Lessons Learned from a Modern Western

My roommates and I are obsessed with AMC’s new two part series, “Broken Trail.” I guess I’m a little more country than I thought, because I don’t care who you are, there’s always enough time for a good western movie. (I’m sort of partial to the contemporary kind as opposed to the John Wayne types, but that’s just me.) You know, the kind with the shoot outs and the helpless women in prairie skirts and the good cowboy/bad cowboy duels. This one even had exotic foreigners – 5 Chinese girls sold into slavery. Complete with lyme disease, suicide by stampeding horses (Oh, Ye Fung, did it have to come to this?) and pure love between the hardened cowboy and lonely Chinese woman #3.

There are lots of worthwhile lessons to be taught by western movies. For starters, love can grow across even the language barrier. Love is its own language. You can feel the longing in the heart. Even though the hardened cowboy tried to send off the Chinese girl to San Francisco to be with her own - even so - she stayed because she knew he really loved her. Lesson to be learned: should your love interest put you in a stagecoach with the intentions of shipping you off to an unknown land run by greedy gold miners, get off said stagecoach and stay put in the wilds of Wyoming. Force the issue and you shall prosper.

It also taught us that when your good-for-nothin' husband gets his legs chopped off and commits suicide, you can always turn tricks to support yourself. And when you no longer draw the lonely cowboys with your crooked teeth and sagging cleave, there is a way to avoid a whore's final stop, "the hog farm." Latch onto a rich horse wrangler and profess your willingness to consummate the partnership. Explicitly. In fact, the more explicit, the more likely he will love you.

And finally, it taught us that cowboys in the wild west of the 1800’s used the words nuts and cooter. Seriously.

I send you into the world with this wisdom.

Go west, young (wo)man.