God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  Even so, for the most part, people in the heartland who live close to nature want to protect and conserve it, and they are willing to err on the side of caution and make some sacrifices. They’d just like some honest answers to their legitimate questions. For instance …

  Are the scary predictions really likely, or are they worst-case scenarios taken to the nth degree for propaganda purposes? How much of the changing climate is really due to humans and how much is due to naturally occurring climate cycles or other natural phenomena such as volcanoes?

  Exactly how much money and personal freedom are we expected to hand over to the government in exchange for promises of environmental salvation, and are those costs being deliberately understated? Would the miniscule dent that such action might make in CO2 levels make enough difference to be worth the tremendous cost to our economy, lifestyles, and freedom? Or would that money be better spent preparing to deal with whatever climate change might come anyway?

  You’ll notice that none of those questions is predicated on “denying climate change.” If environmental activists really want to reduce global warming, it might help if they’d quit turning their flamethrowers on so many straw men.

  Climate change isn’t the only field in which the environmental movement has claimed to represent unassailable scientific truth, only to be brought up short by new data.

  For years, we were told that biofuels were the future. Skeptics who questioned whether it took more energy to create a gallon of fuel from corn than was generated by burning it were dismissed. But as we devoted more and more of our food crops to energy production, we discovered yet again that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Science!) In this case, so-called environmentalist policies hurt the poor when the supply of corn and other grains fell, causing skyrocketing food prices and shortages that led to riots in undeveloped nations. At this writing, the European Union has just agreed to limit biofuels, for those reasons and also because they were found to make some engines run less efficiently, to cause more pollution than expected, and to harm the environment and contribute to global warming, due to the need for clear-cutting more farmland.

  Likewise, we were told that solar and wind power were the renewable energy alternatives to coal- and gas-fired power plants. Billions of our tax dollars were ladled out to well-connected cronies in those “green” industries—“green” meaning money. But solar and wind can’t generate enough power on a consistent basis to meet demand, and electricity can’t be stored. When the clouds appear or the wind stops blowing, the juice stops flowing as well, so we still need the coal- and gas-powered plants. The Germans nearly lost their lederhosen trying to convert to a wind-power society. Even though the program was already an expensive disaster, the German government pressed on after environmentalists insisted that the nation’s nuclear power plants be shut down in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuke plant disaster in Japan. Apparently, nobody bothered to calculate the odds of a tsunami striking Germany. Or maybe they were just planning for that twenty-foot rise in sea levels that Al Gore predicted.

  Here’s another thing the environmentalists failed to anticipate: Spinning wind turbines are a landscape-sized Cuisinart for birds and bats, slicing and dicing them faster than Ron Popeil. It’s a federal crime to shoot a bald eagle, our national bird, or for most of us to possess even one of its feathers, but environmentalists don’t seem to mind very much when they’re felled by windmill blades, in the interest of green energy and all that (when it became known that wind farms were Freddy Kruegering golden and bald eagles, the Obama administration took swift action to save the environment and granted wind farm companies a thirty-year exemption to the eagle-killing ban [Los Angeles Times, “Wind Farms Get Extended Leeway on Eagle Deaths,” December 6, 2013]). Likewise, solar panels in the desert sun can flash-fry a bird crispier than Colonel Sanders ever dreamed. But if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, and I guess if you want to protect Mother Nature, you have to kill a few million birds and bats.

  Well-intentioned “green” forest management, which bans the use of firebreaks in forest areas and leaves dead trees and underbrush untouched to serve as kindling, contributes greatly to the sweeping damage done by wildfires. When a fire rages and equipment needs to be brought in, we should recognize that building a few roads through the woods might have been a good idea. Of course, the environmentalists responsible for piling up all that kindling and blocking access to fire trucks blame the growing number of wildfires entirely on global warming. As governor of a timber state like Arkansas, I can attest to the stupidity of many of the policies of the federal government to “save the trees!” Problem is, without some thinning out of the trees, there won’t be adequate sun for trees to grow and much of the forest will die. After an exceptionally bad ice storm in 2000 which destroyed tens of thousands of acres of forest representing millions of board feet of timber, our state fought the feds continually to allow access to the federal forest lands so the dead trees on the ground could be hauled out for lumber, firewood, and to help preserve the forest itself. The presence of dead and rotting trees on the ground is not only extremely dangerous as a source of ready-made fuel for a massive forest fire, but bugs and beetles that inhabit dead trees can destroy the live ones. Getting those dead trees out of the forests was common sense to the folks in Bubba-ville; but in Bubble-ville, that would have meant “disturbing the natural setting.”

