Episode 9

The United States government is a big fat bag of money. Ideally, it’s so much more than that, but essentially, it’s also a money machine, taking in our tax dollars, and then doling those tax dollars out in distributions designated by congress, and overseen by administration bigwigs and agency heads. It’s a moneybag that is perpetually being filled and emptied, both at the same time. The money we put in the bag as taxpayers is supposed to be spent to benefit us all in myriad ways: from providing air transportation safety to ensuring air and water quality; from providing and enforcing standards of food integrity to preventing the spread of communicable disease; from defending our nation militarily from aggressors to providing a system of justice bound by the laws set forth in our constitution…and one of my favorite things: maintaining and protecting our nation’s natural resources.

In the last seven weeks and change, however, a majority in both the congress and the senate has fulfilled some collective sado-masochistic fantasy and become Reek to their master in the Oval Office. They hope we won’t notice their collective dog collar as they scurry behind their dominator, eager to tear off some of their own flesh (or more likely, ours) at the master’s whim. Far be it from these Reeks to exercise their own power of the purse, let alone create legislation. And yet, they will sit up and do tricks on command in order to prevent the richest of the rich from having to pay a share into the federal moneybag. And they recently tied themselves into knots to achieve the sleight-of-hand of declaring the entire congressional calendar a single day—this, a sudden roll-over-and-play-dead abdication of their power to their evil overlords. It was quite the self-abasing ruse, even for as low a lifeform as the Reeks have become.

The overlords are shamelessly suborning deposits into their own personal moneybags as a result of their power. This is going on boldface in front of us, without scruples or moderation. The White House is now a bribe depot for moneybags offered up to the master, who holds the chain on everything and everyone in government and the corporate world. Want to wear a dog collar and hand the chain to RamsayDon TrumpBolton the Cruel? You can actually dine somewhere in a crowd of Reeks near our Game-of-Thrones-like savage for a mere million. You want to be the only lapdog licking at his elbow for a half-hour or so while he eats? That’s a five million dollar moneybag. Or you can buy a collar and chain by investing in his crypto hustle. You can make a film about his handler-wife, rerun the reality show he starred in to give him royalties, and disempower your newspaper who might have reported the truth about him. You can buy shares of his social media disinformation and propaganda platform. You can spend money at his properties, or donate to his committees. You can buy his bibles, his guitars, or his other merch. If you’re the richest two-legged on the earth, you can pledge a hundred million more to his campaign organizations so he will sell your cars on the White House lawn when an entire globe full of car-buyers have scorned and hate you—and as a result—the products you manufacture. And if you can’t afford to offer any of these moneybags, there are plenty of co-mingled moneybags littered across the White House where you can deposit some big bucks to buy yourself a seat on the floor—drooling and being dominated at the Reek convention.

And right there—our nation’s natural resources are also a big fat bag of money, but in this case, the goal has historically been to keep these treasures safe and preserved—an immeasurable form of natural wealth for all the citizens of our nation to share ownership of equally, in perpetuity. These include our national parks, monuments, historic sites, and wild lands and waterways. But for the billionaire set, these are just big moneybags waiting to be ransacked and robbed. To that end, they have cut away the flesh that protects these gems, firing all the protectors and caretakers that guard the riches. This week, the courts objected and handed down rulings that these federal employees must be reinstated. We will see if the evil overlords comply. But even if they do, be wary. They have painted a moneybag target on our most beautiful places, even on the water we drink and the air we breathe, and they will not relent in seeking to cash in for their own benefit and not ours.

There is not an ugly enough word for the rapacity that we are seeing in this regime. Our language lacks a term with the breadth and depth for the evil at work. The image of the inhuman imposter who somehow garnered enough votes to take a second turn at destroying our democracy is beyond our worst words. Profound evil does not reach deeply enough. Hideously cruel fails to encompass the breadth of it. Horrific, monstrous, villainous… they all fall short. Nothing suffices to accurately name the Trump/Musk/Vance incarnation of evil. Nothing reaches far enough to portray the immensity of their greed.

