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Pine Nuts: Our history in three minutes

McAvoy Layne
Pine Nuts

Native Americans first arrived here twenty five thousand and six years ago. I’m confident of that figure because a Sierra Nevada College history teacher told me, “25,000 years ago,” and that was six years ago.

They crossed from Siberia to Alaska on a bridge; don’t ask who built the bridge … God maybe. They were happy here until a white man poked his nose inside a teepee, and well, you can only imagine the surprise. Privacy was suddenly a thing of the past.

These newly arrived Europeans thought the Native Americans were uneducated because they didn’t speak English, so did they send them to college? No, they chased them off the reservation.



Meanwhile, these newly arrived immigrants considered old King George to be a milk-livered coxcomb, and told him so. George sent an army to quash these haughty ingrates, but George’s army made the mistake of wearing bright red coats and got slaughtered.

America’s immigrants went to work writing up a Declaration of Independence, and made George Washington their president. George was a good leader and had wooden teeth, I don’t know why. Maybe his diet required wooden teeth.



The new government got off to a rocky start when some southern states decided they wanted to keep slaves and quit the Union. Well, all hell broke loose, and many a poor soul got promoted to glory before the South surrendered, Lincoln freed the slaves, and a new quieter revolution started up — the Civil Rights Movement, which is still underway.

Foreign wars? We’ve been on ‘em like a duck on a June bug, and we did OK for the most part, until lately. Here, lately, we’ve been bogged down in a war in Afghanistan for 16 years and have nothing to show for it. The Russians went in there before us and got their Ashkanozies handed to them, and you’d think by watching them we might have learned something but I guess not.

To bring us up to date, 2017, we’ve got a bigger problem today than King George or Afghanistan … North Korea. Here’s this little teapot of a country whistling on the stove with a hydrogen bomb and delivery system that has got everybody freaked out, especially me.

The worst part is, the Supreme Leader of North Korea is someone you would not want in charge of a truck stop, for he would have those truckers standing in line for hours, marching in lock step, and once they got to the showers there would be no hot water.

But there’s more. On our side of this potential peril we have a serving president who is, shall we say, “turbulent.” Incendiary statements on both sides create a palatable possibility of, “Bleep Happens!” With both sides on high alert, one shaky hand accidentally dropping one lit match, could conceivably ignite the entire peninsula and beyond.

The strategy of nuclear deterrence is based upon an assumption that leaders are rational people and sane. Those wars we fought in the past will be peashooter fights compared to the devastation that will rain down should Korea detonate.

We have to keep the lid on this preventable disaster, ensure that cool heads prevail, and not allow this chapter of world history to end ignominiously, where the only things left on Mother Earth could be cockroaches nibbling on fruitcake.

Learn more about McAvoy Layne at http://www.ghostoftwain.com.


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