Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom Read online

  A phone call from Dad was no small thing because he had no phone—no cordless phone, no cell phone, no smart phone, tablet, laptop or any electronics period. How could anyone live in today’s world without electronics? Not only did Dad live without electronics, he lived without electricity. He had made the calls from an archaic payphone in front of the small motel in the little town of Orderville, Utah. He would make the call on his weekly trips into town from the ranch when he would pick up groceries and his mail.

  At last I could no longer brush aside his requests as foolishness. For the last year inflation had been running at 15 -20%. High inflation had caused hardship for the country with significant civil unrest, but Washington kept assuring us that things would be getting better soon. Even with the riots in Chicago and other large cities, I could not bring myself to leave San Diego and my nice paying job as a computer programmer. The stock market had been doing well even though unemployment was holding around 16%.

  “It’s all a house of cards,” Dad would say. “The stock market is being propped up by the Federal Reserve1 and the unemployment only looks as good as it does because of the job growth in government. Our government is monetizing our debt.2 It is borrowing almost 60 cents out of every dollar it spends.3 Like a snake eating its tail, this can’t last forever. We borrow money from China and other countries and then we print money out of thin air to pay them back. It’s like borrowing money from a loan shark and then paying him back with monopoly money. It doesn’t end well, son.”

  Then China announced that it would no longer buy our debt and interest rates jumped from 9% to 28% overnight. Inflation did not go hyper but rose sharply each month. The stock market started to drop and riots began in San Diego. I took vacation leave, packed a U-Haul trailer, and headed for the ranch.

  * * *

  The powerful engine of the Escalade purred into the winter’s night as my wife, Jill, slept in the seat next to me. In the back seat was Jamie, our six month old daughter and Will, our two year old son. They both slept but Jamie’s sleep was fitful with a troubling cough. The day before we left Jill had tried to get Jamie in to see our doctor but he had suddenly left town.

  The back of the Escalade, and the U-Haul trailer it towed, contained those things from our home that we now considered most valuable. Almost overnight, the priority of what was valuable had changed—photo albums, blankets, clothing, camping gear and every last can of food we had left in the house.

  Food. A twinge of guilt pulled at me. What would Dad think with me showing up at the ranch with so little food? Of course he would say nothing and in no way try to make me feel like I had let him down. But I had. How many times had he told us kids to lay up stores and supplies?

  “Make sure you can take care of yourself and do not count on things you cannot control.” Then he would add, “And make sure you are capable of protecting yourself, your family, and your property.”

  That was his way of saying you better have a gun. That window had been closed for some time now. Again, that twinge of guilt. Before our previous President had finished his last term in office, gun control was the law of the land. With the new appointments in the Supreme Court it had moved hard left. The new Court upheld the President’s executive orders, which consolidated even more power in the executive branch of government. Writing for the majority, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had paid lip homage to the Constitution and Founding Fathers while at the same time shredding the tattered document even more.

  “The genius of our Founding Fathers,” he wrote, “was to give us a living, breathing charter of government upon which each new generation may interpret for the will and benefit of the whole.”

  Living and breathing was just another way of saying, “Words mean whatever we want them to mean.” The term benefit of the whole meant “Quit talking about unalienable rights.”

  I would always push back when he would encourage me to get a gun. “Dad,” I would say, “We live in a different world than you do. The whole country lives in a different world than you do, for Pete’s sake! You are stuck back in the days when your Grandpa’s Dad rode out of Texas pushing a herd of longhorns. If he came back from the dead this ranch would look just about the same as when he died, even down to his six-shooter you still pack on your hip.”

  The Escalade droned on. We were now well into the state of Arizona. We had been climbing in elevation and had just passed the little town of Ash Fork. It was a small Highway 66 town that had been dying a slow death since the freeway had been built. Flagstaff was not far away. It would have been much faster to have taken I-15 through Las Vegas, Nevada but, like L.A., civil unrest was starting to break out there as well. To avoid that, I had chosen to take I-40 and circle around through Flagstaff. From there I would go north staying on Highway 89 which passed through Page, crossing the Colorado River at the Glen Canyon Dam. From Page, the ranch was less than an hour and a half away.

  Looking in my rear view mirror, I could see the winding lights of the cars on the freeway behind me—white headlights moving east and red taillights moving west. The country was in a state of unrest with people traveling to and fro looking for security. The warmth inside the Escalade was comforting and with a full tank of gas I would have my family to the ranch before I had to refill.

  Suddenly the lights of the Escalade blinked out as the engine died. I applied the brakes to a vehicle that had found itself in a world that had just gone dark. The rearview mirror confirmed that there were suddenly no longer white lights and red lights; there were no lights.

  The Escalade drifted to the side of the road and stopped. Jill stirred from her sleep in the seat next to me. “What’s wrong, Dan?” I did not reply. I was afraid that I knew what was wrong.

