Snow This Weekend...

...here at the Secret Hidden Bunker in the Rocky Mountains. I would say that impending white stuff has thrown me into a blue funk, but in truth I'm already in a funk. I despair about the state of the country, the election, my apparently permanent virus/head cold, a travel schedule that passed sane a few weeks back, blah blah blah.

Yes, I have the best job in the world...yes, I wouldn't change with anyone...but I worry about what my job will look like in a European-style Socialist America. In 8 years, the end of the second Obama term, will I be railing against "knife and bludgeon control?" Posting blogposts on exciting shooting events for your one allowed .22 rifle? Explaining the "new" rules of self-defense that allocate all violence to the state and prohibit any reaction that might lead to the harming of an individual, even if that individual is mugging you?

Will our hunting shows all focus on the gentry's visits to expensive hunting preserves, far out of the reach of the likes of you and I? Will we have to be careful to remain politically correct in all things, being sure to give animal rights crusaders, now with friends in very high places, their own shows as well? Will we see all public lands posted to shooting and hunting, shooting ranges zoned out of existence, shooting and hunting on private lands regulated until it no longer exists?

Will young people, most of whom will have seen firearms only in increasingly violent first-person shooter games, be thoroughly sick and tired of hearing us "old-timers" talk about practical shooting, about AR-15s, about concealed carry, about being able to walk into a gun store and actually be able to choose from among hundreds of guns?

We we learn to live like today's Europeans live...on our knees? Will we learn just the right way to turn our heads and look at the ground when asked for our papers, please? Will we learn to see the cameras as our friends, the public speakers that shout at us for real or imagined social trangressions as thoughtful helpers, the late-night knock on the door as something that always happens to somebody else, who probably deserved it?

Will we get used to the confiscatory tax rates, the income redistribution that rewards sloth and punishes success, the cradle-to-grave government care that smothers our will and our initiative, the medical triage that defines who lives and who dies? Will we object when our own requests for medical care are turned down because we're too old, too disabled, too something? Will we even know when the state decides to pull the plug for our own good, with the best of intentions and the deepest compassion?

Sigh...it's just the cold medication...after all, what could possibly happen in such a short span of 8 years? It's not like the Reich rose in...no, that doesn't work...or like Beirut went from being the "Paris of the Middle East" to a hellish no man's land...nope, that doesn't work either. Yugoslavia? The USSR? Any country in Africa?

Never mind...I'll go take a nap and be my normal cheery self by the afternoon.