anybody can’t
tell difference has got whole
lot bigger problem

From the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell Book of Life (Continued) –

I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country.

Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools.

And they come across these forms, they’d been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions.

And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways.

Chewin gum.

Copyin homework.

Things of that nature.

So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools.

Forty years later.

Well, here come the answers back.

Rape, arson, murder.

Drugs. Suicide.

So I think about that.

Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old.

That it’s one of the symptoms.

But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got.

Forty years is not a long time neither.

Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether.

If it aint too late.

So says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the book, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ed Tom’s thought are interspersed through out the book and set off in italics.

One of these days I am to copy out all those pages and create a book titled, Ed Tom Bell and the Meaning of Life.

I always meant to go back and re-read just those parts.

Maybe this would get me around to doing that.

takes very little
to govern good people and
bad people can’t be

It’s a odd thing when you come to think about it.

The opportunities for abuse are just about everwhere.

There’s no requirements in the Texas State Constitution for bein a sheriff.

Not a one.

There is no such thing as a county law.

You think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God and there is no requirements put upon you and you are charged with preservin nonexistent laws and you tell me if that’s peculiar or not.

Because I say that it is.

Does it work?

Yes.

Ninety percent of the time.

It takes very little to govern good people.

Very little.

And bad people cant be governed at all.

Or if they could I never heard of it.

So says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the book, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ed Tom’s thought are interspersed through out the book and set off in italics.

One of these days I am to copy out all those pages and create a book titled, Ed Tom Bell and the Meaning of Life.

I always meant to go back and re-read just those parts.

Maybe this would get me around to doing that.

BTW, the title, No Country for Old Men, is adapted from:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

from Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats,