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Thursday, June 8, 2017

Goodbye to my dad!

The above is my dad performing at the age of 88.

This is a difficult podcast to write and speak.  This past week I lost my father, as well as his brother, my uncle Ken!

Phil Bowers and Ken Bowers, small town Wisconsin boys who went on to accomplish great things, have gone to the Afterlife almost together- elder brother Ken died just one week before his little brother.  Ken was born in 1919, and Phil was born in 1920.  Elder brother led the way…

Both of them led stellar lives: Ken was active in WW2, becoming a Major in the US army, before retiring and moving to Florida.  Both had multiple children, although Ken’s streak was cut short since his wife died young, leaving Phil to win that particular “race”- which he won handily with 8 children!

Back when they grew up in small town Wisconsin, my father told me that “When you woke up in the morning, you just went down and loaded the wood stove!”  I’m sure this was an aside telling me how easy I had it, in the early 1950’s, where furnaces were gas fired…

Their little town had a small town dairy, and of course all of the milk and cream was from grass-fed cows.  Every morning, his parents (my grandparents) would pour off the cream from the top of a glass bottle of milk onto a bowl of berries, usually raspberries in summer.  When I visited, this was almost as rapturous a vision as if I was transported to Mount Olympia to consume the “nectar of the gods”- this is how good it was!

Of course all of their dairy products, their butter and milk and cream was pasture raised.
And of course all of their eggs were free range, from natural, unconfined hens- (I know, since they were at my Aunt Ella’s, just down the road)!
Their meat?  

Well, we know none of the cattle was confined, or fed GMO’s, or subjected to antibiotics to make them gain weight and simultaneously keep them alive briefly until they were slaughtered…  

Natural cattle, natural meat, both pig and beef and chicken too!

They spent their young lives running around in nature, barefoot for the most part according to my dad.  Ken was an athlete, and given his height he excelled in basketball.  My father Phil went the musical route instead, and wound up playing in the Big Bands of the 1940’s and 50’s, eventually meeting and marrying my mother, Carolyn, who was a vocalist in a trio that he was backing.

But the point is that both of them achieved wonderful, long, and very healthy lives!  

And just how did they achieve this, living to almost 100 years of age, both of them?  

All of the above: A Natural lifestyle, a life of pre-interference in how animals and crops are raised, a pre- FDA screwup of natural processes.  

If there is one takeaway from this, it is THIS:

Anything that BIG GOVERNMENT touches they will ruin!
ANYTHING.

Natural food,
medication regulation,
TAXES of any sort:

THEY WILL SCREW IT UP!

What we need is small, almost non-existent government.  Small town Americana, such as existed and was espoused by Abraham Lincoln, along with most of the Founding Fathers of this nation.

BIG government has proven, over and over and over again that they are horrible at regulating us for “our own good”.  They need to get out of the way- stop telling us what to do, and let us just do what needs to be done!

And then: they need to ask us how they can fix their big government-centered, clueless, liberal/progressive/loser way of life, so they can finally actually be productive members of society, instead of the constant drags on the tribe of humanity that they have become!

If they actually do this thing, Phil and Ken will, up in the Afterlife, raise their glasses in a toast of 
Thanksgiving!  In fact, I think they are- just look!