{"id":104501,"date":"2019-08-05T12:39:03","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T16:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=104501"},"modified":"2019-08-15T12:02:29","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T16:02:29","slug":"column-a-confederate-yankee-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=104501","title":{"rendered":"COLUMN: A Confederate Yankee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Bill Mayers<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

El Paso massacre hits\nclose to home<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This one hits really close. I spent many a day there. Biggs Air\nForce Base. Fort Bliss. The Lincoln Street bridge over the Rio Grande, which\nwas often mere puddles. I’d walk across that bridge to visit Ciudad Juarez,\nshopping for fine wines, cheap whiskey – often bottled in the U.S. and sold in\nthat Mexican town for a third or less what it cost north of the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

El Paso High was Las Cruces High’s sworn enemy on the gridiron,\noften slapping the crap out of our Bulldogs. We always grabbed ’em by the\nshoulder pads after a game and rejoiced in a game well-played; they\nreciprocated in kind. And often as not, you’d hear congratulatory remarks in Spanish\n– half the guys on both teams spoke it fluently. Me. not so much – besides, I\nwas kinda caught up in (ahem) admiring the brown-skinned cheerleaders from both\nvenues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Las Cruces was a short 40-minute drive north of El Paso. That\nwas our version of “the big city,” but most of all, these were people\nlike us. We got along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Texans have accumulated firearms since before it was a state. So’d\nwe. My first was a single-shot .22 rifle. Knocked off a few jackrabbits with\nthat, but did better with a 20-gague bolt-action shotgun. Graduated to a 16-gauge\nand then got my first “serious” rifle, a surplus British Enfield\nbolt-action in .303 caliber. Ya put a round through that, you knew it meant\nbusiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A buddy managed to save enough to buy a surplus B.A.R. That\nsucker was impressive! We didn’t shoot it often. Rounds were expensive when\nyour pay rate was .75 cents an hour. But that sucker impressed the hell out of\nus when you could fire off rounds as fast as you could pull the trigger. That\nand my Enfield got loads of attention, even when we couldn’t afford ammo. We’d\nsit and put the things through a complete cleaning \u2013 oiling’em up and all that \u2013\nthen put’em in the rack almost reverently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes we’d fantasize how we’d use’em to respond to an\ninvasion of the good ol’ USA by Russians. But use them to blow away fellow\nAmericans? Oh, hell no! Not in Las Cruces, not in El Paso. Yeah, some few of\nour neighbors looked askance at those who spoke another language … even more\nso at our Native American neighbors. The area had been home to them for\ncenturies. But they were neighbors. We interacted with them, rarely bothering\nthat they were different. We all had the same needs, goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, they could have been talking about us Caucasians in their\npreferred language, but what the hell? We didn’t care what they called us, just\nso long as they didn’t call us late for lunch when we had a community\nget-together. That wasn’t a frequent occurrence, but still…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what the hell? Where has this recent madness come from? What\ndo these boneheads think they’ll solve by blowing away a bunch of people at\nrandom? And has the attitude out of the nation’s Capitol had any influence on\nall this? I think it has. And I think we need to rid this country of Donald\nTrump and as many of his supporters as we possibly can, as quickly as we can. God\ndamn it, those folks in El Paso are my kinds of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened made me physically ill. And, at risk of pissing off\na few people, I insist we need much stricter gun control. No American civilian\nneeds a military-style long gun with the capacity to fire off dozens of rounds\nin mere seconds; freak it \u2013 if ya can’t hit your target in five rounds or less,\ntake up golf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor\u2019s note:\nWilliam Mayers of Sullivan is a retired senior U.S. Army Corpsman. A certified\nhealthcare professional since 1964, he holds two professional licenses,\nincluding that of Registered Professional Nurse licensed in New York, Alaska,\nVirginia and Louisiana. He is the father of three and avid analyst of current\nevents.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

El Paso massacre hits close to home This one hits really close. I spent many a day there. Biggs Air Force Base. Fort Bliss. The Lincoln Street bridge over the Rio Grande, which was often mere puddles. I’d walk across that bridge to visit Ciudad Juarez, shopping for fine wines, cheap whiskey – often bottled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23677,23808,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion","category-top-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43meu-rbv","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/bill-mayers.jpg?fit=226%2C313&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}