We watch with horror as the orange thing and his chainsaw-wielding Nazi handler line up cars in front of the White House and make a shameless attempt to reinforce the riches of the richest man in the world. We gasp as the evildoer in the Oval Office prepares to deport a man rightfully in this country while offering a “gold card” to anyone (including Russian oligarchs, very nice people, by the way) who will pay $5million. We are stunned in disbelief as the economy we are forced to participate in now is hacked away at, limb by limb, and subsumed in a siege of systemic, structural violence and inhumanity. We are asked to fund a regime that not only ignores but argues for suffering, starvation, disease, poverty, and war. We are expected to line up this April 15th and refill the moneybags so these diseased fungal substitutes for human beings can harm not only our reputation in the world…but other countries along with our own, as well as our air, our water, our elderly and disabled, our dignity as a nation. The list could go on and on and we don’t even know the extent of the harm yet.

It is not enough to say that the White House is for sale. It is not adequate to say that they are destroying the government so they can piece parts of it back with privatization to glut their moneybags—as in the attempts to demean and cripple Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It will never be sufficient to say that they have killed—and even reversed—all the momentum, the shared prosperity, the global good will, the climate activism, and the social and economic gains we achieved in the past four years. The aggression, the caustic open and boundless corruption, the horrific enabling of evil-doing by those charged with serving us in congress and higher office, the perversion and ugliness… we don’t have the words. Or likely, for most of us, the ability to fully comprehend and adequately respond.

I don’t have a story that matches the inexhaustible, incalculable evil of the moneybags masters or their grinning submissive Reeks, but I do have a story about what can happen to what is precious when it is not protected.

There are places out of sight in the American Southwest that hold inestimable and irreplaceable fortune. For over three decades, my husband and I have trekked time and again into the deepest deserts, to remote places without roads or designations on maps, carrying our own water and provisions on our backs, with the goal of beholding the art and dwellings of the first people on this continent. Their footprints still exist on sandstone slabs. Their pots, their bows and arrowheads, their atlatls, remnants of their baskets and their sandals, and more still lie on and beneath the surface in the arid sandy soil. The basic structures of their homes and villages still stand. And their creative visions still teach and inspire us from great stone panels along the walls of canyons and cliffs, and on the faces of great boulders along dry streams and riverbeds. On these back country expeditions, it was—for years and years—highly irregular for us to see another human being. Sometimes for as much as three weeks. We would go as long as our water held out, and if there was a desert rain, we could stay a while longer by filtering the water that pooled in stone basins. And—oh!—the wonders we would behold!

The advent of GPS and sturdier off-road vehicles gave birth to a new generation of “desert rats,” as we called ourselves. We could go farther in, to even more remote places, carry more water, and locate the most gorgeous rock art panels and ruins by numbered coordinates shared among outdoors enthusiasts on the internet.

But even once these technological wonders began to make this inspiring ancient world more accessible, there were still some priceless panels and ruins that require advanced skills for climbing, rappelling, and extended treks on foot that remained relatively unknown. Over the years, we have made pilgrimages to some of these precious gems time and again. And the welcome protections of many of these places came when Obama made Bears Ears a national monument. Obama went further and shared the work of managing and protecting this new monument with the tribes whose ancestors lived there from the first days of human habitation on this continent.

This helped tremendously to stem the damage that might have occurred to fragile and precious sites in the face of all the new technology making wilderness exploration easier. But it was not totally successful.

One late summer, we found ourselves revisiting an especially beautiful canyon where you could camp on the rim right next to a stacked-stone lookout tower complete with window openings… from which you could see almost a hundred miles. This, no doubt, was the station for sentinels who warned the villagers in the cliff dwellings below of invaders, coming weather events, and more. We had come to this canyon, littered with ruins whose creation spanned hundreds of years, to see its beautiful and pristine panels on the cliff walls. Getting to most of these required rappelling down sheer rock faces. But some of the more recent ruins could be accessed by some careful climbing.

