Liberty's Horizon

Even our low scholarship in Botany is enough to suggest that the flag did not by nature emerge from the tree's limb. It strikes us as a gesture of independence from or opposition to accepted mainstream thought. This took some thought and effort toward visibility and permenance

We love the open road, the uncluttered winding paths of both the old and familiar, the new and exciting. These are the roads less taken along which no two houses are identical nor are the families inside of them. As mass culture takes us for that last ride it will be upon the interstate highway system upon which every one in every car and every mile is about the same.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Those words first spoken not by whom you think, but by Thomas Paine. There is a great movement upon the land, a single minded tidal wave of following which overruns the levies today. There isn't much room for independent thinking or varied voice in such an elemental force. It has gone from polemics to physics so those cards are no longer in the deck. As Dickens begins, these may be "the best of times, the worst of times ."

Paine again warns, "When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." This we post on a large regulation DOT yellow warning sign along the way.

Yet again Paine instructs, " Lead, follow or get out of the way ." To lead suggests that one must take charge, perhaps alter or oppose the movement. The second choice is to fall in and follow the mob. We choose door number three: we're getting off at the next exit. We're neither for it nor agin' it, but getting out of its way and hoping against hope that it will work.