As we pulled on our waders and boots in Yellowstone National Park, a man drove up and asked us how many fish we had caught. We told him we had just arrived and hadn’t started fishing yet.
He then went into a rant about how “they had ruined the river.” Back in the day, when he fished the Yellowstone, he’d catch hundreds of fish and now, because of the introduction of Lake Trout, all the other trout have been lost. I bit my tongue not to ask him about who he thought of as the “they” but I already knew the answer to my question. Big, bad government.
I have refrained from being too political on my blog because I’m really not that well-read when it comes to politics and in the end, fly-fishing is about taking me away from the world of stress, discord and problems. Like everyone else I have also had my share of trials and tribulations and have enjoyed not putting myself in the middle of controversial subjects.
I think this concept that the government is somehow a bad, ill-intentioned entity out to get the individual is what bothers me the most. In the end, government, like our corporate world, is made up of individuals like you and me who can make mistakes, be ill-informed and selfish, but they can also be kind, well-intended and smart as a whip. This all boils down to the glass half full or half empty. We can look at our people-run institutions as doing the best they can in a complex world or we can see these entities in a nameless non-human environment out to get us.
I have lost computers, wallets, broken down in inconvenient places and in every challenging situation I have had wonderful people help me out. I believe in the goodness of people and the institutions they work for.
