Nancy once told me about a time she and some of her friends went out to eat. They wanted to sit around and talk for a long time after the meal, but she had an early call the next morning for a commercial shoot and wanted simply to go home and get some sleep. She had ridden to the dinner in another friend’s car, and when that friend didn’t want to leave early, Nancy decided to find another way home. She was living in Little Rock at the time and called the local cab company, but they wanted to charge her almost $25 just to get home. She then noticed that next door to the restaurant where they’d been eating was a Papa John’s Pizza. Nancy called and said she wanted to order a pizza for delivery. She gave her address and then said she was next door and would like to go with them when they delivered the pizza to her house. The boss said that was okay, and for $12, Nancy got a ride home and a pizza.
Nancy is a wonderful example of the difference between an educated person and a smart person. There are people with more education, and who certainly think they’re the smart ones. But you’d be hard-pressed to find people with more “smarts” than someone like Nancy. Have you ever heard it said of someone that he was “educated beyond his intelligence”? Look around and you’ll see, we’ve got plenty of people who are exactly that—especially in government. (We have so many Harvard and Yale grads in D.C. that if they all got tuition refunds, they could pay off the national debt—and judging from the results of this brain trust, most of them deserve a tuition refund.) Give me a smart person any day over one with an education who lacks the resourcefulness to solve problems with whatever is available.
In the governor’s office, I often said I had two kinds of people working for me: people who would figure out how to get something done, and those who would spend more time explaining why it couldn’t be done than it would have taken to get it done! I’m sure you’ve figured out that I preferred the kind who could figure out how to get it done.
One of my staff people, Gary Underwood, ran media operations for the governor’s office. He had been with me for many years. We’d built a community television station together prior to my going into politics, and to stay within our shoestring budget, we had to be very creative when it came to making things work. Gary didn’t have formal training in television, but he learned it the best way—by doing it. He came up with some really inventive solutions. For example, if we needed lighting and couldn’t afford to buy a professional lighting kit for $5,000, Gary would go to Sam’s Club and buy some work lights, the kind you’d use in a shop. Their “color temperature” was not a pure 3,200-degree kelvin—the ideal for TV—but the 3,000-degree kelvin of the work lights was adequate. He even figured out a way to hook the camera and the lights up to car batteries so we could be portable. We ran a TV station for a fraction of what it should have cost to do it, because Gary had more smarts than he had education about TV. Had he been too educated about it, he would have known that doing what we needed to do was simply impossible on the budget we had. But Gary, not being such an “expert” that he could simply throw up his hands and walk away, went ahead and made it possible.
This true story affirms the old tale about the aeronautical engineer who studied the bumblebee and surmised that due to its size, weight, wingspan, and dimensions, it was impossible for the bumblebee to fly. Case closed. The bumblebee, in its ignorance of these scientific facts, continued to fly anyway. The part about bees defying the laws of physics may not be true, but the part about humans declaring things impossible most certainly is!
So allowing children to be children may turn out to be the best education of all. Children in rural America whose parents might not be able to put them on a prebirth waiting list to attend a $30,000-a-year preschool aren’t necessarily doomed to a life of failure and lost opportunity. William Doherty, professor of family studies and director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota, says, “The experiences we thought kids had to have before high school have moved down to junior high and now elementary. Soon, we’ll be talking about leadership opportunities for toddlers [The New York Times, “Family Happiness and the Overbooked Child,” August 12, 2011]. But it’s mostly just talk, talk, talk.
There is enormous tension between those who rail against “the overscheduled child” and those who say children need to be pushed to excel and to achieve great things. The arguments from the experts miss the point that common sense ought to teach us: Kids are different. Profound, huh? Simply put, some kids are prodigies. Not only are they unusually gifted, they can comfortably handle a busy schedule, the pressure of deadlines, and the looming expectations of performance in the midst of intense competition. But it’s simply wrong to measure a child’s worth by these sorts of standards. The child needs to sense a balance to what clinical psychologist Paula Broom calls the difference between human “doing” and human “being.” The value or worth of a child is not in what he or she can do, but in what he or she is.
Other kids may be smart and capable but, even at their “personal best,” probably won’t set the academic curve or break long-standing athletic records. Kids don’t necessarily develop according to a timetable. They may have a particular talent or interest that won’t be discovered for years—perhaps even late in life.
Parental anxiety may be best described by the term “helicopter parent,” coined by Dr. Haim Ginott in 1969 in reference to parents who were so afraid of their little darlings being hurt or having a stumble that they “hovered” over them like helicopters, ready to swoop in and save them like a Black Hawk on a rescue mission.