I remember pulling up to the normally deserted rim site where we had camped alone over the decades to find a trio of tents pitched in a semi-circle around a big campfire pit filled with ashes and broken glass. Discarded beer bottles lay scattered around. One man was packing up, and pulled a queen-size mattress out of his tent and pitched it into the bed of his four-wheel-drive truck. Others stowed massive coolers in another truck as they broke camp. They were friendly enough, and wanted to know if we had ever been there before. We talked with them and said we’d been coming here over the years but had never seen anyone else there.

“We found it on a map on the internet,” one guy said. “There’s lots of cool stuff down in that canyon if you can climb.”

These three guys did not seem nefarious, but their presence alone—and the mention of the map on the internet—made our hearts sink. A previously relatively unknown museum of antiquities was now exposed to all comers.

Worse still, the first Trump administration saw this gorgeous place as a moneybag. He disrupted the BLM by forcing its employees to move out of the path of power and the deal-making in Washington, where they could have better protected the rich resources of this area, and relocated the headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. Many did not move, and the workforce of the BLM was reduced. Trump also slashed the size of the monument from 1.5million acres to 228,784 acres, leaving much of its most vulnerable sites without the protections needed. Vast swaths of the formerly safeguarded areas were leased for profit to big corporations for mining, fracking, and drilling for oil and gas. Too much of Bears Ears was soon scarred by intersecting roads and barbed wire fences… roads which led through areas adjacent gorgeous ancient sites.

And here is where my WILD story of desert wonders intersects with the moneybags held by the greedy. It wasn’t that time on the rim when we surprised the beer-guzzling campers—or even the increasingly similar situations that followed—that we beheld the worst of what the desire to grab riches from the public domain could do to the ancient and beautiful treasures on public and tribal lands in the southwest. We didn’t see the full picture of the harm all at once. But we began that day to see small signs: the erosion of the conditions of the most reachable ruins, signs of digging for pots and arrowheads, and scarring and vandalism of rock art panels.

Soon, though, we beheld an unforgettably clear picture of the moneybag mentality in an area that had been cut from Bears Ears and its protections. It was deep within some sublime cliffs miles from civilization in harsh, high desert land. There, along a dry streambed that only runs with life-giving water during monsoon season, dozens of magnificent rock art panels spanning thousands of years of history gave witness to the sacredness of the wash. There, Barrier Canyon era art existed alongside dozens of more recent generations of artists’ work depicting sacred shaman, magical animals, bolts of lightning, herds of mountain sheep, and strange alien-like people wearing elaborate jewelry and headgear. We had journeyed to this site many times. After the Trump delisting of that area, during a return visit, we witnessed not only vandalism where some felt compelled to carve inane crap into the panels, but places where some had come with rock saws and literally cut whole rock art panels away from the side of the cliff. And for what? To take them home and own them, display them in their homes where none but those they knew could see? To them, these beautiful and sacred rock art panels—the stories and art of the ancestors of the tribes that still live there in our Southwest—were just moneybags to be taken home and hoarded. To be taken away from the people, and allotted to just those with the means to get the heavy equipment into those remote places and cut away the history and legacy of a sacred place—all in service of greed addiction.

While there are no words for the extreme selfishness and covetousness that would prompt this kind of theft and destruction, there are also few words potent enough to describe the sadness we felt to behold the devastation of our shared beauty and history. The sense of loss, for us, was profound. The anger—looking for a place to fix on—could not find a target from which we might derive some sense of justice. The loss—not just for us, but especially for those whose ancestors created the beauty that had been ripped away from its home—was ineffable.

