There always have been and shall always be ruling elites or ruling classes.  This is an inevitability born of human nature and any attempt to make it otherwise will end in failure.  We humans are hierarchical.  Kings, administrators, and ditch diggers are vocations and all of us, whether we like it or not, have one or are somewhere (perhaps multiple somewhere’s) within the various social structures of the day.

Security is a universal constant and most of us will choose (often happily) to play a generally subordinate role in exchange for it.  For example, how many of you reading this right now have a trusted employer who makes a lot of money, but with whom you would not trade places for an instant because of the burden that employer carries?  You want a reliable paycheque, not sleepless nights.  

If we all, in one respect or another, will be led or circumscribed, then my first questions are, where in the power structures of today am I, my family, my county, my state, and my other associations?  Who would presume to lead or influence me and mine?  My next questions are to what degree am I circumscribed or led and are these limitations and influences reconcilable with my idea of myself as a free man among a free people?  

I am not a slave pulling an oar in a Phoenician galley, the striped back of the man in front of me a constant reminder to keep on’a’pullin’.  I’m fat and happy like the poorest among us.  We live in a prosperous age.

But in regards to the distribution of power and influence in the USA today, I am uneasy about a long term development that is now global, namely the growth of mega-cities or metropolises (think Nashville) and the cultural disconnect between them and the region from which they emerged and draw their strength.  

Nashville the Home of Country Music and a reflexion of the values of Tennessee is my kind of big city.  Nashville as a manor house of Progressivism that rules and despises the land between it and Atlanta?  Not so much.

M.C. Atkins