WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS

I can hear the river calling. It doesn’t have to call loudly because I live close. In Missouri, everyone lives close to a river. Mine is the Meramec. Spring fed and clear it runs out of the Ozark Hills to the Mississippi. It’s a good place to swim, fish, hunt and think. Today, I’m thinking about rivers and people.

Even though they have different natures the rules that govern them have a lot in common.

It seems like we can’t leave rivers alone. The history of man is the history of rivers and our attempt to subdue them and harness their power. Sometimes we get it right. We play by the river’s rules. We use them in ways in harmony with their nature. We follow their rules because we are on their turf, so to speak. We let the river choose its path and work within it. We may build mills or farm the land but we do it within the laws that govern the river. If we want to live in peace with the river and profit from it we have to do it on the river’s terms, or else we will fail. Maybe not right away; but the river always wins; unless we make it something other than a river.

You see, that’s the problem with us. If we can’t control something we will do anything, even destroy it, to gain control. The Missouri river is a prime example. It’s been straightened, channelized, narrowed, dammed and dredged. We put in who knows how many wing dikes and levees. We had to control it. We needed to be its master. Now it is really a river in name only, a glorified storm water drainage canal in reality; but we still can’t control it. Not completely anyway. It still floods.

If you live by rivers long enough you soon learn that the one absolute rule of rivers is that they’re going to flood. All it takes is rain. This is an immutable part of their nature. We cannot change it no matter how hard we try. We think we can control it with levees and sandbags and water pumps. Sometimes we do, but really only if the river lets us. The river will always get back what belongs to it. It will consume the bottoms that it and it alone has claim to, washing away all of our petty attempts to claim them for ourselves. In just a matter of minutes the river can destroy years of work and dreams. It can destroy it because it has the right, because we intruded into its space, because we didn’t play by its rules; by God’s rules.

Mans history is also the history of our efforts to control others.

Just like rivers, we function inside a set of rules. These rules suit our nature. When those that govern us, by our authority, govern within these rules society functions smoothly. When the rules are respected we are able to work, create and play as we were intended.

Our government has decided that the rules that were intended to govern man place too many restrictions on their ability to control us. They’ve begun to build levees and wing dikes, to dam and to dredge. They think that if they can control our flow with limits on speech we won’t be able to argue against their unconstitutional abuse of power. They think that through eminent domain they can take our property to do with as they please. They can take away our right to privacy through wiretaps and monitoring internet traffic. They can intimidate and scare us so that we won’t exercise the freedom to say what we want when we want. They can limit our ability to defend ourselves and the means to do so. They limit our freedom to worship when and where we see fit. Where we can work, what we can do, which doctor we can see and for what, what our labor is worth and how much is really ours and how much belongs to the state. They will change our nature to control us. They would destroy us.

They have put themselves in the place of God, deciding how the game will be played.

But now, the rains have started; the river is beginning to rise. As long as it continues to rain, the river will continue rise. It will swell over the levees and the dams; it will inundate the bottoms. It will take back all that God intended it to have. Nature will be restored to its proper order. Those that would sit in Gods place will be swept away along with all of the other dead and rotting debris.

The river always gets back what belongs to it.