  I could go on and on, citing statements from people who claimed to have irrefutable scientific proof on their side (“Due to ocean depletion, tuna will cost eighty dollars a can by the 1980s!”), only to end up with egg on their faces when new data appeared or the planetary ecosystem proved to be more complicated than they realized. I well remember my college days in the early seventies how we were told that it was an absolute fact that we were experiencing global cooling, and the covers of Newsweek and Time touted the imminent danger of our planet becoming a big popsicle. Maybe this is why hyperenvironmentalists are so desperate to shut down any further discussion that might give rise to new, contradictory data (i.e., “science”). This attitude is nothing new. The progressive environmentalist movement had a spiritual forefather in the theologian Philipp Melanchthon, who wrote in 1541 that “wise governments ought to repress impudence of mind.” He was suggesting that government power be wielded to silence the crazy claim by Copernicus that the Earth went around the sun instead of the other way around, as was the consensus of all learned men and governments at the time.

  Recall, it hasn’t been that long since the self-proclaimed scientific “experts” were telling us that chocolate, coffee, eggs, coconut oil, and butter were killing us. Now, they’re practically considered health foods by many nutritionists, as long as we stay at a reasonably healthy weight. Even bacon is suddenly okay to eat, at least at this writing. And those “experts” may change their minds yet again. Remember, they’re the ones who told us that oat bran would make us live forever. Luckily, those of us from Paula Deen country never paid any attention to the food alarmists in the first place. You may take away our plane tickets, our coal industry, and our SUVs, but keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off our butter!

  For those of us from the land of God, guns, grits, and gravy, being told we need to ride a bicycle and live in a tree stump by an environmental lobbyist in a Gucci suit or an aging hippie who hasn’t been outside the San Francisco city limits since Jerry Garcia died goes over about as well as Pee-wee Herman lecturing George Foreman on how to throw a punch. While environmental activist groups lobby Congress to spend more of other people’s tax money on protecting species and habitats, the people putting up their own money to do just that are the hunters and fishermen who have a vested interest in keeping forests thick, waterways clean, and wildlife plentiful.

  According to the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, there are around 34 million hunters and anglers in America, who generate a total of $25 billion a year in federal, state, and local tax revenues. They spend ove
r a billion dollars annually just on licenses, permits, stamps, and tags, much of it going to pay for conservation and management of wildlife habitats and waterways. If that’s not enough, there are nearly 600,000 members of Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit group for duck hunters that generates nearly $180 million a year, at least 80 percent of which goes directly to habitat conservation. Full disclosure here: I’m a Life Member of Ducks Unlimited, a Life Member of Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.), and a member of the National Wild Turkey Federation. In fact, maybe I should add another “G” to God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: Game. Because God gives us game that we shoot with guns and serve with grits and gravy. Gooood.

  I’m sorry if that sounds cruel to any vegan readers (And are there any? Raise your hands, if you have the strength), but that’s what nature is really like. Humans are part of the natural world, just as much as the spotted owl and the snail darter, only our place is higher on the food chain. I feel a twinge of sadness before pulling the trigger and killing a deer or duck, but I know that my family and I will eat the meat and give thanks for it. It’s far kinder to cull the herd with a quick lethal shot than to let overpopulation lead to slow death by starvation. (Some animal rights groups want to shoot deer with birth control darts instead, which can cost up to $1,000 per deer per season—but then, government-paid birth control is some people’s answer to everything.) I also like to think that given the choice, game animals would prefer a quick death by a hunter to being ripped apart by some less humane predator, like a wolf or a mountain lion. Again, I hate to disillusion those who learned about nature from Disney cartoons, but the real natural world is often cruel and painful.

  Out in Bubba-ville, the natural environment of the great outdoors isn’t some abstract concept that we imagine we can control at long distance through legislation. We “interact” with it every day. It’s the forests, the fields, the farms, the mountains, the lakesides, and the riverbanks where we grew up and where our children will grow up. It’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening; but it’s our home, it’s where we’re closest to God, and we would no more let the EPA tell us we have to get off of it than we’d let someone come in and pave over it.

  That bearded guru of backwoods life, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, perfectly expressed our attitude toward Mother Nature in all her unpredictability in his book, Happy, Happy, Happy. He recounted the day a real estate agent took him out to see a house that was down a dirt road, deep in the forest, and next to a river, a location that many environmental lobbyists would recoil from (it was so remote, there wasn’t even a Starbucks!), but which Robertson described as “absolutely perfect.” He wrote:

  The real estate lady sensed my excitement and told me, “Now, Mr. Robertson, I’m required by law to inform you that this home sits in a floodplain.”

  “Perfect,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want it if it didn’t.”

  It’s one of the reasons I love Phil Robertson. He makes sense to me, but the elites will never “get him.” Give thanks to God, and pass the grits!

  14

  School’s Out

  MASS EXODUS FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  BILL CLINTON AND I BOTH attended Miss Marie’s kindergarten and started first grade at the Brookwood Elementary School in Hope, Arkansas. Clinton never finished the first grade there since he moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, that year. That means Clinton was a dropout from the school where I spent six years. Okay, that sounds a bit harsh and unfair, but we both did have our starts in a public school in a small town. We were not alone. Most kids of my generation went to public schools. There was really no other choice in my community and frankly, there didn’t need to be. The public schools of Hope, Arkansas, in the fifties and sixties reflected values that were bedrock American, Judeo-Christian, patriotic, and traditional.

