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What you see here is a sad story. That’s rain out there on the plains and its falling pretty good where its falling and that’s a good thing. But you’ll notice it isn’t falling everywhere, there’s empty spaces between those rain spouts, and that’s the sad part of the story.

Out West here water is more important than anything else. Its more important than politics, religion, money, although all those things play a part in managing it. It’s the actual water itself, the wet part, that is important. There’s been wars fought over it, laws made controlling it, lives ruined for lack of it. It’s a big deal here.

Water is becoming scarcer and scarcer every season and so it’s becoming expensiver and expensiver every season. The powers that be have set up what is called, ‘the Rain Commission’, which is made up of the usual suspects and they’ve managed to set the price on rain. The price being determined by how much rain you want, how long you want it to rain for and how often. And by how much the R.C. can make off it by establishing their regulatory fees. They say its expensive maneuvering those clouds around and timing the rainfall, so if you want rain now, you’ve got to ante up and they aren’t fooling. Get out the big bucks and if you think the price is going to go back down again you’ve been listening to those oil boys too long.

You can own water here and keep it for yourself if you’re a ruthless greedy bastard. Politicians get elected and unelected over it by deciding who gets to use it. We’ve even got a law that says you can’t catch the rain that falls off your roof and use it for your own selfish needs unless you want to go to jail. That rain has to run down unimpeded to where the people who want to control it can get their hands on it. They collect it in big ponds they call reservoirs and fence it off and the people who live around them can’t even swim in it, or go boating on the top of them without the rain owners permission because they own the surface rights to that stored up rain. Consequently bootleg water can be a big business if you’ve got the stomach for it and you can dodge the Rain Commission’s regulators. They’ll disappear you if they catch you dealing water. But folks have a way of working around  things like that. That’s why you rarely see those plastic water bottles littering up our highways out here. As soon as someone sees one it is snatched up and guess what goes in it. Yup, rainwater. You’ll see people out behind the 7-11 passing money over and loading those plastic bottles into their trunks.

Which brings us back to the sad part of our tale. If you look again at that rain falling out on the plains you’ll see that there are spaces between the rainfalls, we mentioned that at the beginning of this story. In the old days, before the ‘Rain Commission’, that rain that’s falling out there would have been a solid unbroken sheet of water running from Denver in the South to Cheyenne in the North. Everybody would have gotten some. And it was free water, a gift from the heavens to make those farmers lives easier. Now you got to pay for that rain. The politicians and the greedy rain owners have put a price on it. They’ve commoditized it. The spaces where the rain isn’t falling are over those poor farmers land that missed their rain payments and so now they don’t get any. No pay, no rain. It’s going to take a lot of trips to the back of the 7-11 and a lot of those plastic water bottles to make up for that lost rainfall for those poor folks. Crops don’t grow themselves, they need that water. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy farmers out there. It also looks like there’s going to be some more politicians out of work soon. I wonder if they’ll take up farming. Probably not.