FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK: A Day Of Reckoning!

By VERNON ROBISON

With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, our minds will be turned towards the pilgrims of the Plymouth colony. The story is familiar. In 1621 these hardy Massachusetts settlers held a joyous harvest feast after a successful growing season. They had labored extensively throughout that year establishing themselves in a new land under extreme and severe conditions.

When the harvest was finally brought in, the small band of 53 pilgrims along with 90 Native Americans held a celebration. Their food was brought in from all the various bounties of nature. The menu included fish and shellfish from the nearby Atlantic coast; fowl and venison hunted from the surrounding forests; wild berries and fruits they had gathered; and, of course, vegetables and grains that they had learned to cultivate from their native neighbors.

Of course, legend tells that the feast’s theme was gratitude. These settlers had come across the stormy seas in search of freedom. Now they were celebrating that freedom: the freedom to grow their own food, make their own living, on their own land and enjoy it freely with others. They felt this freedom had provided them a measure of success and their feast humbly expressed thankfulness for this long-sought blessing. There was no one; no government official nor church authority; which prevented them from this outward celebration. It was a splendid and joyful festival.

Last week, here in Moapa Valley, another harvest feast was carefully planned. Friday night the cool autumn weather was perfect at the Quail Hollow Farm. Farm owners Laura and Monte Bledsoe along with their team had worked hard to make everything perfect for this night. Elegant dining tables were set with candles glimmering under the starry sky. A quiet and peaceful crowd of people gathered at the little farm. Many of these folks had come from outside of the Moapa Valley community; from Las Vegas and from southern Utah; to enjoy this special placid evening of fresh air on the farm.

They also came for the express purpose of experiencing nature’s bounty. They came willingly, paying a premium, in order to enjoy a purely agrarian feast with whole, natural foods completely untainted by additives, preservatives or factory processing. The food had not been shipped hundreds of miles to get to their table. Rather the fruits of this harvest were to be enjoyed in the very location where they had been carefully cultivated, tended and raised.

Laura Bledsoe had long looked forward to this event as a chance for neighbors and friends to get together and share the simple riches that this earth has to offer: foods produced naturally, organically and locally. For her, the evening was to be essentially an expression of gratitude. Yes, gratitude for nature’s gifts; but also, like the pilgrims, gratitude for the freedom to grow her own food on her own land and to be able to share it with others.

But, unlike the pilgrims’ feast before, the Bledsoe’s little farm faced an unforeseen obstacle which would cast an ugly shadow over the evening. Even as guests were preparing to sit down to this opulent meal, a single official from the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) entered the scene, storming onto their property and insisting that they cease and desist their activities. Showering the Bledsoe’s with a web pf confusing technicalities and codes, this bureaucrat cited a hundred and one reasons why they absolutely could NOT serve their carefully prepared harvest feast to their waiting guests.

Now, was there anything impure or unhealthy about the evening’s food or its preparation? Absolutely not. The great irony is that this meal was carefully and artfully prepared as a model of healthy and wholesome dietary living. But this didn’t matter. Only the bureaucratic, nonsensical code mattered. The SNHD official alleged that certain of the food items, coming from small local farm sources, lacked the necessary institutional stamps of approval required by SNHD regulation. Ironically it was precisely this conveyor belt-style philosophy of food production from which this crowd had paid handsomely to retreat. The result was a ruined feast, a disappointed crowd and, no doubt, a financial loss to the Bledsoes and their Quail Hollow Farm.

This is an absolute outrage! How can we, the very heirs of those hardy Massachusetts pilgrims, have possibly come to this lowly state of affairs?

How can a single person, an unelected bureaucrat whose power is checked by no one, be able to come onto a person’s property and brazenly exercise such despotic and arbitrary power? That such codes and regulations, enacted in distant places by officials and boards not ever presented to the people for election, should thus be used to strip away the unalienable rights of simple citizens is nothing short of an institutional tyranny.

After all, was there not encompassed in these people’s fundamental right to the “Pursuit of Happiness” a right to decide, as consenting adults, to spend an evening enjoying the fruits of nature, free from the very institutional stamps and processing that were so forcefully asserted by this bureaucrat’s impertinent codes? These people knew full well what they would be enjoying that evening. No one was forcing them to partake of this bounteous feast. It was their right to do so.

Was it not also the right of the Bledsoes to offer this experience and be appropriately compensated for it? Was it not their right to engage in free and fair commerce in offering their services?

In sum, are we not still living in the United States of America? Is this not still the nation which was forged out of the initial longings and strivings of those plain Massachusetts pilgrims, as well as multitudes just like them, who journeyed here seeking a new land of freedom?

Agencies like the SNHD, and all of their associated bureaucrats, ought well to remember the words of our nation’s founding documents. Specifically, they ought to remember that it is only to secure our rights that “…Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…”

Inexcusable events like the one that occurred at Quail Hollow Farm last weekend show just how far out ahead of its mandate the SNHD has ventured. This unhappy story illustrates once again that the urban-centered governments and agencies sent to regulate our rural communities, businesses and lives just don’t get it. And they never will!

The time has come for a day of reckoning. This unchecked agency has, for far too long, been allowed to work outside of the “Consent of the Governed”. Reform is desperately needed. It is high time for the SNHD, and many other governmental entities like it, to be stripped down and fully reconciled to our country’s founding principles. Otherwise it is the right of the People to alter or abolish them.