James Raymond Reese

Link: http://www.hua.org

We flew into Des Moines on Friday, rented a car and drove to Auburn. It was an uneventful 3-hour ride across mid-America.

There was one major change in the view of the landscape from I-80 since we traveled that road across Iowa a year ago. Hundreds and hundreds of beautiful, new windmills. A bit smaller than those I've seen in California but still huge by any definition.

We arrived in Auburn a little before 4 pm. That allowed some time for visiting before heading for dinner at Wheeler Inn. (Tip: Good food if you ever have reason to be in Auburn, Nebraska.)

After a good night's sleep we awakened to partake of the reason for the trip in the first place: spend some time with the rescued puppy-mill dogs at a shelter named Hearts United for Animals, known to all of its friends simply as HUA.

That was the very same Saturday morning I met Kid Rock.

Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. First, let's back up a bit.

Several weeks prior to our arrival in Auburn, a man and his son pulled into the shelter's small parking area in their pickup truck. They had a small puppy with them. It seems the little fellow had been thrown from a speeding car in rural Nebraska the night before and the son saw the dog in a ditch. They wanted to know if HUA could, maybe, help the little guy.

If you know the people at HUA at all, you know the response was an immediate "yes."

They had no idea what was ahead.

They spent a few minutes with the puppy and noticed that his breathing was raspy and labored. He could take some water and small bits of wet food but was obviously in great pain. They soon realized that the little guy needed some serious vet care and a few minutes later were on an hour-plus drive to an emergency vet clinic in Omaha.

What they found was a traumatized eye, broken ribs and a jaw badly crushed in a place that rendered surgery to be not an option. All they could do was tape up the muzzle and hope the jaw healed itself.

Through the pain of it all the puppy tried to show his happiness. His tail would wag on the approach of people. At least as well as it could with broken ribs. He obviously didn't connect our species with his hard landing in a rural Nebraska ditch.

When I first saw the puppy, he was happy, running and jumping and wagging his tail at humans like they were his best friends. The only remaining signs of his ordeal were several 1- and 2-inch scars on his head, face and neck.

He is absolutely a charmer and should have no problem being adopted by a loving family.

Oh, I guess I had better get back to Kid Rock.

The volunteers at HUA started calling the puppy Kid Rock on the ride to Omaha when he showed signed of actually enjoying a song playing on the radio. Go figure.

And that's how I met Kid Rock in Auburn, Nebraska.

If you've made it this far in the story, please click on the link above. There is a picture of Kid Rock on the front page. At least there is as of the date of this posting.

If you have a few minutes more, please take a look at some of the other stories.

Thanks.

If you are part of a prayer chain, please pass this request along. Robert had terminal cancer and was leaving Sarasota shortly to return home to die among his family. His alternative lifestyle often made him the object of laughter from others. He didn't realize it was so obvious. Life never seemed to be easy for this kind, gentle and caring man. As I write this, Robert lay dying in one of our local hospitals. He had a massive stroke while driving, causing a minor multi-car pile-up. The doctors say the stroke is unrecoverable and Robert is expected to crossover within the next few hours. Please have him in your thoughts today and ask for a peaceful crossing.

Much like what is happening in America right now, the struggle in the 1860s was over the power in government. The south was rich in agriculture and traded with Europe, the north was manufacturing and had no trading partner whatsoever. The market for the north's manufactured goods was primarily the existing states.

So, when Lincoln was elected president he taxed all southern goods heading for Europe and bankrupted a lot of people in the south.

Slavery was not particularly an issue other than a symptom of what the south felt was an unconstitutional exercise of Federal power.

If you think slavery was the issue, you'll want to check this fact out: President Lincoln, in a discussion with President Davis, offered to maintain slavery as an institution if only the Confederate States would return to the Union. Davis' response was, "Slavery is not the struggle we fight in this war."

In fact, the whole way through the war a number of northern states (Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, etc.) were slave states. And, if you check the census forms for 1860, you'll find that a number of very northern states, like Pennsylvania, actually had a column to indicate whether a person was a slave.

The issue was federal power. The north had 20 million residents, the population of the south was only 5 million at the time. That resulted in the northern states being predominate in the House of Representatives. There were fewer southern states than northern, so the north also owned the Senate.

The south and the north were different in just about every category you can imagine. The end result was the north trying to force the south to do a lot of things, independent of the slavery issue, that didn't conform to the 10th amendment of the Constitution.

And, when the tax situation developed, that was the end of the union as far as the south was concerned. The northern-dominated congress put taxes on agricultural exports, which hurt the south, and taxed imports of manufactured good, which had no impact at all on the north.

The south saw this as a form of "taxation without representation." That, coupled with other federal muscle-flexing led to the breakup of the union.

South Carolina was the first to go to battle. It is instructive to note that even the South Carolina declaration of secession recognizes that slavery is an economically unsustainable institution. Slavery and non-slavery were mentioned a lot in the declaration but mostly used as synonyms for south and north, respectively.

You have to ask yourself why they're rewriting history.

If we are ignorant of history, we are doomed to repeat it. Not a good thought.