  _____________________

  1. The Federal Reserve was created in 1912 and is the central bank of the United States but is privately owned. Before the creation of the Federal Reserve the U. S. dollar increased in value. In 1912 a working man’s wages were about two dollars a day, with which he could feed a family. Since the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1912 the dollar has lost more than 95% of its value. When Andrew Jackson was President (1829 -1837) he defeated the attempt to create a central bank and got the United States out of debt. It took from Andrew Jackson in 1837 to 2008 to run up 9 trillion dollars in debt. In that period of time we had a civil war, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Under President Obama from 2009 to 2014 the national debt increased from 9 trillion to over 18 trillion.

  2. Monetizing the debt, in simple terms, means we print our own money to pay our own debt.

  3. In 2013 the United States Government was borrowing 43 cents of every dollar it spent

  Chapter 3

  CAT

  January 27th

  The snow was starting to fall a little faster and more than an inch was on the ground. The bushes were wet from the snow, soaking my pants as I walked through them. I was cold.

  The gold watch on my left wrist was a gift from Mom and I looked at it. It was 2:20 A.M. Following the power lines, the last ridge that I had crossed was a mile back. When I crossed that ridge I had descended into the wide Rio Puerco valley and was now topping its west ridge. The lights of Albuquerque, which had disappeared from view when I had descended into the valley, were now reappearing and twinkled in the distance.

  I was close, I knew I was close. Un-slinging my bug-out-bag from over my head, I set it in the shallow snow. Pulling my flashlight from its side pocket, I began casting the beam across the ground south of the power line.

  There it was! The spot I was looking for. A lone cedar tree, weathered by time, clung to a small rocky outcropping. Beyond the tree was a large hollow area. Close to the center of the hollow was a small bump the size of a soft ball.

  Walking to the bump I kicked it and a rusty tin can was exposed from below the snow. The tin can was both marker and digging device. Kneeling down, I started digging. I was grateful the ground was not yet hard frozen. Within eigh
t inches I hit the first five gallon bucket. In a moment I had all four of them uncovered and sitting on the snow. I had been shivering for a good while but now it was starting to become uncontrollable. My light tennis shoes as well as the bottom of my jeans were soaked from the snow. The bottoms of my pants were starting to harden as the moisture in them began to freeze. I began to worry. There were some dead cedar limbs lying on the ground by the tree. They were wet and covered with snow. Starting a fire in this weather, shaking as I was, was going to be impossible with the lighter from my bug-out-bag. Hypothermia was closing in upon me. I needed external heat.

  Taking the first bucket, I turned it upside down, emptying the contents on the snow. They were not in this bucket. Emptying the second one, I found them—two road flares. Waterproof and a burn time of 15 minutes each.

  With foresight that comes from time and experience, Dad had placed them in the buckets several years ago. I had been there helping him. “Cat,” he said to me, “There are times when getting a fire going is the difference between life and death. In those situations a person is often as wet as the wood he is trying to light. This road flare will burn long enough to dry your wood and start it burning.”

  Stumbling to the foot of the cedar tree, I lit the flare and its red flames crackled to life. I did not appreciate the fact that the light gave away my position to any fool who also might be wandering around in the dark at 2:30 in the morning but that was not to be helped. Breaking the smallest branches from the dead limb, I started laying them on the flare and soon had a good blaze going. The third bucket had a good goose down bedroll that was placed inside a camo covered Gore-Tex liner. Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex was waterproof but still breathed and it would keep me from the wet snow. I pulled the sleeping bag from the liner and laid the liner on the snow next to the fire. Pulling off my wet jeans, I sat down cross legged on the liner and wrapped the bedroll around me and over my head. This left my legs exposed to the warmth of the flames. Finally, after a half hour of warming I quit the violent shaking.

  As the heat seeped into me and the shivering subsided, my body started to relax. I started to drift in and out of sleep and my mind returned to Mom. It did not seem real. Yet there on my hands was her dried blood. Quiet tears started running down my cheeks. My world was changing fast. The comfort and security that filled my youth was taking wings of flight. With comfort and security departing, I had to admit, I was scared. But something remained. Hope. Hope remained and I clung to it. Hope that I would make it home to the ranch. Hope that I would see my brother and sisters. Hope that I would again see my father. That he would hug me in his reassuring arms, comfort my aching heart and make my world right once more.

  My eyelids were just closing when a brilliant and blinding flash of light filled the whole of the sky. The clouds and falling snow for a moment were as plain to see as if it were mid-day. Turning my head towards the city of Albuquerque I saw a tremendous pillar of smoke rise up with a mushroom cloud on top of it. I could tell it was coming from Luke Air Force Base.

  The fearful energy of a hydrogen bomb rolled out from under the mushroom cloud.

  In unbelief, I stared as all the remaining electric lights of the city blacked out. In seconds I felt and heard the rumble and roar of the atomic explosion. My desperate little camp was more than twelve miles from the impact of the bomb and beyond the blast radius. If I had thought my world had been changing fast it now changed at the speed of light.

  Chapter 4

  DAN

  January 27th

  Growing up and with every vacation trip I had made back to the ranch over the years, Dad would have something he wanted to teach me and my siblings. He was a reading man. His library was extensive, from the old classics to the latest political book. Then there were the revolving stacks of weekly periodicals. He would have us all gather together in the great room of the rock home.

