Child’s Garden of AnimalsVictor Davis Hanson The Great Circle When I had three of my own free rangers in the early 1980s, there were even more houses on the farm, perhaps economically a bad idea to bring more of a family onto a farm without increasing its acreage. Our young triad would visit their cousins […]
Victor Davis Hanson More of the Harder Sort My great-uncle, my grandmother’s brother was one of the harder ones we saw on the free-range circuit. He grew up one of 12 siblings, impoverished, and rode a horse at 13 from New Mexico to Selma, California. His family, after a variety of tragedies, was destitute. And
Child’s Garden of AnimalsVictor Davis Hanson The Softer and the Harder What an array of tutorials we received from the scores of relatives and friends we met free ranging! Beldon was the disabled Philippine war vet. He spoke so softly as to be almost not understandable. He had a heavy bike with a rubber horn
Victor Davis Hanson A Merry-go-Round of Merry People My parents wisely worked in town and outsourced us to the farm both to work and to be watched while they worked. We took the bus and got off at our farmhouse at 3 PM, and most days were alone and free until 6 when my mother
Victor Davis Hanson Set Loose About a decade ago I came across the old cattle term “free ranging”—but now curiously applied to child-raising. It had grown in popularity in antithesis to the “helicopter parenting” of Tiger Moms. The retro idea was that rural folk (I’m not sure free ranging would be viable among 21st-century suburbanites),
Victor Davis Hanson The Border, RIP, Continued… Note well: That after years of acrimony, and the unhinged charges that Donald Trump was recreating Auschwitz on the border (i.e., reusing the “cages” built by Barack Obama), Trump by late summer 2020 at last had mostly ended illegal immigration. He replaced hundreds of miles of porous border
Victor Davis Hanson The Border, RIP The rise of the modern state is synonymous with ideas of identifiable and secure borders within which a consensual society can set their own laws, inculcate and nourish unique customs and traditions, and ensure that a special space is secure for its people. Without borders, we are mere tribal
Victor Davis Hanson 2. The War on Gasoline and Diesel. The Democratic primary field of 2020 mostly demagogued energy. Each candidate sought to outdo a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, promising to cancel pipelines, stop new federal leases, shut down ANWR, embrace the New Green Deal, leverage financial agencies not to lend to frackers and
Victor Davis Hanson One day Americans will look back at the nightmare of the last two years—COVID, the lockdowns, the riots, the 102 million mail-in ballots, the Biden catastrophe, the utter lawlessness, and the woke revolution—and properly understand it as one of the strangest and most dangerous periods in their modern history. The toll will
Victor Davis Hanson How Did It All Go to Hell—So Quickly? Where such pessimism? I have been abroad for ten days and trying to see America as others do not in America and talk and listen to them. And the observers are bewildered, as if our country is committing a two-year suicide. I confess too