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ORIGINAL: cordilleran

Nineteenth Century western expansion is truly the story of strong people taking a chance. Those of inferior stock stayed behind choosing to linger back east with its own unique predictability. I suspect a large percentage of ancestral descendents currently reside in the urban sprawl content with the myriad problems associated with living in contemporaneous urban bedlam. When one extracts an artifact from the west coast dating from the late 1840s through the 1850s it speaks volumes of the fortitude of folks who "bet it all" on a dream. The fence-straddlers, on the other hand, remained in their safe bouroughs lacking initiative. These Woody Allen types had little more to discuss daily other than hangnails, rising tax rates and the infrequency of oysters on the half shell. The same phenomenon plays out cross-culturally with the geographic locations of the Southern Paiute (digger indian). Strong-willed and deliberate Amerindian nations such as the Ute to the east, Shoshone and Nez Perce (to the north) and Navaho and Apache to the south of the Paiute, forced these digger indians to live a beggarly life of subsistance eating insects and living in the dirt. They lacked ambition (fight) and as such were relegated to a place no one else would choose to inhabit. Today, the southern Paiute reservation encompasses less than two city blocks in Cedar City, Utah, and the handful of inhabitants quest for little more than a government-sponsored subsistence lifestyle. I can further draw distinctions between peoples as diverse as the Nederlanders, Hottentots and Obama supporters.

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ORIGINAL: cyberdigger

Cord, your interpretation of east coast life is insultingly narrow-minded.. those of "inferior stock" created things like.. Manhattan, for example.. I'm not going to insult anyone who went west, other than to point out that not all of them were the noble type.. many went west to escape justice, exploit and plunder.

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ORIGINAL: cordilleran

Nineteenth Century western expansion is truly the story of strong people taking a chance.
folks who "bet it all" on a dream.

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ORIGINAL: Antiquenut

As far as bottles go....If I had all the money in the world,I would still dig for the thrill of a new discovery and the puzzle of what kind of people lived there before me,what they did and what their life must have been like.CALDIGR2,your bottles may be newer but the history of the Gold miners,cowboys and gunfighters and ship Captains,to mention just a few,is just as or more exciting than the rest of the country.I would love to have a piece of ghost town history or sunken ship booty that I dug or found myself. I will keep seeking the next whole container while fighting hordes of flies,keeping an eye out for wild animals,busting my back,and sweating a river in humidity and storms while dreaming of that next better bottle or jar.

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antiquebottlediggers.com

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I am not worthy

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ORIGINAL: cordilleran

I'm glad I got your attention. Fact is, education and intelligence are not mutually inclusive.

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ORIGINAL: cordilleran

I'm glad I got your attention. Fact is, education and intelligence are not mutually inclusive. God forbid that a person has both and experiential knowledge beyond the pale, to boot, they find themselves on the outside looking in. Here's where things get unsavory. As a lifelong searcher I have witnessed the closing of the American mind. No longer are U.S. campuses a place of free inquiry and thought. As indoctrination centers, colleges and universities have devolved into think tanks for a very narrow interpretation of reality. With numerous laurels a person of my standing is persona non grata. With my numerous degrees and professional accolades and a dollar bill (plus tax) I am afforded the opportunity to slake my thirst on a cup o' java. So much for diversity and tolerance, mere buzz words for those intent on shackling free minds and free will. We can rally around the banyan tree and sing the praises of democracy, but when entire peoples are subjugated and disenfranchized based on their race and sex, then a cauldron of disenchantment is the soup de jour. Oppression, however, is an equal opportunity destroyer. If you haven't been touched by the growing miasma seeping into collective consciousness you will. Forget emotion, forget social propriety, go ahead and forget those treasured baubles and long-term dreams. Many already have. We are moving into a period of history never realized before. Call it the Dark Ages Redux. Let me be so brazen as to extrapolate on the immediate future. When the foundations butressing civilization give way, civilization collapses. Four elements constitute civilization: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. Civilization begins where chaos and insecurity end. Currently, we live in an age of uncertainty as never before. Unlike the most recent cataclysmic conflict, World War Two, we neither know the enemy or fear that the enemy is living next door. The greatest triumph during this great upheaval is that people were unified for the common good. There is an underlying sense of hostility punctuating the people in their daily discourse. Civility has taken a back seat in the bus and today, people have been divided to the point of near anarchy. Moral tradition has been thrown out the window as so much bathwater along with the infant comprising our greatest strengths. As I touched upon earlier, the pursuit of knowledge has been severely curtailed by anarchist gatekeepers and what passes for art is politically motivated. The leftist powers-that-be recognize this and have effectively infiltrated mass communications, public education and yes, even traditional houses of religious worship. When a person is bombarded with politically charged propaganda day after day, he or she begins to believe the propoganda as truth. Such is the power of real-time propaganda and political division yields to the one voice mantra. Economic division is easily solved in the totalitarian construct -- make everyone needy. Universal health care is but one venue toward this end. Of course in theory universal health care sounds attractive. In reality the incentive for quality health care goes out the window with the baby and higher costs with a lottery system of healthcare becomes the norm. Need cancer treatment? Take a place at the back of the bus. Funny how I fought against such oppression as a soldier. Moreover, it is ironic that my father and my father's father -- all socially upstanding men -- fought in great wars to prohibit the insidious scourge of absolute oppression from poisoning the peoples of foreign lands and here we are weighing the merits of socialism. In closing let me say that when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life. Stop being afraid, speak your mind and throw off the ever-tightening shackles before a few stalwart souls have to shed their brave blood for the collective good of the masses.