Deforestation When you see the word, deforestation, you think of the Amazon River Basin in Brazil or the Congo River Basin in Africa, and you’re right on target. These huge, tropical rainforests are sometimes called the lungs of the earth, and make no bones about it, they are extremely important. Their loss would be catastrophic, but they are in grave danger. A few decades back our family went with a church building team from El Dorado First Baptist Church and Three Creeks Baptist Church to central Brazil. The final leg of the journey was flying from the town from Manus, Brazil in a regional carrier. We were flying over dense rainforest all the way to our destination, and I was sitting upfront almost by the co-plot, when I nudged the co-pilot and pointed toward the line of black clouds. “Thunderstorms?” I questioned “Just smoke from cattle ranchers burning the forest,” he replied. Yes, that was several years back, but deforestation is still taking place in Brazil. The recent environment summit in Scotland called for that practice to be eliminated, and Brazil has agreed. However, based on the President of Brazil’s pro-clearcutting actions over the past several years, few people expect him to hold to the agreement. However, deforestation is not just happening in the tropical rainforests, it is occurring every day in most cities and towns in the “Natural” State. Let me give you some examples from El Dorado. We don’t have a landscaping or tree ordinance in our town, so you can do just about anything with a piece of your property, if it pertains to trees or landscaping. Almost all of our parking lots are as blank as you can get them. Of course, there have been several studies that have compared landscaped parking lots with trees to parking lots without them, and the landscaped lots had 25% more customers than the non-landscaped lots. Dan Burder, a Senior Urban Designer, estimates that over its life a single downtown street tree has $90,000 in direct benefits, and on a residential street with trees, houses sell for an average of 10% more than a street without trees. It must be that El Dorado and most Arkansas cities don’t understand basic economics because we whack away as if trees just get in the way. Now let’s step on a few more toes. El Dorado has a relatively new high school, which is a gorgeous, well-planned series of inter-connected buildings. However, the site, which is a large significant piece of property, has been scraped off. It has one tree remaining in the front of the school. Hugh Goodwin Elementary, our award winning Blue Ribbon School, has just cut down a large pin oak tree, and over trimmed two others. But I will give them credit for planting one tree in the front. However, they need to add not cut down. But it seems the education community is unaware of the value of trees, since they cut down three sidewalk street trees in front of the headquarter building, which were trees I planted. Now let me put my money where my mouth is, which is planting trees, and if you want to join me jump in. I will make a $500 donation to the El Dorado School System, if the school will use it to plant trees on the new high school property. If you donate fifty dollars, it will be enough to plant a tree on other school properties, and it can be for any street tree on any public property in the state. Just send me your commitment of how many dollars you will donate, and where, and I will make sure those dollars buy trees. We must develop a pro-tree attitude, and plant a tree in every spot possible, and refrain from clearing the land when we develop. If you remove a significant tree from your property, you reduce its value, and that’s not environmentalist Richard speaking, but realtors and the IRS. What could be more natural to a state, which calls itself “The Natural State” than trees? Of course the history of our state is rampant with deforestation as the great east Arkansas flood plain of the Mississippi was essentially clear-cut and the huge swamps drained, and yes I know that made the fertile land available for farming, but instead of 95% deforestation couldn’t we have saved more? My uncle lived and farmed in the boot heel of Missouri, and he commented that at least 25% of the land cleared was less than quality farm land. I know when we hear about things such as deforestation, while China and India are still constructing coal fired electrical generating plants, we think we’re isolated from those practices, and if China, India, and Brazil would get their act together, we could get global warming under control. However, the problem is worldwide, and the cumulative destruction of forests whether they were cut down and eliminated a hundred years ago or last year created the problem. The earth has lost a huge percentage of its tree cover, and it continues to lose trees at an alarming rate. A study a few years back estimated 8 trees are cut down for every 1 planted. What the world needs now is more trees, and it needs an attitude that trees are a vital part of our lives, and are keys to a healthy planet. I’ve touched on attitude several times in previous columns, and of course, that’s the way it is with most things. Cutting down trees and not replacing them is an attitude problem. If we get right down to it, cutting down trees, littering the highway, not using plastic bags, and adding waste to our stream and oceans, are all part of the same problem. If we are going to restore trees to our towns and cities we must have the inner desire to consider trees an integral part of our environment. As I drive around and look at our town and others in the state, I look with a critical eye, and I see the empty lots and front yards where a tree would make a difference. However, we do have some excellent examples of landscaping with trees here in El Dorado. The next time you are downtown, look at the block north of the courthouse where Murphy USA, the former Murphy Oil Building, and the Newton Museum are located. What if the rest of our town looked even close to the way that block looks? We’re gaining on the trees and landscaping in downtown El Dorado (over 1000 downtown trees have been planted). And of course our town is better off because of the trees. Our downtown won a national award for the best Main Street Downtown, and one of the factors the judges commented on was the great tree canopy. Now if we can just keep our Mayor and Public Works Director from whacking them down, maybe our downtown can continue to be an example of how urban tree planting can beautify a downtown as well as cut utility cost. Just think; if everyone who reads this column would plant one tree what a difference it would make. Plant a tree!

