghost is to announce the death of a nation.