A Proud Southern Parlor

Wasted potential was just something he couldn't abide

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.” —Alexis de Tocqueville

There once was a proud Southerner from an old family who left the land of his birth to strike out West and find his fortune. He established himself in a small dusty town somewhere—the only doctor for miles. And as he increased in respectability and wealth, he grew concerned about the county’s appalling lack of civic education.

The original settlers in that place were nepotistic, self-serving, and profoundly ignorant, and they ruled their polities with an iron fist, leaving many ambitious young men cut off from the levers of power that so profoundly shaped life in the untamed West.

Being a student of the Classics and an unapologetic Democrat in the Jacksonian mold—and having descended from a long line of Virginia Burgesses—this proud Southerner saw fit to start a private school in his parlor, dedicated to educating rudderless young men in lost art of civic governance.

As fate would have it, the old Southern doctor immediately acquired a following of town rowdies, and through painstaking effort, taught the young men rhetoric, philosophy, political history, and constitutional theory—with every interaction governed by Robert’s Rules of Order.

The classes became wildly popular, inviting both praise and suspicion from the county’s inhabitants, and after some time, several of the doctor’s top students began to conspire with one another to create a political coalition, or, according to some, a secret brotherhood, to take over their town governments and set things right.

After much planning and strategizing—and after some guidance from our kindly Southern doctor—these young men rallied together and gained some support, campaigned hard for a season, and ended up tossing most of the grizzled political bosses from off their perches.

In several towns and even in the county, the little faction—born in the proud Southerner’s parlor—seized power and held onto it tightly for more than a decade. The young new leaders even appointed their old mentor as a county Alderman for spell.

In time a few graduates of the parlor school pursued political careers at the state and national levels, distinguishing themselves in halls of power far from the dusty Western towns of their humble youth. And this old doctor, who simply couldn’t abide wasted potential, lived to see his influence span the globe.

Every man knows the advantages of laboring within the borders of power, but only a select few know the advantages of laboring in the borderlands.

Think on it.