Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell this story before. But it’s relevant and revealing, and so many stories aren’t.
In March 2010 I accepted the invitation of a couple of Faulkner County people to behold the local Tea Party meeting.
For a while the discussion was reasonable. People talked of “constitutional government,” by which they meant limited by budget and regulatory reach.
Then the group made a sudden and severe right turn.
People started complaining that the U.S. Census Bureau was asking too many invasive questions.
People said they’d be happy to tell the government the number of people living in their homes. But the rest of it — age, gender, income, job, marital status … why did Barack Obama need to know all that? What was he intending to do with that information? It’s nobody’s blankety-blank business, they said.
Then the organizers introduced the evening’s guest speaker, Jeannie Burlsworth, leader of a group calling itself Secure Arkansas.
It turned out that she had not brought her hinges with her that evening.
She said many things, including this gem: The United Nations’ Agenda 21 was about one-world government that would destroy our sovereignty. She said then-Mayor Patrick Henry Hays of North Little Rock, in his role as chairman of some international municipal association’s committee, was in on the conspiracy. He reported progress to Gov. Mike Beebe, she said.
I was looking for rolled eyes and listening for laughter, and seeing and hearing neither.
Hays and Beebe later denied this charge when I asked.
But what do you think they were going to say?
There is out there among us a great fear of — and a great hatred for, and a mass spasm of irrationality about — the federal government and international alliance.
There is a sense of doom that they are coming for us and that they are going to take our land and our freedom and our livelihoods.
“They” are Obama and the Muslims and the socialists and the Kenyans and the UN and, according to Burlsworth, Patrick Henry Hays and Mike Beebe.
There is one word that seems to be dreaded more than any other.
The word is “sustainability.”
UN Agenda 21, you see, is about coming up with international ideas on how to develop economically in a “sustainable” way.
To some, that word — sustainability — is code for believing climate change is real and trying to force people to give over their individual freedoms and lifestyles to the nation and one-world order … to be forced into transportation on bicycles and into rationed use of water and into severe restrictions on one’s own use of one’s private property.
So now comes the National Blueways program.
Oh, dear. Not that.
And now comes the approval of the White River through southern Missouri and almost all the way through Arkansas as the second river in the nation to be awarded this designation by the federal Interior Department.
As advertised, the White River Blueway designation — one applied for by conservation groups and endorsed by the state Game and Fish Commission — will provide as follows: Local people in the White River watershed will be authorized to become engaged in partnerships and collaborations with federal agencies, perhaps through access to federal grants and federal technical expertise, to enhance recreational opportunities and conservation programs and — uh, oh — develop “sustainable” economic growth plans.
This designation was made in January and was so non-controversial at the time that even U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, as opportunistic a Republican as you’ll find, participated in the celebratory announcement.
Since then Burlsworth and others have said that this White River Blueway is in fact the grand finale, meaning the ultimate vehicle, meaning the big one in which they are really at long last actually coming for us.
Burlsworth told the public radio station in Jonesboro the other day that everything that has come before — such as environmental regulation — has been “loaded bullets” for this “nexus,” this coup de grace.
This White River Blueway designation will consolidate all its forerunners into a singular assault on life as know it.
“It’s gonna get severe,” Burlsworth told public radio.
At last count a dozen county quorum courts in the White River watershed in Arkansas had voted that they want no part of this menacing “Blueway.”
And Tim Griffin is now worried about “implementation” of this designation he formerly celebrated.
There are some things wrong with this “Blueway” designation.
For one thing, the bureaucratic rhetoric about what it will do and how it will work is so general and nebulous as to be meaningless.
For another, it offers no money.
For another, Congress didn’t actually pass it. The Interior Department created it and implemented it.
But it is not — it absolutely is not — a conspiracy by the federal government to take anybody’s land.
It is a well-intended, woefully nonspecific, politically clumsy federal plan to bring groups and resources together to protect rivers and water and land resources.
It specifically says that it imposes no regulation, levies no tax, spends no money, contains no authority to take property and works only in partnerships instigated at the local level.
I suspect we’re not going to be implementing many partnerships at the local level around here. Everybody’s running for cover at the local level.
Jeannie Burlsworth is a modern-day Paul Revere. She rides through the streets — in a car, not on a bicycle— screaming “the sustainability is coming, the sustainability is coming!”
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.