A quote: “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” ~~ Robert Frost
I’ll start with a story …
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You know they drove all us old folk out in order to burden you folks, right? You grow their food but they resent having to trade, and you staying free and all.
So many of us died along the way, but once you found us, we proved our worth. Here, girl, take these journals I’ve kept. Lots of the stuff I’ve been teaching is in there. From knitting to how to clean and cook rabbit. Wasn’t raised in the city and I feel blessed they drove me out. Doc says my time is short and I got one last mission.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license.
Cameron says: He looked at me warily, finger off the trigger but the little Derringer ready to be used against me. I looked as non threatening as possible and moved closer.
“I don’t know you so you had best tell me why you’re here before I bury you.”
“You have some banned books. I want to buy them, copy them and get them into libraries.”
“And in return?”
“Twenty gallons of real gas and ten pounds of actual meat from a cow.”
Two months later, the books were out in the wild. And he and I still do business once in while.
Lewis says: Nice ,Cameron! I love books and hope when it’s my turn to go to Beyond I have a copy of Wind in the Willows in my hand!
Clausewitz said that diplomacy was war by other means. I’d always thought that a cynical way of looking at life, that surely we could be better than that.
Yet the longer I’ve lived the more I understood the truth that lay behind those words. Conflict will always be with us, for the simple reason that we live in a finite world. Some people play the games of smiling and flattering to get you to give them what they want and think you’re doing them a favor, while others take what they want, or make you so afraid of the pain they might cause you that you’ll surrender it without a fight.
I took the diplomat’s path, and rebuilt networks of trade that our would-be overlords had destroyed in their determination to reduce us to serfdom, or the peace of the grave. But the older I get, the more I respect my brother’s choice. His face is scarred and weatherbeaten from the long years of fighting first the goons of the tyranny and then the gangs that spilled out of the cities when the transportation systems broke down. But even now he can still draw faster and shoot straighter than anyone who would thank that what’s ours is theirs.
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