So many of us for generation after generation had come to this sacred place to behold beauty and share in the wonder of the records of our first people. But someone saw this as a moneybag, and—like the thieves at the top of our government—stole it from the people, to whom it rightly belonged. They stole it from the people whose dignity had already been assaulted for hundreds of years in the name of seizing those moneybags for the rich and the white and the powerful. They stole it from history, where the record is now lost forever so that it can only be seen and shared among the moneybag holders who had the power to take it. And they stole it from the WILD, to which this beauty belonged.

Now we face another kind of defacing, destroying, vandalizing theft. The theft of our democracy, of justice, of our preeminence in the world for leading, giving, and upholding values upon which we were founded. We face a theft of our esteem, of our due regard in the world. We face—instead of friends, neighbors, and allies—suspicion, wariness, fear, and animosity throughout the world. And we face an unbelievable situation in which nearly half of our own citizens chose to opt for moneybag-driven greed zombies and criminals and the open objective of deleting our democracy from the great panel of our history—scarring it, cutting it away, hacking at it, and corrupting it with endless slashes and cuts until it no longer can exist.

The moneybags pile up at the White House, and for the crypto bros and the billionaires and the Trumputin family, and for the richest person in the world, who runs this country and seeks to destroy it and all democracies. The moneybags pile up here, and the bodies pile up in Ukraine and in poor countries where a small portion of our formerly-great wealth used to sustain life and fight famine and disease. The moneybags pile up for the Reeks in the GOP as the body count begins to mount from the needless spread of measles, of bird flu, of Tuberculosis not only in other countries, but here in this once-great one. The moneybags pile up for the string-pulling puppeteers who created the ascent from nothingness to the vice-ghoul who stands next in line behind the bloodsucker-in-chief and beside the technofascist with the most moneybags of all—to whom they answer.

The beauty and the treasure is being cut away. The moneybags are piling up in the open as the rich laugh at the rest of us suckers who together have created the biggest moneybag of all: the wealth of our nation—in every sense of the term. The scars from the hacking, the vandalism, and dismembering can never be healed.

The demons destroying democracy openly drool over their moneybags as they promote car sales from the White House. They also flagrantly protect, pardon, condone, and even celebrate pedophiles, human traffickers, rapists, and drug lords. Because these fiends have moneybags and no morals and can be made into Reeks who will pay into the moneybags, too. The hellhounds feast on hate, aggression, degradation, and bullying. The GOP Reeks in our Congress and throughout government have lost all compassion and sense of humanity. They are corpses decaying before our eyes as they shuffle along as a herd, screaming lies and fouling the halls of the place where they dwell.

Evil prevails in the places of power in our nation today. Moneybags abound, open for any to buy a perch near those in control. No evil is too great for a pardon and no bribe too obvious to be welcomed. No corruption is too conspicuous. After all, what is important is the money bags growing at the feet of the devious demagogues.

We have already lost too much. Too much has already been cut away, defaced, deformed, vandalized and stolen. We need to rise up together to stop it. In past posts, I’ve suggested some wise leaders with invaluable ideas and information. I’ve urged you to seek out groups in your communities to partner with to resist. I’ve offered advice from a wilderness, wildland, and outdoor survival perspective to help you prepare and strengthen your position. And I have warned you about the zombie Reeks among us who helped make it possible for the moneybags to pile up in place of our democracy, for the rape and the theft, and the greed and the imperialism, for the racism and the otherism, for the warmongering and the hate to make its home in the hallowed halls of our country.

There is growing resistance. There is growing awareness. There is growing discontent and determination to reverse course in any ways we can. Stay connected to those in your community who are doing things to defend democracy. Join them. And make yourself ready.

While we all aspire to prosperity, most of us aspire to prosperity for us all. The moneybags piling up in the White House and all the places of power in Washington, DC, do not belong to the corrupt scum who now collect them, like tithes to false gods.

This has been Sandi Ault—Reporting from the WILD. You can also listen to my stories on the companion podcast to this blog—wherever podcasts are found.

If you want more stories from the WILD, look for my WILD Mystery Series in book, audio book, and e-book. You can start with any book in the series and go WILD.

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Take care.