We strolled down to the Pioneer Taphouse yesterday for an early meal before I had a poker game starting at 7 pm and Danielle was going to have to work overnight. The weather had turned cool for most of the day, chill breezes swept up the downtown streets under hazy skies, but then it cleared up and the sun came out and if you stayed in the sun, it was almost warm.

The walk to the taphouse takes all of two minutes. But on every side is history. There to our left, the building now called “The Vault”. That was a bank. There’s still a vault in there if you can believe it. Down there a bit is the five-story Debusk building. I’ve written about it quite a bit. The bottom floor was a bank. Across the street, catercorner was a bank.

We stepped over the words that are impressed into the sidewalk as you enter the taphouse: Brooke Smith Bank.

The irony is not lost on me… that we were treading the ground of the historic and legendary “Old West”, crossing a street that was once lined with old banks (paradise for the bank robbers,) in a town that should be MUCH more famous for its Old West History of cattle drives, poker dens, brothels, gunfights, range wars, etc., and that we were eating in a drinking establishment called “Pioneer”… in preparation for a poker game that night. “History,” someone said, “does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”

Banking, which has since become a den of professional thieves, predatory money-printers, and usurers, was once a necessity thrust upon merchant – kind of against their will. (My sincere apologies to the people who just work there because they need the money – ((like the women in the brothels back in the day over on Center Ave, S. Broadway, and several other downtown streets.)) I think I just sub-sub parenthesized.

Brooke Smith himself said in his memoirs:

“Banking was an unexpected development of a new business demanded by people. When we engaged in business, we did not apprehend that we would soon be in the banking business, and we had no such intentions, but the banking business `was thrust upon us.’ Almost daily and many times a day different people would come to us with checks that they wanted cashed, and we could generally accommodate them, and if the check was larger than the cash we could spare, they would say, `Just let me have a part of it and I will get the balance some other time.’ In this way we would have several thousand dollars of depositor’s money. On the first day of July 1876, we opened the `Pecan Valley Bank.’”

Historically, “several thousand dollars of depositor’s money” soon became the “bank.” Bankers printed their own paper “money,” to represent the value held in the safes (the bank,) which, by definition, was “safer” than carrying it around. People, depending on the security and safety of the currency, traded and exchanged printed “bank notes” which became “money” until the Federal Government and the private “Fed” bank took over the scam. Bankers loaned out the depositor’s banked money at interest, and thus began the leviathan that would become the fractional reserve banking system that owns and operates America and the world today.

Life is an experiment.

By that I do not mean to imply a Darwinian idea that “life”, whether it be a single-cell or multi-celled or organism or a complicated society of independent creatures, somehow learns from dying badly and genetically adapts itself progressively into a different species. That’s nonsense. When I say “Life is an experiment” I mean that individuals (and societies of individuals) develop, often organically, into whatever needful existence is required.

I watched a video the other day of how researchers used a fungus to “organically” grow a newer and more efficient map of the Tokyo train system because the fungus naturally organized itself in the most efficient way as it spread.

So, we’re the fungus. But that’s a column for another time.

My point is that life grows and expands experimentally. This includes societies as well as individuals. Civilization, which, in its beginnings and establishment, is brutal, violent, and unjust, survives because of experimentation. It grows and thrives based on how efficiently it can control and conquer. Softness does not engender life in the beginning. Children must be sheltered and protected if they are to grow. That started with parents fighting sabertoothed tigers and whatnot.

There is no other way. Eventually, after its initial violent explosion outward, life (or society) becomes “civilized.” In this way, by the expansion and multiplication of resources, it is able to eventually bring along its weaker members and those who previously would have been sacrificed, marginalized, or left behind. There is a process here, and it is not pretty. To assume, though, that the benefits of this experimentation would have (or could have) been attained, multiplied, and shared by any other means than that which was necessary and tested by experimentation – is foolishness.

We’re not talking about banks anymore.

I’ve previously used the imagery of a high-rise building. Think of a high-rise building – maybe a sci-fi story of an entire society now existing in a skyscraper on an inhospitable planet, one covered by a dangerous environment of ravenous beasts and disease and wild and horrific specters. To build the high-rise amongst the wilds of barbarism and danger, took pain and suffering. Injustice. Violence. Death. Slavery. Ugliness. The land was cleared at great cost in lives and treasure. Foundations were dug. Eventually, the first floors were finished and they provided some defense against the hostile environment. As the building, first very slowly, then rapidly, soared upwards, life became minimally more comfortable. The hard men gave way to the philosophers, the artists, and the poets. Engineering which was once brute force, became mathematics and geometry. The poets had children who were adventurers or layabouts.

You get the point.

A generation arises and they rightly identify the brutality and injustice so they, living on the upper floors of comfort and security, take dynamite to the foundations of the high-rise.

You don’t want to be the one saying “Hey you guys… maybe… not.”

But here’s where we are.

There are practical things that can be done, if we’re willing to listen and learn.

The dynamiters, financed by the bankers and the lot that benefits from distress and misery, are not into nuance and discussion.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.