I was at Cody, Wyoming.

The full history of this city is not important now.

It’s a town that prides itself on having carved itself out of the wild west frontier. There are lots of big pickups. People wear cowboy hats. Country music plays in shops. It’s like Texas, but in Wyoming.

Of course all Western states had cowboy types. But most were not cowboys. Most did not spend their lives in saddles corralling cattle. Most were farmers, hat makers, shoe makers, blacksmiths, shop keepers, freighters, miners, soldiers and a milieu of other roles far less glamorous than the mythical cowboy.

Yet they all made civilization happen in the West.

Now, you can decry the evil of Manifest Destiny. You can refer to all white people who settled out West as Indian killers. You can say a thousand things to justify erasing the memories of those who unfurled American civilization from sea to shining sea – and I’d probably disagree with all of it – but the point of this post is not specifically to address cancel culture.

My point is to talk of reality.

Life on the frontier was HARD. It was scorching or burning. It was feast or famine. It was the best and worst of times.

Thus, you couldn’t be a wuss. You had to do more than push buttons for a living.

You had to build your own cabin. You had to work your hands to the bone. You had to save every penny, and deny yourself indulgences we moderns take as essential.

And even then your homesteading efforts may fail. Even then you may end up a pauper. Even then you may end up dead in some lonesome canyon where it would take a century for another human being to find your skull.

You had to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, or go back east to a life you were escaping from. It was a life unimaginably harder than we can understand now.

One thing’s for sure… there was no place for degenerating woke ideologies decrying evils that only the brainwashed take seriously in this frighteningly decadent 21st century that seems more rooted in the digital world than the real one.

The gigantic propaganda matrix of the 21st century – consisting of Big Government, Big Tech and Mass Media – is what causes people to believe woke views of reality. The propaganda matrix is their kool-aid.

The growing insanity of woke ideologies could not exist in days before mass propaganda intruded upon every corner of our lives. It could never exist on the frontier. Radio, television, movies, video games, internet, apps, cell phones, signs, etc, constantly condition us into a false reality where people are to be mere chattel of the benevolent state.

Wyoming blizzards dropping feet of snow on your 32 degree cabin, even with a fire, would have required a deadly sober view of reality. No place nonsense. No place for crying about equity and other euphemisms.

I also say the manufactured zeal of the 21st century to erase the 19th should never make us forget to be grateful that rugged men and women braved hardships of the West to set the foundation of an infrastructure – like roads and railroads – that allows everyone to appreciate spellbinding landscapes.

Man-bun soyboys who hate guns could never have seen, or allowed others to see, the Yellowstone country. The opposite did.

They could never have allowed anyone to marvel at God’s artistry as the sun moves shadows and colors across rocky mountainous and grand canyons you can only believe by seeing. Too dangerous for wussies and cowards.

Seeing an old homesteader’s cabin from 1880 Wyoming made me think of this.