First, please excuse my Southern Baptist proclivities as this is a contemporary Christian song from 1992 by Steven Curtis Chapman. If you choose to take a listen, click here. Regardless of your religious leanings, there is a good message to be had. “Saddle Up Your Horses, We Got a Trail to Blaze.“"This is a great adventure.” It seems like everywhere around us people see a discombobulated blue marble flying aimlessly through the universe and are spouting their theories of philosophy to fix the chaos. Amid this anarchical and dictatorial mix is the business community trying to kindle the light of free enterprise that has sustained this nation for the past two-plus centuries.
If this feels like a wet blanket in an igloo, listen up! The message here is meant to inspire the masses, not conspire to encourage fealty to cultural populism. Growing up on a ranch taught me a few lessons, the most important of which was When life gets tough, you get tougher! Somehow the modern view of a cowboy has been diminished as a beer swigging green horn picking up ladies at the dance hall, but in fact, the true agriculturists are the ones who give their last ounce of strength to save one baby calf when the blue northers are howling, or they replace sleep with steely eyed resolve to combine that last quarter of wheat when the “great white combine” (hail) threatens to destroy the crops that a weathered brow and callused hands have worked so hard to grow. In short, when challenges happen on the ranch or the business on main street, “We saddle up our horses and blaze a trail.”
Maybe it has truly been God’s Grace or an illogical belief in mankind’s potential, but American business has propelled society into times of remarkable economic and social success through the pursuit of free enterprise. While my comments aren’t meant to be negative, they aren’t meant to be utopian either. There is no doubt that free enterprise is under attack from political players on the left and right and cultural warriors from the top and bottom. If there was ever a time in American history to “saddle up and blaze a trail” the time is now.
We are fortunate that we live in a place that hasn’t entirely forgotten the blessing of free enterprise. Cheyenne and Wyoming are still places where you can pursue the proverbial American dream. Make no mistake about it, though, we are not immune from the clutter, and we must be diligent to maintain this wonderful inheritance we call “free enterprise.” I also believe that with much blessing comes responsibility. In short, we owe it to those who came before us to “saddle up and blaze a trail” for free enterprise both for our own community and state and for our nation.
Saddle up Wyoming! The future of free enterprise is ours to nurture not only for ourselves, but for posterity as well.
Onward and Upward,
Dale Steenbergen
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