I was privileged last week to speak to a room of welcoming members of the Bella Vista Kiwanis Club at their breakfast session that began even before the sun peeked above the hills surrounding the Concordia subdivision.
The good folks rise mighty early in this borderline community of 27,000 souls.
And when time for questions came, care to guess the subject of the first one asked?
Go ahead, give it a stab.
"Mike, how in the world did our state's environmental protection agency allow a large hog factory to set up in the watershed of the Buffalo National River?"
And so went our group discussion for the next 10 minutes. The Kiwanis wanted to know how such a travesty could ever have happened. How much of permitting this hog factory supplied by Cargill and owned by one family in Newton County was political? Is there anything that can be done to move it?
I assured everyone of what I've repeated since I began writing about the way this factory was so quickly and quietly approved under our state's first new General Permit: that my issue here has never been with farms, farmers or swine.
No, the widespread outrage generated by this absolutely terrible act by our state's Department of Environmental Quality (chuckle) lies strictly with its wholly unacceptable location, and the sneaky way the state allowed it.
We enter 2015 with a new governor who hopefully will take a far more proactive and aggressive stance toward this factory's location than his predecessor's administration, which allowed it. Many across Arkansas and the nation continue to hope Cargill of Minnesota comes to its senses and moves the factory it supports out of our state's sacred, karst-riddled Buffalo watershed.
Meanwhile, it's a matter of permanent history that this occurred under the administration of Gov. Mike Beebe and the department he ultimately supervised. It's by far the worst possible legacy his administration could possibly have left for the rest of us. Like it or not, he most assuredly owns it.
And rest assured, my friends, those who hope the deeply controversial issue will slowly fade with time are mistaken. The nation's first national river, a treasure that lies so near and dear to the hearts and memories across our state, is far too precious to ever forget or ignore.
A lot of pit bulls
Did you see the story last week about 22 pit bulls taken from a man living in a Springdale duplex that was deemed unsafe? Yeah, I just wrote 22!
It seems neighbors heard dogs fighting in the home at Unit B of 2643 Adrian Ave. and notified animal services, who arrived to find 11 eight-week-old pups, seven juveniles and four adult dogs. The owner hadn't neutered or spayed the dogs. That naturally had led them to breed and become aggressive with each other. Big surprise! The owner surrendered the innocent animals to Animal Services.
Perhaps like you, I'm at a loss for words to describe my feelings about people who do this sort of thing to animals, especially dogs. Rest assured, there wouldn't be a positive word.
Confront ourselves
How many others can sense the same chill wind whipping through society that I feel?
The pervasive frustration, unrest and a seeming moment of truth for every person swirls in the air, even boring through us. It feels as if we each are being pulled like the suction of a whirlpool inexorably toward deeply personal confrontations with ourselves and the depth of our convictions.
We increasingly do not have the choice to hide in the shadowy corners for fear of offending others or seeming to be (gasp!) politically incorrect. In fact, it is such fears that have cowed so many Americans into silence and denial today.
I see the unfolding circumstances around us forcing deeply personal choices on how we feel about supporting law enforcement over those who want to assassinate them, about blithely accepting truth over an endless stream of lies from the top aided by those eager to spread the falsehoods to promote a mutual ideology, about the depth and endurance of our religious beliefs and about what we are prepared to say and do to remain true to what we believe in our spirits.
Our nation certainly has seen its share of these moments of commitment to our convictions dating back to our founding.
The group Buffalo Springfield explained this phenomenon well back in 1967 with its hit, "For What It's Worth." Anyone else remember? "It's time we stop, hey. What's that sound? Everybody look what's goin' down!"
Just an observation from a baby boomer, my friends.
------------v------------
Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.
Editorial on 01/11/2015