Mother Nature’s Environmental Engineers Beaver are everywhere. After recovering from being almost trapped to extinction by early fur trappers, they have returned to almost every stream in our state. Environmental success stories are sometimes hard to find, however, the creation of new wetlands by our beaver population has certainly helped the Arkansas environment by creating a whole raft of new wetlands. That may cause some headshaking by bottomland timber owners, but the beaver are just trying to restore what they lost to rural development, and folks…the beavers are winning. Everybody has a beaver story. I have several. The first beaver incident happened on the edge of the El Dorado Golf and Country Club. A small stream flows from the southeast portion of the golf course leaving the course to flow under Calion Road. Well, one night beaver moved up the stream into the Country Club area and managed to down a large tree. The tree fell at about 9:00 pm one night, bringing down the adjacent power lines. Our whole side of town was plunged into blackness, at the exact time anti-environmental President George Bush was making his 1992 Convention Acceptance Speech. Headlines "Beaver Pulls Plug On Bush" My second story occurred along a tributary of the lower Ouachita River, and comes from my good friend Charlie Thomas. A few years ago a beaver control expert working for a timber company came upon a large beaver dam strategically located in a small creek where the stream flowed between two large cypress trees. Beavers know exactly where to build their dams, and this one was backing up water covering 160 acres of hardwood timber. The dam had to go. The beaver control man inserted a charge of dynamite and stepped back. When the charge failed to blow the dam, he peered in the hole left by the blast. Much to his surprise he saw a tangle of steel running parallel to the dam. "My God," he said aloud, "They are reinforcing these dams with steel." However, as he looked closer, he determined an innerspring mattress had lodged between the trees. The mattress padding had rotted off, and the beaver had incorporated the springs into their dam. Another beaver story has to do with the re-stocking of beaver into the inaccessible area of the Rocky Mountains. It seems one of the wildlife biologist came up with a plan that sounds like something out of a comic book…parachute them into the area. And after a few trials where they determined the size of the parachute, a plane load of beavers was flown to the deep backwoods of the Rockies and beavers were parachuted down into the area. Of course, with those teeth that can cut through a big willow tree the parachutes were quickly chewed up and the beavers headed downhill to the nearest stream. Can you just imagine backwoods campers seeing beavers floating down? The beaver in Yellowstone are making a comeback thanks to the restocking of wolves. The wolves were restocked because the overpopulation of elk were stripping the aspen trees causing the trees to die and inhibiting the beaver’s food supply. Add wolves and….presto the beaver are multiplying. Yes, beaver do cause damage and not by just dropping trees on power lines. If you have ever walked along a stream frequented by beavers you won't walk far before you come to a dam. Occasionally these dams will create a lake covering as much as a couple of hundred acres. Of course if that big lake is on your land, and if it floods and kills a big swath of your timber, then this wonderful little environmental engineer is not high on your list of loved animals. So, that's the problem. Beaver trying to reclaim their old habitat running into John Doe Timberman who is trying to make a buck from timber harvesting. Well, as you can imagine, trying to dislodge literally thousands of beaver who are working every night to build dams is almost an impossible situation. Folks, the beaver are winning and it's no contest. Today beaver are more numerous than ever, and next year they will be even more to contend with. The beaver were almost eliminated back when beaver skins were in vogue, but today not even Republicans women are wearing furs, so without natural predators the beaver are taking over our streams. We are spinning our wheels trying to blast out the dams, hiring professional trappers, and head-lighting them