Debate over parenting styles rages on. Amy Chua’s controversial book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, gave rise to a national conversation over whether or not it’s better to have Eastern-style parents who control every aspect of their children’s lives and demand total obedience and perfection from them. This philosophy defines success incredibly narrowly—to the point of restricting the musical instruments one’s child may study to piano and violin. It’s fair to say that most Western parents would be downright horrified at the thought of such extreme authoritarianism, even if it resulted in straight A-pluses, perfect SATs, and a full scholarship to Harvard Medical School.
At the other end of the spectrum is the view best described by Lenore Skenazy in her book Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry). Skenazy takes the more laissez-faire approach, believing that parents need to relax and let children learn through their own mistakes, risk-taking, and independence. Skenazy once allowed her nine-year-old son to take the New York subway home alone from Bloomingdale’s. Many Americans were horrified by this approach, too.
But unless it was at night, I can’t honestly say I’m so shocked that a nine-year-old could get home safely on the subway in New York. I regularly ride the subway there, and unless it is very late at night or involves getting off in certain neighborhoods, I’ve never seen a reason to assume inherent danger on the subway. The streets of New York are a different story—not so much because of predators, but because of crazy cab drivers and bicyclists riding through stoplights and going against traffic.
In fact, the story of the nine-year-old made me reflect upon my own childhood and how completely independent we were at that age. We rode bikes all over town, stayed gone for hours, and never thought about going home before dark. Our parents weren’t worried about us until “dark-thirty.” And, remember, this was before cell phones; they didn’t have that way to track us down. If my mom and dad had been helicopter parents, they would have run out of fuel and crashed, not while hovering over us, but while trying to find us.
Sometimes, it’s not the kids I worry about, but the parents. When some parents in Colorado Springs, Colorado, couldn’t stand the thought that their precious offspring might not find enough eggs at a community Easter egg hunt, they tore through the rope separating them from the children in the hunting area and proceeded to shove other parents and children out of the way so they could grab the eggs. One “exemplary” parent
explained, “I promised my kid an Easter egg hunt, and I’d want to give him an even edge” [The Huffington Post, “Aggressive Parents Force Colorado Egg Hunt Cancellation,” March 26, 2012]. The following year’s Easter egg hunt was canceled.
A ninth-grade honors English teacher posted at Reddit a story about giving a D grade to a student for a paper. The mother of the student came to the school in a rage and argued the paper deserved an A. When the teacher asked her why, the mother huffed, “I have a college degree, and I wrote this paper myself” [Reddit.com. “Teachers of Reddit, What Is the Worst Case of ‘Helicopter Parenting’ You Have Ever Encountered,” September 9, 2013]. I can just imagine this poor kid begging, “Mom … please … stop helping me!”
Somehow, even without parents getting their babies into the top private schools before they’ve left the delivery room, the human race has survived. And if I were in a roomful of people facing a real jam—a group including some farm kids, say, and some Ivy League grads—and I had to handpick the team to get us out of it, I’d take the kids from the farm. Oh, and my friend Nancy, if I’m lucky enough to have her there. You never know when a pizza and a ride home will come in handy!
One of the great moments I’ve had hosting a TV show for Fox News Channel was when Hank Williams Jr. was on the show. I love his music, I love his genius for lyric writing, and I just love ol’ Hank, period. His classic song may say it all …
A Country Boy Can Survive
The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry
The interest is up and the stock market’s down
And you only get mugged if you go down town
I live back in the woods you see
Just my woman and the kids and the dog and me
I’ve got a shot gun, a rifle, and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks will survive.
I can plow a field all day long
And catch catfish from dusk ’til dawn.
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too,
Ain’t too many things these old boys can’t do.
We grow good tomatoes make homemade wine
And a country boy can survive
Country folks will survive.
’Cause you can’t starve us out
An’ ya can’t make us run
’Cause we’re them ole boys raised on shot guns.
We say grace and we say Mamm
If you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn.
We come from West Virginia coal mines,
And the Rocky Mountains and the western skies.
And we can skin a buck and run a trot line
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive.
I had a good friend in New York City,
He never called me by my name just hillbilly
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to be a business man.
He sent me pictures of the Broadway lights
I’d send him some homemade wine.
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For forty three dollars my friend lost his life.
I’d like to spit some beechnut in that dude’s eyes
And shoot him with my old forty five,
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive.
9
Personal Freedom—“GET OFF MY LAWN!”
CLINT EASTWOOD’S MEMORABLE PERFORMANCE with the empty stool at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa was roundly criticized and even condemned by the chattering class. It was unscripted, impromptu, and authentic—totally unlike the overscripted, choreographed, and contrived rest of the convention. Full disclosure: I was one of the speakers at that convention, as I have been in other years, and I’ve always been completely exasperated by the “nervous Nellie” approach taken by convention planners to ensure that every syllable uttered from the stage is preapproved. It’s exhausting to fight for every word in one’s speech and be forced to go to “rehearsals” where “professional speech coaches” drill the speakers on the sometimes awkward and unnatural stage mannerisms that I uniformly ignored. While I don’t claim to be the best public speaker in the world—by any stretch—I’m pretty sure I’ve done it more and had greater success at it than the people trying to tell me how to stand at a podium.
