Distance = 19 Miles; People Met = 12
We returned to road walking; my knees thanked me. It’s a good sign that they recover well from a day of torture. The scenery did not suffer in the least. We traveled through a state-owned area called Lion Rocks that was truly astounding.
Lion Rocks
This was a good day for meeting people, particularly at the State Park where we stayed that evening. The managers of the park, Randy and Kathy Gould, allowed us to stay for free. Their kindness did not stop there, but more on that later.
Randy Gould, Park Manager
We camped next to three guys who were on a fishing vacation but were also hunters. They cooked us up a feast of venison, elk, home-grown lamb and salmon. I made Hiker’s Mac & Cheese, which they seemed to appreciate almost as much as we appreciated their offering. The beauty of potluck! Ernie and Paul are brothers and retired welders; Matt is a friend of theirs that worked with steel and concrete. We all had a great time that evening.
From Left to Right: Matt, Ernie, Paul
During the road walk we ran into three people about to go on an ATV jaunt. I did not get their names, but they called themselves transplanted “Floridiots,” a reference to the hanging chads of the 2000 election. We commiserated over our respective state Supreme Courts getting things right in the Florida election and preventing the takeover of private property for private development in New London, only to be overturned by the federal Supreme Court that advocates originalism and judicial restraint (evidently, only if it meets their self-interest).
They liked my message of community involvement to address the issues of Housing, Health and Hunger, but warned that it might not go over well in Utah. I wondered why, after all, I’m advocating decentralized communities tackling problems on their own rather than relying on government, corporations or other centralized institutions. They warned I’m likely to be branded as a community activist of the ACORN mode.
Hmm. That prompts me to distinguish myself from that now defunct group. I know only two facts about ACORN: they organized people to vote; undercover reporters for Fox News were convicted for illegal activities and false reporting in regards to ACORN. In other words, ACORN was likely to be nowhere near as bad as portrayed by corporate media, yet organizing people to vote is not what I’m about.
Voting serves a purpose. Our foreign policy hinges mightily upon who we vote into office. The issues of Housing, Health and Hunger are largely irrelevant to which Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, we vote into office. There are deep, systemic problems that lie behind these issues, as I reveal in my book Systems out of Balance, and we can’t expect to overturn these systemic problems by more reliance on paternal systems, either conservative or liberal. I would organize a community to hold a potluck, rather than vote, but more on that as we journey on.
