All is not lost.
The past few years have been brutal to the United States. The radical left’s long march through the institutions is now effectively complete. Starting with the government, leftists have moved through corporations, education, medicine, science, arts and God knows what else, with most of their targets cravenly capitulating to wokeness. At the left’s behest those institutions now busy themselves undoing things that once made this country a beacon to the rest of the world. These days it is understandable to gloomily perceive the United States as a giant deteriorating socialist mediocrity, no longer respected–indeed ridiculed–while a resigned populace stands by helpless.
Or so it would seem. This writer is grateful to the estimable and veteran blogger Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, for posting this Independence Day a link to a superb piece in Sean Dietrich’s blog Sean of the South, which is simply entitled Mendon, Missouri. That tiny locale is where last week an Amtrak train running at 87 mph slammed into a massive dump truck inexplicably parked at a crossing, with catastrophic results. Dietrich describes nicely two reactions that took place following the accident, the first one seeming all-too-typical to most Americans.
Reporters from national newspapers visited. They photographed, videoed and wrote. Cable news anchors wore frowny faces and mentioned the wreck, just before cutting to commercials urging elderly viewers to reverse mortgage their livers.
The second reaction was mostly ignored by our media, which typically declines reporting on Americans acting contrary to received opinion.
Throngs of ordinary townspeople arrived before first responders even knew about the crash. There were volunteers crawling out of the wallpaper.
“It was a wonderful problem to have,” said school district superintendent, Eric Hoyt, “but we probably had too many volunteers show up.”
People came from all over Chariton County, riding beat-up Silverados, ATVs or arriving on foot. They came from Sumner, Marceline, Cunningham, Brookfield and Indian Grove.
Two Boy Scout troops dutifully helped injured victims from the wreckage. Local high-schoolers were fashioning bandages out of bandannas. Old women recited the Lord’s Prayer alongside strangers in blood-stained clothes.
There were farmers, off-duty nurses, truck drivers, soccer moms, Little League coaches and grade-schoolers. They were doling out food, first aid, bottled water and, most importantly, phone chargers.
Victims were taken to local homes, fed, bathed and bandaged. Weeping passengers were embraced by rural preachers. Passengers using wheelchairs were lifted from the rubble by young men in ropers and camouflage caps.
Local schoolbus drivers transported the wounded to hospitals. Northwestern High School staff members triaged victims in the gymnasium and fed people in the cafeteria.
One resident said that Mendon didn’t feel like a 171-person town anymore. “It was like 671 people came together.”
And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.
That, dear readers, is one of the “glimmers of hope” your Tatler wrote of in an earlier post concerning our dark times, ordinary Americans. Not only do they thrive, by definition they vastly outnumber the so-called elites who paradoxically insist their cynicism and anger is the prevailing mood of the land.
It isn’t. It is however up to ordinary Americans to rise up, collectively cry “enough!” and consign the scheming and hateful anti-American elites to oblivion, which being so outnumbered ought not prove too arduous. The next step is taking back our country so “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
THE TAOS TATLER. 