Ronald Reagan is dead. Yep, the Cowboy President has passed onto greener pastures. He received an orchestrated state funeral and tributes from all sides. During the days of mourning for Cowboy the shear magnitude of the accolades heaped on him surprised me. I was stunned to hear people on the street tell news reporters things like, "President Reagan turned my life around" and "He gave my life meaning." No kidding, Cowboy actually gave these people a reason to live? After some thought it has occurred to me that Cowboy gave my life a lot of meaning too. Here is my little tribute.

Cowboy had a major influence on my life, short of getting sober, that is. After graduating high school in 1973, I worked as a mechanic and drank a lot of alcohol. My politics were moderately liberal and somewhat populist. I went to the polls and voted the straight "D" ticket and that was it. Policy issues, politics, economics and all that stuff I figured was for white shirt eggheads to worry about. That is until Cowboy came on the scene.

Cowboy talked a lot about freedom. He opened my eyes to freedom. He epitomized freedoms that I had never thought about like the freedom to get rich no matter who gets stepped on or killed in the process. Cowboy called that the free market. During the 1980s the free market took many lives in Pennsylvania. Suicides went through the roof as mills and mines closed down. People lost livelihoods and loved ones. I got busy hauling free firewood and coal to some of the many new poor folks in the Pennsylvania coalfield county where I lived. Cowboy told us that this was the cost of freedom – a free market.

Cowboy cut social spending. He told us that catsup was a fine vegetable for hungry children. He told us about a "welfare queen" up in Chicago who was living high by milking government welfare programs. Under Cowboy’s reign the number of folks living on the street suddenly started to climb as people were liberated from their homes and from the social safety net. Cowboy told us that poor folks were lazy and irresponsible and that they had to be set free from the government. Cowboy called this the freedom of personal responsibility.

Cowboy supplied military equipment, personnel and CIA expertise to "brave freedom fighters" all over the world. Anybody who dared to question the unlimited freedom of oligarchs and multinational corporations to get rich was an enemy to Cowboy. Anytime people no matter where they lived, joined together to do freedom-hating things like redistributing land and wealth, Cowboy rallied his freedom fighters to defend the freedoms of the rich. Reagan became obsessed with the attacks on freedom going on in the Central Americas. Some of those leading the attack on freedom in places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were church workers who cleverly masked their attack on freedom behind something called "liberation theology." Cowboy helped to make sure that they were killed and he joined with a freedom-loving Pope to wipe out liberation theology once and for all.

In Nicaragua where the enemies of freedom actually gained enough power to implement a program of wealth redistribution freedom fighters called "Contras" got extra help from Cowboy. The Contras liberated many thousands of poor people from their lives. Cowboy helped out by blockading Nicaragua and even denying medical supplies from going there. In the end freedom prevailed. The "free marketeers" won. The poor were once again free to labor at starvation wages in sweatshops and on coffee plantations. Thanks Cowboy!

Because of Cowboy, I began to see how protecting the freedom of the rich to keep and increase their wealth was central to every policy choice, both foreign and domestic made by the U.S.A. Thanks to Cowboy I began to seriously think about my freedoms and how they were watered with the blood of poor people all over the world. Thanks to Cowboy it finally dawned on me that in the USA freedom is really just a commodity. Thanks to Cowboy I began to reject these freedoms. Thanks to Cowboy I began to live in deliberate proximity with those on the edge. Thanks to Cowboy I began to see that the USA is a reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the poor of the world to keep us rich (and free).

Thanks Cowboy, for opening my eyes to the freedoms we enjoy in the USA. As you ride off into the California sunset let me leave you with these words, "You may think that you’re the owners, you may have everything, even god, your god – the bloodstained idol of your dollars…but you don’t have the God of Jesus Christ, the Humanity of God! I swear by the blood of His Son, killed by another empire, and I swear by the blood of Latin America – now ready to give birth to new tomorrows – that you will be the last emperor!" "Ode to Reagan" by Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, Brasil