along the rivers. Even stocking alligators to try to control their numbers has been tried. Nothing works. All we are doing is wasting money. Should just let the beaver restore their natural habitat? According to a number of studies, we have lost over 90% of our wetlands in the United States, and since the beavers seem to have the upper hand our traps, dynamite, and importing alligators isn't going to stop them. We have talked about the problems beaver cause, but what about the benefits? Beaver dams are natural wetlands, and as we all know wetlands have been destroyed all across our country. Many areas of our state have seen an over 90% loss in wetlands. The benefits derived from wetlands have been well documented by research scientists. They calculate values as high as $20,000 per acre. In Arkansas, the wood ducks and river otters are now abundant in many areas of the state because of new habitat created by beaver. Beaver ponds are some of the most productive wildlife habitat in our state. Some individuals, with dollar signs in their eyes, would eliminate any form of wildlife that interfered with their ability to make money. Surely we have enough vision to delegate that mentality to the dust bin of history. I hope so. I you consider the amount of land that beavers flood, it is on a small fraction of the timber in our state. In fact, since it already is bottomland timber and susceptible to flooding, it is toward the bottom of the list in quality timber. Beaver do make a very positive environmental difference in our state. We need to work with responsible conservationists to protect the beaver from people who would do anything to eliminate them. Beavers are simply trying to restore our ecosystem, and as they add wetlands, which we have lost 90% of, they are truly the wetland engineers who are re-creating our lost wetlands. The next time you are tramping through Arkansas’s numerous river bottoms, take a close look at one of the beaver dams you come across, and consider how much that couple of acres benefits the overall ecosystem. Those small ponds are the most productive acres of wildlife habitat in the woods. Of course, there are limits to what size these beaver dams should be, but limiting the size of the beaver pond is a lot easier that eliminating the beavers, and a series of small ponds are more productive than a large pond. Beavers add immeasurable to the ecosystem, and Arkansas’s streams are much more wildlife productive with beaver dams than without them. So, the next time you hear a Quorum Court or the Legislature proposing a bounty on beaver, speak out for Mother Nature's best friend.

Pets Are Us It seems almost everyone has a pet of some kind, and they vary with the individual’s taste. From the time I was six years old, several dogs were always around and under our house, and they were varied. Of course we had cats, but they were barn cats, and they earned their keep by holding down the rat population. Some dogs stand out, and I remember several, but probably one better than all the others. When I was about 12 years old, one Friday afternoon Mr. Benton drove up in his old pickup truck with a skinny, brown hound in the back open truck bed. I was raking the front yard and daddy walked out about the time Mr. Benton pulled up. I couldn’t help but notice the hound. Daddy and I walked over to Mr. Benton’s truck, said hello, and then Mr. Benton pointed back to the back of his truck, and said, “Jack, I’m agettin too old for huntin’, and I am gonna get rid of my old hound. Y’all want this dog? It’ll tree most anything.” I walked up to the hound in the back of Mr. Benton’s pickup truck, and the hound came over and licked my hand while I petted it. “Let me have it, Daddy. I promise to take care of it,” I begged. Daddy started talking with Mr. Benton, and I knew with a nod that I had a hunting dog. Shoot, I couldn’t wait to take the dog out hunting. I named the hound Browne, but after taking it in the woods, I changed its name to Sniffer, because the dog was almost constantly sniffing. Sniffer was my dog until I graduated from high school. I featured the dog’s name in several of my books. Sniffer, the dog hero of Norphlet is available on Amazon, and its fiction. Mark Twain was asked if his Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer books were based