Life was so much simpler in black and white.
I mean, in black and white movies.
Back then, there were only two types of men. Good guys and bad guys. And we could tell who the good guys were. They were wearing the white hats.
The bad guys were the ones wearing the black hats.
And normally, the good guys had two guns, one in each hand. One gun wasn’t enough, back in those days.
And you had to be able to do rope tricks, if you were going to be a good guy.
I’m not sure if the bad guys also knew how to do rope tricks. If they did, the movies left that part out of the story. But I clearly remember the good guys being able to throw a lasso around a couple of bad guys from twenty or thirty feet away.
You didn’t kill the bad guys, back then. You tied them up and took them to jail. So the guns were really more for show. The lasso was your primary weapon.
There’s some confusion these days, about what color hats the good guys are wearing.
Some people claim the good guys are wearing red hats. Other people claim it’s the bad guys wearing the red hats.
I would like us all to get back to the days when the good guys wore white hats… back to the times when we could easily tell who the good guys were.
And back to the days of lassos. When guns were mostly for show.
Like, when the National Guard comes to my town, someday, I’d like them all to be carrying lassos.
Sure, they can be carrying guns, too, but maybe without any bullets in them. And I’d like them to be wearing white hats.
Another thing about the bad guys, that made them easy to identify: they often wore masks. If a guy was wearing a white hat, but also wearing a mask, you knew he was a bad guy. I suppose that’s still true.
Often, the good guys had white horses as well. You almost never saw a good guy riding a black horse. Brown, maybe. Or tan. But preferably white. And almost never, black.
I personally have nothing against black horses. I’m sure a black horse can be as gentle and easy-going as a white horse. But when the world was black and white, the black horses had to fulfill their function, as symbols. We don’t blame them for that.
The world has become so colorful and full of variety, it’s hard to tell who’s who.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.