Ours is a most fascinating culture. Bernard of Chartres was a 12th-century French philosopher who first suggested that we accomplish great things not because of any superior sight or stature of our own but rather because of the solid foundation of our predecessors.
Sir Isaac Newton codified that in a letter to academic rival Robert Hooke when he said, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” In our case, we have taken our amazing American birthright and done some of the most despicable stuff with it.
Over the course of our storied 250 years as a nation, around 660,000 young Americans have given their lives for freedom. Our forebears endured the taming of the West, the Great Depression, and two massive world wars so that we could enjoy the fruits of liberty and thrive in a land of plenty. Now look at what we have done with that.
As a people, we are just a hot mess. Emotional support animals, ubiquitous anxiety medication, and a fixation on our mental well-being would have seemed otherworldly in eras past. That is because we now finally have the luxury of fretting with such stuff. On the American frontier, if some effeminate mountain man struggled unduly with his emotional state something would just eat him.
My Role Model
My maternal grandfather went by Pappy. He was born in 1901 in rural Mississippi. Pappy was a natural storyteller. I like to hope that perhaps I inherited a bit of that. One of his many compelling tales involved some early-American frontier justice.
Pappy worked as a clerk with the railroad. Steam-powered railroads were the primary means of moving people and goods around the country back then. The railroad depot typically served as the commercial center of a small community. As a result, they also kept cash.
America is much richer today than was once the case. Nowadays, you are poor if you cannot afford DoorDash. Back then, you were poor if you could not afford to eat. In such austere spaces, that cash box full of money held upstairs in the railroad depot began to look awfully inviting.
The Crime
One morning, Pappy and the station master arrived at work to find that some miscreant had scaled the gutter on the outside wall, jimmied the upstairs window, and made off with the cash box. The high sheriff was notified, and the theft duly reported. The company made that right. Then, a couple of weeks later, it happened again.
Somebody had obviously happened upon a good thing. If this criminal guy could spread his nocturnal scalings out a bit, then the local railroad would theoretically keep him in whiskey money indefinitely. However, that didn’t seem like a great idea to the curmudgeon who served as the local station master.
The Solution
Rather than post himself inside the depot for weeks on end waiting for this guy to return, the railroad official brought his side-by-side 12-bore from home and wired it to a chair. This he oriented toward the window before running a cord around to the big gun’s twin triggers. He armed this contraption every evening before locking up and going home. He did not have long to wait.
Two weeks later, my grandfather arrived for work to find a dead man sprawled out on the dirt street below. The hapless burglar had caught two full charges of buckshot to his chest. That clearly had not hurt for long.
The sheriff duly investigated and notified the proper agencies to dispose of the man’s cooling corpse. My grandfather replaced the shattered window. It never even occurred to anybody to extend the long arm of justice toward the station master who had contrived the diabolical device. If the dead man had not wanted to get shot, he shouldn’t have been trying to break into the train depot.
A Brave New World
Suffice to say, things would be adjudicated somewhat differently today. The media would no doubt fixate on the poor demised criminal’s sordid home life and dire personal state.
He might have hypothetically needed money to pay his smart phone bill or support an unfortunate drug habit. The owner of the shotgun would be roundly vilified and his response decried as criminally disproportionate. The station master would no doubt rot in jail.
By contrast, in Pappy’s day, they just buried the bad guy and moved on with their lives. Word got out that poking around the depot looking for money to steal was a bad idea, and nature found its level. This was the foundation we were built upon. This is where we came from. It remains to be seen what sort of legacy our generation leaves for those to come.