Leave us alone

Carolyn Hileman

Black top roads, one lane wooden bridges, not the fancy kind either, old wood barn, cows meandering in pastures. We have running water, electricity and we have pride, it takes a lot to live out in the country, where it is a twenty minute drive just to get up town, but it is where we want to be and a bulldozer couldn’t move us. We are the small town, backwoods rednecks that live and breathe the clean country air. Aren’t much on suits, just for funerals and Sunday morning, but we do own a pair of yard jeans and a pair of work jeans and we know there is a difference. Here we revere our old and raise our young the same way we were taught, we take care of our parents when they are told old to do for themselves the same way they took care of us.

We still bake cookies and take them to the new folks, bake a whole meal when a neighbor is down, and congregate at peoples homes after they have laid a loved one down. A lot of things have changed over the years and a lot of things have remained the same, like you don’t wear your Sunday best to the fishing hole and you look in on Grandmother before you go home. Recently there has been a lot of talk about being our brother’s keeper and needing a bill to make sure we are, but some of us don’t need a piece of paper to tell us what the right thing to do is, we have been doing it for years. You have probably seen us on TV, you know the ones they say are paid loud mouths and Nazi’s, but we aren’t, we are just like everyone else it is just that we don’t much care for strangers coming to our parents or Grandparents discussing the end of their lives.

Raised on greens and Sunday sermons, prayers at meals and any other time we need them, we have managed for years to take care of our own. Now suddenly this smooth talking, well dressed man is going to come into our living room uninvited and tell us how to run things, he is going to preach to us, cajole us into doing things his way and we just do not take to kindly to people butting in. We may not have his education, may not have been the places he has been, or done the things he has done, we may not walk around wearing a suit all day but we know the value of every single human life. We know that we would not be here if it were not for the elderly that he says cause the deficit and that there will be no future if we kill all the babies.

All we ask for is to be left alone, if we need you, we will let you know, but they can’t or won’t do it. You cannot put a price tag on the human spirit; you cannot define merely by age how much a person is capable of, there is wisdom within those old lips and possibilities in that fetus and we know to appreciate them before they are gone. You can go ahead and send out your bill as some of us still have outhouses but do not expect that we a free people will honor or abide by it. We do not need your idea of how life should be, we have a life the way we want it, and we will fight to keep it so you might want to keep him busy, perhaps there is still a country he hasn’t apologized to. We are asking, no on second thought we are telling you to leave us alone.

Carolyn Hileman is the owner/operator of The Voice Website
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