  If it was winter, he would build a fire in the large rock fireplace. Then, by the light of an old kerosene lamp, he would pull up his old wood rocker and read to us. As kids, sometimes we listened and sometimes we lay on the floor playing with small toys.

  From the old world, he would read to us from the works of Aristotle to John Locke. From the new world, he would read from the writings of the Founding Fathers to the latest books by conservative political writers. For fun he would throw in a western novel.

  It did not matter from what wide array of literature he would read from, he always started with the Bible. Besides the four Gospels in the New Testament, he loved the writings of the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel.

  As an adult and starting my own family, I had found it increasingly hard to listen to him. More and more he would talk about freedom and how those freedoms were being eroded away in this great land. He always sounded so doomsday-ish.

  Now I was sitting in the dark, in a car that did not run, in a forest with snow falling. This definitely had a doomsday-ish feel to it.

  One of Dad’s contentions had been that, as bad as radical Islam and the caliphate were, they were not the major external threat to our country. They were useful puppets of Russia and China, but the caliphate did not have the nuclear arsenal and war machine of the super powers.

  “Communism, fascism, socialism and radical Islam cannot peacefully co-exist with freedom,” he would say.

  “The economic principles of communism, fascism and socialism are false and cannot sustain themselves. The state run capitalism of Russia and China is nothing more than a reshuffling of the old communist leaders who traded military uniforms for business suits.

  “When our economy starts to fail, theirs will too. At some point the super powers will have to become predatory to their neighbors. They will prey upon their neighbors in order to keep power and survive.

  I looked out the window of the Escalade into the darkness. Without the car heater running, the temperature inside began to drop quickly.

  China, Russia or radical Islam, it didn’t matter. Someone had hit our country with a nuclear strike. It had to be a nuclear strike or at least an EMP bomb.1 It was the only thing that could cause all cars to shut off at once. At least that is what Dad had said.

  Jill remained quiet in the seat next to me while I thought. What else had Dad said?

  “… Dan Bonham, when our country gets hit it will be a massive nuclear ‘first strike’ by Russia and China.2 They are not going to waste just a single EMP strike on us, even by proxy of radical Islam. If they were going to seize the economic engines of Europe and Asia they must first render America inert. They will use a potent concoction of nuclear missile strikes coordinated between the two countries. They will target most of our military bases and much of the power production in our country. And, of course, they will use several well-spaced EMPs.”

  EMP, an electrical magnetic pulse bomb, detonated in the atmosphere over our country would take out every electronic circuit in the bomb’s line of sight. That had to be why there were no lights and why my cell phone would not turn on.

  I still did not want to believe it, but it was getting colder in the car and it was dark everywhere.

  Sitting there, wasting time, I thought of the arguments I had with Dad.

  “That is never going to happen.” I would say. Then he would start with all the reasons it could.

  “Listen Dan, your government is lying to you and our media is keeping us in the dark. Russia and China are combining to take down our country economically and militarily.

  “Did you know that Russia now has 32 stealth destroyers that can get close enough to our aircraft carriers undetected and sink them?

  “We have removed our missile defenses from Europe and changed our nuclear doctrine. Under Bill Clinton it was changed from launch upon warning to launch after receiving a first strike.3 Not only that, Bill Clinton sold to the Chinese our missile technology that made their intercontinental missiles much more accurate.

  “No one is listening to China’s generals. They speak all the time about
open warfare with America and using a preemptive nuclear strike. It’s in their military doctrine.”

  I could not help but turn the key to the Escalade one more time. Nothing.

  There were only two cuss words you would hear once and awhile at the ranch, damn and hell. I chose the first and swore softly under my breath, “Damn, damn, damn, why didn’t I leave yesterday!”

  “Honey,” the tone of worry distinct in Jill’s voice. “What happened, what’s wrong?”

  “We’re not making it to the ranch tonight. We are not going to get there anytime soon and it’s going to be on foot when we do. Let’s get moving.”

  That thought, move, always move forward. Those were my Dad’s words and they brought comfort to me. I knew the staggering task that suddenly lay before me. Wife, small child, infant, these I must take over three hundred miles on foot in the face of a coming winter storm, but I was my father’s son.

  Though I had come to disagree with him as an adult on these issues, there were many good memories from my youth. The memories of my upbringing in the back hills of southern Utah came flooding back to me—memories of ranching, camping and hunting. Those memories brought me hope because I had been given a lifetime of survival skills by a father, a father who made his children a priority in his life, one who never missed a chance to teach and guide them.

  Jill exited the Escalade and went to the back of the U-Haul. I grabbed the Maglite from under the seat as I got out. The darkness was eerie. The pine trees loomed tall and a cold breeze moved their branches and I shivered. . The shiver was not all from the cold but also from the dark picture that lay before me. It was a picture that would give any father a chill.

  I met Jill back at the U-Haul.

  “Jill, we can take only those things we can pack on our backs. We must streamline things to the bare essentials.”