Wild Hogs

Most people believe the last thing a blind man should be involved in is book collecting. But, I have been an antiquarian book collector most of my life. I have bought and sold more books than most people have ever seen. Even though I can't see one, I can almost smell an old book and tell you what it is worth. I have sold books from the 1700's to the present. I have an almost subversive love for books. At the present, I have over 5,000 rare first editions.

Two young university students working here were looking at drawings in one of the first books ever published on butchery. I then told them about the country practice of “hog killing” where, on the family farm, after the weather became quite cold, a large group of hogs would be butchered for the family use. I told them about the “chitlins”, the “souse meat” and other less delicate parts of the hog which people eat. One of the young men, like most young people who just think food magically appears in the grocery store pristinely wrapped, got ill and had to go outside for fresh air. This is a part of Americana which has rapidly disappeared. I have found that family and friends in the countryside now want to live like people in “town” and just go to the grocery store for their meats. They don't know what it is like to see a large hog on the gallus and see the various parts processed for the “smokehouse”; a vital part of every country home and country living.

I have used this story many times, in speaking, of the old farmer from the Broad River area of Eastern North Carolina, who one morning showed up at a local country store on a one horse wagon with a mule. On the wagon were several bags of corn, some building materials, a hog trough and a large barrel. This was a real mystery to the regulars who hung around the potbellied stove at the country store. The man came in and said, “Can you folks tell me where that group of wild hogs are in this area?” They told him where he could find the wild hogs, several miles away, near the river, and said, “If I were you, I would stay away from those hogs. They will even eat your mule!”

The old man thanked them and moved on. It is reported that he went down and finally heard some hogs in a large forest of mostly “underbrush”. He threw out a few ears of corn and some of the hogs ran out and would grab an ear, mostly the young ones, and go back under a bush to eat it. Slowly but surely, some of the older sows started coming out to get some free corn; a change from their diet of acorns, roots, anything edible they could “poach” in the area. The next day, when the old man and the mule came by the store and he went inside to get himself a 'cold drink', the regulars inquired, “Did you find any hogs?” The old man said, “Yes, I am making some progress. They're all good Democrats.” So he went back to the place where he'd made his initial missionary contact. Again, he attracted their interest with ears of corn, but also put out the large hog trough, mixed up some 'slop' (liquid garbage and hog feed) from the barrel on the wagon.

The hogs began to come to the trough, very happy over this new 'delicacy'; a real treat for their life and living. The next day, more of the wild hogs and their friends came to the trough. The farmer began to construct his fence around the area as the hogs, now busy eating and sleeping, paid no attention to him at all and were much too lazy to pursue an acorn any longer. (Why should they look for food when food was being brought to them?) Before long, the farmer with his wire and fence post had enclosed the entire area. He had put up a gate which you could only enter from the outside, a pen from which you could not escape. More and more hogs would appear, find the opening, and before long, the farmer had a pen full of wild hogs eating and sleeping. Free sex, free food, no longer interested in a lifetime of pursuing their own freedom or making choices; they were much too good to eat an acorn anymore. As the farmer told his friends at the country store, when he and his mule went back by, “There is a big pen full of 'seduced Democrat' hogs just waiting for slaughter; all you have to do is go down and get them.”

In my lifetime, I have seen this very thing happen with the public with which I have been in contact. Maybe it has not happened everywhere, but it has certainly happened everywhere I have come in contact with public life. I did not enjoy growing up in poverty, I did not enjoy seeing and hearing the poverty with which I came in contact, as a young university student for 8 years, selling books, door to door, down every 'pig path' in Eastern North Carolina. My parents, my relatives, and the people throughout the eastern part of North Carolina, had a rough life, but they were free. Free from the shackles of government bureaucracy, free from the stocks of forms and permits, and grants and loans which have slowly enslaved not only the older people, but even the students as they are trying to provide for themselves. I remember the first credit card I ever saw. Now, even school children have become prisoners of credit; prisoners of numbers. (I did not have a Social Security Card until I was college aged) prisoners of a license to do anything; prisoners of permits, of politician's promises. Young people of my generation, like our country's founders, grew in the hope of self accomplishment; thrilled in the hope of success, basked in the hope of freedom provided at such great cost by those who were willing to defend this democratic republic.

As a young man, driving an old car out into the countryside, early in the morning, I did not enjoy seeing people walking many miles to a job. But, as they walked and visited, they were laughing and free of much of the stress of today's socialized promotion, the bombardment of their minds with advertisements, awakening an attitude of unhappiness about their station in life, that possessions are more important than professions. Contentment, in young people and even older people now, is a very rare characteristic. We are trapped in a world of greed with an attitude that government should provide all our needs and we can spend what little we have left on our wants.

GOD, give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty, and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.
Josiah Gilbert Holland