Not All Change Is Bad, Although Nearly All Of It Is

I am in the process of donating the horse operation to our new nonprofit, Gwaltney Frontier Farm, Inc. Such legal paper work changes rightfully cause concern among people who care about our program. For the last twenty years big companies have been swallowing up smaller companies and nothing good has come of it except to line the pockets of a handful of rich people. With that as a back drop it is easy to understand why people that do not understand the need for the conversion to a nonprofit are concerned.

Do not worry. The integrity of our program will remain intact. We will continue to do what we do. We will not be taking any steps to attract Mrs. Drysdale to the horse lot. Ellie Mae and Jed will still be happy with us.

Compromise--one of the most significant and dangerous words in our language. Some compromise is necessary to get anything done yet every step of every compromise is a threat to one's integrity. It is a question that I have wrestled with since I was a little child. I realized early on that if I wore a coat simply because some adult thought that I should, whether I was cold or not, I was taking a huge leap into following the dictates of an irrational, absurd culture.

Not all slopes are slippery, but many are. Hubert Humphrey said that the problem with politics is that one had to constantly compromise on the small issues in order to eventually win issues that mattered. The catch, he said, was to always be able to recognize which issues were big and which were small.

Steve Earle gets a bit passionate when he speaks of Townes Van Zandt "shooting himself in the foot" every time he had a chance for real commercial success. He feels that Townes let people down by pursuing a course that did not get his music out in front of more people.

It is hard to argue with that point. But would it have been better to have become part of the glitzy nothingness of the Nashville sound than to simply be drunk (and ultimately dead)? I cannot say which choice I would have made with any degree of certainly. However, it is much easier for me to imagine being drunk and dead (though I do not drink at all) than to sing painfully frivolous songs whose meaningless lyrics would be adored by screaming fans with meaningless lives.

I have nearly nothing in common with the man that I understand Woody Guthrie to have been. However, given the choice of money and a degree of fame in exchange for having people tell me which songs I was allowed to perform, or walking away from it all; I suspect that I would have been on train getting out of New York as fast as he did.

I have never been under any illusion that I am always right, but I have clearly understood that I am always me.

If I take any step that causes the established horse world to feel better about mustangs then I would have let the horses down. If I take any step in my riding program to garner the approval of the established horse world then I would have let my riders down.

So those of you that are worried that changes will come about that will make us into anything more conventional than we are now. Stop worrying.

All of my life I have had no fear of being tested. That is because the only tests that I have ever cared about have been self graded.

(That is not a picture of Mrs. Drysdale riding Young Joseph.)