In the movie “Forrest Gump,” the hero is a nice man with a low IQ whose simplistic reasoning usually made sense. His response to anyone who called him stupid was to say, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
My interpretation of that phrase is, “You don’t have to be stupid to be stupid.” One can have a high IQ and still be stupid. Which leads me into my observation that we in America have the “luxury to be stupid.”
And we seem to take advantage of that freedom on a regular basis, regarding the Endangered Species Act (ESA), for instance. Another idealistic dream gone septic. Remember the snail darter?
Extremists have used and continue to use the goofiest reasoning to achieve their goals, which usually means if something is productive and people make money from it, it must be evil. And the most unbelievable thing is that the appointed government regulators cower to the lunatics.
When the ESA was conceived, it was a well-intended way to preserve certain species of animals and plants. But it has been subverted into a blind, clumsy, slobbering dinosaur controlled by extremists’ intent on driving Americans from public and private land.
It is done in the guise of “protecting” a species. These enviro-terrorists have thrown up a wall of legal riprap that blocks any consideration of economic impact or common sense in the discussion.
The famous spotted owl fiasco put 90 percent of Oregon’s federal forests off limits to logging. Northern California became Appalachia. They have never recovered.
Twenty-five years since the owl’s devastation began, the population of the spotted owl has continued to decline, and not a single enviro-looney has said they were wrong. They take no responsibility for the atrocity “Spotted Owl” has wrought. And the dodo birds just keep moving along.
The Klamath water project in Oregon began in the ’30s. The rivers and lakes became a symbol of American ingenuity and progress. In the ’70s, the Indians and enviros wanted the ag community shut down. The Indian tribe’s mechanism was the coho salmon.
The enviros and their lawyers found two species of suckerfish. To prove the sucker was endangered, and different from the millions of other suckers around the country, they found a minute DNA difference, making it specific to the manmade Klamath ditch in which they hatched.
During the drought of 2001, the deferral court judge cut off water to 1,400 farms and 90 percent of the valley’s farmland, devastating the whole Klamath ecosystem. His explanation ... “The need to protect imperiled fish outweighed the economic needs of farmers.”
You don’t have to be stupid to be stupid.
In the Sacramento Bay Delta Plan, envirofites have chosen the Delta smelt as its next weapon to take land out of production and turn it back into wetland. They think nothing of the destruction of a good chunk of California’s farming bounty.
Greater prairie chickens, the silvery minnow, Casey’s june bug and the Hay Springs amphipod are one in thousands of potential symbols for the cause. They’ll never run out. ESA leaves no room for reasonable compromise.
They use their ability to destroy and trample on their victims. They, like the EPA, are dictators and legal thugs. This disregard for the people’s rights demands a slap upside the head.
Panda.org estimates up to 10,000 species go extinct every year. Name one.
Saving the species can’t be all or none. Common sense and economic impact have to be factors. We do have the luxury to be selective … but not to be stupid. Just ask Forrest Gump.PD