on real life experiences and he said, “Well, these stories are about things that could have happened to boys in the South.” Yes, that fits the Sniffer story. Along the way, when I was 12-14, I had a pet possum. I had picked it up beside the road after its mother was run over. I couldn’t house break the possum, so it had to live outside and finally it ran off with another possum. I tamed a big red-tail hawk, which I’d caught in a steel trap, and it would fly across the yard and land on my arm. I was training it to hunt, but when I finally understood the hunting eagles in Afghanistan hunted in the desert, I encouraged it to fly off. After Sniffer died of old age, I didn’t have a dog from until I was out of college and working in South Texas, when a good friend in Corpus Christi gave us a female Dalmatian, and a year later, she gave birth to 11 puppies. The day she gave birth it snowed in Corpus Christi, and we had to bring 11 puppies inside, and we ended up with a bathtub full of mother and puppies. We liked to have never got rid of all those puppies. While Lara, our daughter, lived in Santa Fe, she visited the dog poumd, and was told two dogs there were going to be put down that day, so she sent them to us. Not the best present I have ever received, but I will say this, the big red-haired dog was an excellent guard dog. If a car it didn’t recognize came down the driveway it would bite the tires, and, if it were our guests, I would have to go out and escort them in. Our last dog was probably the best dog ever. Mollie was a mixed female lab that someone dumped out in front our house, and it was such a friendly dog that we adopted it. It refused to come into the house and our grandkids loved it because when they visited, Mollie would come to the kitchen door with a tennis ball, and all they had to do was throw it out the door. Mollie finally died of old age, too feeble to chase the tennis ball. We had a deaf, white kitten for a couple of months, when our kids were six and eight, and one morning I jumped in the car to take the kids to school and the deaf kitten was under the car. Yes, I ran over the kitten with the kids in the car, and it was an upsetting experience, to put it mildly. I put the kitten in a shoe box and that afternoon, we had the funeral. However, over the years we have slowly added some rather unusual pets, and as I write this our small pond in the front yard contains an estimated 35 koi. About twenty years ago we bought abound 10 small koi, and when our kids went off to college, we shut down our swimming pool, and made it into a large koi pond. It actually worked fine except with the dark water you couldn’t see how many fish we had. After about five years, we decided we wanted our pool again, and decided to revert it back. When we pumped it down, I was amazed at the number of large koi. We had at least 35 and when we put them in the front pond, it seemed to be exactly what we wanted. The water was clear, and when we fed them it was a sight to see. However, the crowded situation turned out to be a problem, because first we had a couple die, which I assumed was from a bacterial infection, and then we had a wholesale dying off the koi. We got down to two koi, and for several years we had only two fish in the pond. Then one died, and we decided the lonely large ten pound koi needed company so we bought ten four inch ones, and over the next five years only one died, and then we noticed several smaller ones of different sizes. Then tragedy stuck. A big blue heron grabbed two of the original ten before we set up a sound system, which ran it off and then the old original koi from the first batch of fish, which was at least 25 years old died. We still had seven koi which were getting bigger and today weight around two pounds each. However, over the past year, we started noticing a variety of small koi and a school of ten to fifteen solid black fish. We now have koi of all sizes from two inches to one and two pounders, and we have a school of black fish, which are growing like weeds. I don’t think the black fish are koi, but how they got there and what they are is a mystery. As a little sidebar: this past Feburary the pond seemed to be solid ice with eight inches of snow on top of the ice, and I thought it was curtains for the fish, but I didn’t lose a one.

