The acts of defiance

Win or lose elections, they haven't broken the will of all of us yet.

This will make for a good draw on social media.

Something struck me about the subject of this photo when I hurried by it Monday morning, and by the time I got back by there in the evening it was too dark to snap a picture. So I took a moment to photograph this as the sun came up yesterday morning, frosty as it was on the outskirts of Delaware on Route 54.

Since I hadn’t seen the tractor and flag there before, I’m led to believe the farmer placed it there over the weekend as a reaction to election results he didn’t agree with. Or maybe he was pleased with them and just wanted to remind us all that we are all still Americans. It looked like an act of defiance to me, that’s for sure.

We are now a week and a day beyond an election that shocked all of us because the results weren’t what many of us were led to believe they would be. Because of that, my feed and social media are rife with claims and counterclaims about what should be done, whose heads should roll, and so on and so forth. But the question I pause now to ask is this: how much did the results of this election affect your daily life?

In answering this, I will grant that on a macro scale, elections do sometimes matter. As an example, our gas prices are higher because of decisions we as a nation made in 2020, and higher gas prices have led to increased inflation as well as huge quarterly profits for the oil companies. Those profits are transient, though, while the inflation may stick around for awhile. It makes things more of a struggle than perhaps they were a couple-three years ago.

But in the overall scheme of things it shouldn’t really matter who wins an election because you are still (more or less) in charge of your life. Unless Uncle Sam or your locality has you under lock and key, you’re still as free as you can be in a nation where the average person commits three felonies a day yet walks away scot-free because no one was there to enforce those regulations. I may have done unspeakable things like share the truth (or the Gospel) within my house, but that little act of insubordination toward government hasn’t caught up to me yet - even though they may be spying on me via my laptop’s camera or my cell phone.

Perhaps John Cougar Mellencamp fights authority and authority always wins, but remember - he’s “been doing it since I was a young kid/And I come out grinnin’.” I think we all need a dose of that philosophy right now, and if anyone knows that it might be the guy who’s been blogging for over seventeen years and has been confused for a Libertarian on many occasions by the “party over everything” subgroup of the Republican Party. Conformity just isn’t my strong suit.

Monday must have been a seminal day. Not only did I see that tractor, but then I was doing my reading to write my weekly article in The Patriot Post and I came across a nice whack upside the head of what’s considered authority by a writer named Joel Abbott, at that serious scholarly publication known as Not the Bee.

True conservatism… starts with telling our children and our communities why investing in marriage, families, faithfulness, and obedience to God's designs is actually the most exciting and adventurous thing we could ever imagine – and that it gives them the identity and belonging they so deeply crave.

Explain to them how investing in population growth, individual liberty, and financial responsibility is actually the quickest and most moral route to taking care of the environment and protecting against fascism. (I didn’t do the emphasis, he did.)

Oh my gosh, you wanna talk about a thumb to the eye of The Man? Turning our backs on the hookup culture, the DINKs, consumerism, and the secular world by going the traditional, slow and steady route to prosperity and maintaining liberty that’s worked for generations? That’s rebellion talk right there, but without the Confederate flag. (A Christian flag will certainly suffice.)

But in a pinch I’ll accept an American flag placed defiantly on a tractor out in God’s country, the backbone of America. It made my Monday morning and hopefully my little pep talk makes your Wednesday.