That’s why I personally loved the Eastwood speech. He broke all the rules and went out there and was himself. (Who’s going to tell Clint Eastwood that he can’t?) That empty-chair symbolism, spot-on accurate as it was at the time, has turned out to be astonishingly and sadly prophetic. I had only one disappointment about his speech: I honest-to-God wanted him to go out there and reprise his role from the 2008 film Gran Torino and say in his iconic gruff voice, “GET OFF MY LAWN!”
For many of us, that pretty well sums up our attitude toward the nanny-state government that wants to make sure we live “The Life of Julia” that President Obama extolled in the online cartoon rolled out during the 2012 campaign. It depicted a woman named Julia who from cradle to grave was dependent on all things “government” and could live her life only with the ever-present and all-guiding hand of Uncle Sugar. (As I recounted earlier, the phrase “Uncle Sugar,” popular throughout my lifetime and immediately understood by every Southerner as a descriptive mash-up of Uncle Sam and “sugar daddy,” became controversial when I uttered it during a speech in D.C. in January 2014. Some media elites who must rarely venture forth from their comfortable confines in Bubble-ville thought there was something nefarious about the term.) To many self-reliant Americans, the notion of “Julia” was a disturbing combination of insult and laugh-out-loud revelation of how our “nannies” in government must think of the poor, feckless American people—or must deeply desire to train and condition them to be.
I actually felt sorry for the people who thought Julia’s little life was something to be celebrated as a tribute to the wonderful, all-encompassing role government plays in our lives. In my own role as a parent, it was never my hope that I would raise my three children in a way that would make them dependent on me for their entire lives. I would be heartbroken and distraught if three able-bodied adult children felt unable or unwilling to leave the nest and try their wings; that my parenting had left them paralyzed and clinging to their mother and me for the rest of their lives would be unthinkable. Friends of mine who have children with incapacitating physical or mental disabilities have had no choice but to keep them at home for their entire lives. But they provide never-ending care out of necessity—not because it’s the way they’d hoped it would be. The willing sacrifices they make are extraordinary, but they would be the first to say that it’s not the life they would have chosen for their children.
“The Life of Julia” was in many ways a revelation of how proponents of Big Government view life. Intervention by government at each stage of Julia’s existence makes her life possible. From food stamps to Medicaid to rent subsidies to tuition assistance to the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program to welfare checks to Medicare to even a government-subsidized community garden, just to name a few of the programs, good ol’ Julia survives only because she is a ward of the state her entire life, as is her child. Where Julia’s husband/spouse/partner/sperm donor/baby daddy is, we never know. In the minds of those who love all things government, a participating father is so irrelevant, he’s not even worth mentioning. Government is both protector and provider. Who needs anybody else when you’ve got Uncle Sugar? (Maybe he even fathered Julia’s kid through a Planned Parenthood grant.)
We’ve discussed “helicopter parents,” who hover over their children to swoop in and protect them from every scrape, bump, and bruise. Today, we’re also faced with the prospect of “helicopter government,” which is similarly poised to swoop in and rescue us from life’s trials and tribulations. Of course, the government also has
to make sure that the staggering cost of “hovering” is passed on to the dupes they can force to pony up and subsidize the programs.
(Incidentally, it’s a lot easier to dupe people who haven’t even been born yet; this explains the stupefying national debt.)
But for many of us in Bubba-ville, we’d like to join Clint Eastwood in saying to the government, “GET OFF MY LAWN!”
The contractor who built our house has a plaque glued to the back of his government-mandated construction site hard hat. It says, GETTING WELFARE OUGHT TO BE AT LEAST AS HARD AS GETTING A BUILDING PERMIT. I understand this sentiment very well, thanks to my experience with both. As governor, I was responsible for making welfare available to those who needed it and even spent a day working in an office of the Department of Human Services as an intake clerk. I’d made it part of my practice during my ten and a half years as governor to spend a minimum of one day every six weeks working at the delivery level of state government. I also required this of my senior staff and cabinet officials so we’d understand from the ground up what we did, why we did it, and how we could do it better. I can attest that we intentionally made the process of helping truly needy citizens as painless as possible. I’m quite aware that some government programs are vital, filling gaps for people going through tough periods and struggling through no fault of their own. And while the ideal, arguably, would be for them to receive help from their families, their neighbors, or their church, mosque, or synagogue, sometimes the only fallback they have is a public assistance program.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 11