White River worries

Arkansas knows better than to let the federal government come in here and start giving our rivers fancy designations.

Surely the Buffalo experience has taught us about the perils of a federalized river.

We actually have people contending lately that hogs should not be permitted to do number-two within six miles of the Buffalo National River.

How in the world does the federal government propose to keep a hog from doing number-two? Have you seen how those rascals eat?

So President Barack Obama’s federal government hauled off in January and declared from left field that the White River through Arkansas all of a sudden was a “national blueway.”

Obama’s people said the designation would not amount to anything that local people didn’t instigate. Only then might it affect conservation or recreation or economic development, and then only in the form of federal grants, technological aid and collaboration.

To that the common-sensical Arkie asked: Then why do it?

We don’t trust the federal government down here except to look at lists of the phone numbers we call.

We’re confident Big Brother will see that we’re only hard-shell Baptists, not Islamic jihadists.

And the federal government is welcome to look at most-but maybe not actually all-of the websites we visit.

But the point of this river-naming power grab, according to a stateswoman named Jeannie Burlsworth of a noble outfit called Secure Arkansas, was “putting habitat over human.”

You know-emphasizing the ecosystem itself instead of the people.

Any suggestion that humans actually require a habitat-that you can’t have one without the other-is only in Jimmy Carter’s imagination.

Burlsworth believes all of this could be an international plot to trump up so-called climate change and force everyone to ride bicycles and give over their land as preserves for rare woodpeckers that probably don’t even exist.

So last week a state legislative committee room was filled by agitated river people scared half to death by this “blueway” and other United Nations conspiracies toward one-world despotism headed by Muslims or European socialists or moderate Democrats.

So the legislative committee, frightened by the scared river people, voted unanimously to tell Obama what to do with his federal designation for the White River.

He was advised to take it to a less-sunny location.

That was done on account of concern that, if the designation was allowed to stand, and if our White River was thereby ceded to a federal designation, then there would be dire consequences for us.

No one else mentioned it, but baptism was what I mostly was worried about.

If you have a river that has been designated a national blueway by Obama’s Interior Department, then you have an open invitation for some secular humanist to go to court saying that baptizing somebody in that river is a violation of the separation of church and state.

Being a federal “blueway” under Obama’s thumb could leave us powerless to save a repentant wretched soul from eternal hellfire.

That might even apply to sprinkling as well as immersion, although, as we know, sprinkling does not actually provide salvation.

And in light of Ms. Burlsworth’s concern about favoring the habitat over the human, I am concerned about whether spraying to kill mosquitoes in the White River watershed would be prohibited under blueway status.

Might that be considered animal cruelty, punishable as a felony?

I’ll tell you what would be cruelty. That would be letting some of those White River watershed mosquitoes grow to full physical maturity.

There’d be more than one White River Monster then.

In little more than a generation, the only thing left in eastern Arkansas would be mosquitoes, water moccasins and the skeletal remains of farmers and extinct woodpeckers.

There are countless other questions.

Could we keep the gays from getting married on the banks of a federal blueway?

Could we fry catfish taken out of the river or would Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Michelle require us to bake it only?

Would you have to sign up for socialized medicine before you ventured into the deep water?

Why won’t they just leave us and our river alone?

That’s unless it floods, in which case we’ll be needing our fair share of Chinese-lent federal dollars.

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.