  We started each day with a prayer, and said another one on the way to the lunchroom. We recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag every day and heard a reading from the Bible. We had guest speakers in assemblies, some of them guest ministers doing a church revival in one of the local churches that week, and they would give us a spiritual message. The Gideons came to our school and handed New Testaments to every fifth grader. We were required to say, “Yes, Ma’am” and “No, Ma’am”; “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir” to adults—whether it was teachers, parents, or the janitor. If we misbehaved, we got a paddling at school (yes, we really got those), and in my case, one at school meant an automatic repeat at home. We had cake and Jell-O on our plates in the lunchroom and whole milk. We had popsicles in the afternoon recess. But no one ever got shot and we didn’t have armed guards on the campus.

  I am a product of the public schools. My sister taught for thirty-eight years in public schools before retiring. Two of my aunts were public schoolteachers. And all three of my own children attended the public schools of Arkansas their entire first grade through twelfth grade. In fact, I was the first Arkansas governor in fifty years whose own children attended the public schools of our state exclusively. When the teacher’s unions of Arkansas would oppose me and virtually everything I ever did for education, I would remind the public (especially some of the left-of-center partisan Democrats who doubted my support for education) of that fact.

  I’m so very grateful for the public schools and the public schoolteachers I was blessed to have as a kid growing up. Because of the opportunity to have access to a good and challenging education, I was able to do something no male in my entire paternal lineage had ever done: I graduated from high school. That’s right—upstream from me, no male in my paternal ancestry had ever finished high school, much less went to college.

  After I tried a few teenage jobs such as stocking shelves and cleaning the local JCPenney store, or catching chickens and hauling hay with one of my friends who lived on a farm, or unloading a truck full of strawberries, I wanted to know, “What do I have to do so I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life?” When I was told I would have to get a good education, I was highly motivated! And I was fortunate to be able to access a good education in the public schools, because my family would not have been able to afford an alternative. It’s one of the reasons that I do understand the importance of good public schools. If we can’t make them work, then we need to create options for the parents, whether through vouchers, tax credits, or another way, so every parent can make a good decision for the education of their children.

  I wish I could say that the public schools are where my grandchildren will be great as well, but I can no longer say that what was perfectly fine for my generation and for my children’s generation is perfectly fine for my grandchildren’s generation. In some communities, perhaps; but in most of America’s communities, parents cannot confidently send their children to a public school unless they are prepared to undo the damage done each day to values and mores the parents are attempting to instill in their children.

  Parents are ditching the very schools that they once attended and, in many cases, spending large sums of money out of pocket to receive what they already have paid for in taxes to their state and local community.

  Some of the reasons parents give up on the schools they are already paying for and opting to pay twice for their children to have an education is the sheer insanity of some of the policies the “educrats” create. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the truly nutty attitudes some schools have adopted regarding violence and guns. Don’t misunderstand—guns and violence are serious issues on a school campus, but I’m talking about something that defies common sense and makes one believe that morons are running the schools.

  Fourteen-year-old Andrew Mikel did what every bored teenage boy has done since the dawn of time: In February 2011, he used his fountain pen tube to blow some small plastic pellets at three classmates during lunch period. Sure, his miniature blowgun was childish and annoying, but completely harmless. But not to school officials! Oh, no! Andrew was not only expelled for possession and use of a weapon, he’s also charged with three counts of assault. The
officials insist that under the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, Andrew’s pen tube was a “projectile weapon,” “used to intimidate, threaten or harm others,” and he had to be expelled to insure a safe learning environment [The Washington Post, “Plastic Pellet Incident at Va. School Ends in Expulsion, Assault Charges,” February 1, 2011]. He’s now being homeschooled, which sounds like a darn good idea. I guess he’s lucky he didn’t throw a spitball. He might’ve been accused of a biological weapons attack.

  From a Pop-Tarts gun (there was actually a case [New York Daily News, “Boy Suspended for Chewing Pop-Tart into Shape of a Gun, Gets Lifetime NRA Membership,” May 31, 2013] where a student was suspended because he bit his Pop-Tarts into the shape of a gun!) to a picture of a rifle on a T-shirt, schools have punished students for anything that even resembles a gun. But this may be the screwiest story of all. The Rutherford Institute is suing a Chicago-area school district on behalf of veteran second-grade teacher Doug Bartlett. He was suspended without pay by Washington Irving Elementary School for violating the zero-tolerance policy on “possessing, carrying, storing or using a weapon.” And what was his crime? He brought his toolbox to school to give his kids a lesson on how pliers, wrenches, and screwdrivers are used. He didn’t even have a nail gun. When he wasn’t demonstrating the tools, they were secured on a high shelf, out of reach, and the students never even touched them. A spokesman called Bartlett’s suspension a “zealous misapplication of misguided zero tolerance policies.” [The Christian Science Monitor, “When Is a Tool a Weapon? Chicago Court Throws Out Teacher’s Discipline Case,” April 18, 2014]. But you know who I really feel sorry for? The kids in that school district’s high school shop class. How do they cut boards? With their teeth?