When Someone Gets Eaten by a Bear, You Take Care of Their Family

Man this country is really messed up. Back in my day, when a person was disemboweled by a ferocious member of the ursine family, you did all you could to mitigate their loss to their close kin. If they needed someone to take the trash out, you came over and did it. If the gutters needed unclogged, you had no problem doing it for them. If their spouse needed some servicing, you did it, regardless of sex. But now the government is all involved. Now the community can't care of families that have lost someone due to the insatiable appetite of carnivorous predators. And that's something we just can't have.

In my day (which was hundreds of years ago, to be honest) when an apple farmer fell out of a tree and broke his leg, the whole community rallied together to pick the harvest. Everyone put on their best pair of overalls and picked up their bushel baskets and got together and did some hard work. Old Johnny Appleseed would look the other way, of course, while the community drank all of his cider and hauled most of his crop back to their homes for fermenting. Everyone was a drunk back then. But the harvest got picked. A man's livelihood was saved. And the government didn't have one thing to do with it.

We need to go back to those times, hundreds of years ago in the past. Never mind that close-knit, self-dependent rural communities do not exist in the same way as they did in my idealized past. Life isn't a Wendall Berry novel, unfortunately. I still think we should rely on the charity of others, like those nice young methheads that live down the street from me. I like to think that, god forbid, I was eaten by bears, they would come by and make sure the kids got to school on time. We can't count on the government to send our children to school. Come to think of it, we can't count on it to educate our children, either. The community should perform that task as well. Really, there's nothing the community can't do for you. I guess that's communism, though, ain't it? Christ, where am I going with this?

I just want everybody to know that if you get eaten by a ferocious, rabid bear, I will do my best to raise your family. I'll take them to ball games and give them scraps under the table. The government will have nothing to do with it, as you would have wished. I hope you will do the same for me.