Insects Are Trying To Take Me Out! Well, I know you’re wondering about that crazy title, but I have the facts to prove it. Of course, with Global Warming, L. A. (Lower Arkansas) is rapidly becoming sub-tropical, and I think that will give us more and bigger insects. Well, the first group of insects that have it in for me are chiggers. Of course, chiggers are abundant throughout the South and my favorite Southern Author, Rick Bragg, who also writes a column for the last page of Southern Living magazine, recently had an entire column on chiggers. Writer Bragg says you can get chiggers on a blacktop highway in the South, and I believe him. I spend several hours a week trimming and picking up limbs around our property, and this year chigger attacks almost made me give El Dorado the title of Chigger City. Vertis and I are being eaten alive by chiggers. I double-checked our bed to be sure we didn’t have bedbugs, and then I came to the conclusion that I was a chigger carrier, and Vertis caught chiggers from me. I know that’s sounds a little strange, but I can guarantee she didn’t get her bites from working in the yard. I’m kinda like Typhoid Mary. Yes, I’m Chigger Richard. I don’t think if you shake hands with me you will get COVID because I’ve been vaccinated, but I may pass on a few chiggers. I don’t think anyone has ever died from being bitten by a chigger, but I’ll bet there are a few Southerners who aren’t playing with a full deck after a summer of scratching chigger bites. Of course, today we have numerous creams to hold down the itching, but we didn’t always have all that stuff. Growing up in Norphlet, it wasn’t the chigger bites or wasp stings I dreaded, it was my doctoring grandmother who lived with us. I had to suffer though chewing tobacco and snuff juice being put on a bite of any kind, and I was nearly was nearly strangled from the smell when I tried to rob a wild bee tree for some honeycomb. Of course, I wasn’t dumb enough, even at the age of 14, to try and rob a bee tree without a mask and gloves. After finding the bee tree I spent nearly fifteen minutes making a bee-proof sack mask with wax paper taped over the eyes area where I could see out, and with a pair of my daddy’s work gloves on, it was up that bee tree. Heck, everything was going great, and I had started to pull out a big honeycomb, when a bee got in my bee-proof sack mask and stung me on my lip. Yeah, I whacked the bee and the sack came apart. It was the time to take off running, but since I was twenty feet up in the tree, it took a while to get down, and I had so many stings on my uncover head that I lost count. No, the stings didn’t nearly kill me, it was the folk mixture grandma smeared on the stings. For about a week I was like Moses parting the Red Sea when I would walk into the room, and I could hear folks muttering, “What’s that I smell.” But it isn’t just chiggers, wasps, and bees, it’s also ticks, mosquitos, and what I call deer flies, and horse-flies. Of course, grandmother had a fool proof way to keep all kinds of bugs and flies from biting you. She would take rags soaked with kerosene tie them around both of my ankles. I think maybe it did work on insects because it really did work around people. Doc Rollinson, the newspaper stand owner, made me sort my papers outside if I had the fresh rags on, and even if I took them off they had still dripped enough stuff that even after a washtub bath, I smelled as if I had rolled in something bad. But back to why I think the insects are trying to take me out. Heck, I can stand the chiggers, but before I even had time to scratch, I was attacked three times by some really vicious, huge red wasps. L. A. red wasps are like, there are watermelons and then there are “Hope Watermelons,” and the farther south in L. A. you go the bigger the red wasps are and the more chiggers and other insects we have. There may be an Arkansas athletic team needing a mascot, and if you really want strike fear into the opposing team, call yourselves The Stinging Red Wasps. You know like The Charging Wildcats. You probably haven’t met a real charging wildcat, but if you haven’t been nailed by a stinging red wasp, you probably ain’t from these here parts, and if you are from, say Johnsonville, and you line up against the Stinging Red Wasps from Pine Ridge, you might get a little shaky, when the hometown crowd starts chanting, “Sting ‘Em Wasps!” Kinda like the Winslow Squirrels, when they had a football team. “Squirrels! Squirrels! Get Those Nuts!” Until this year, I thought if you leave the wasps alone they wouldn’t bother you, but this year’s bunch with nests around our house seem to be a different more deadly variety. I’m calling them the Delta Red Wasps, and they will attack if you are within ten feet of their nest. We have a pergola by our backyard pond about 20 yards from our back deck, and since it’s shady and we have a ceiling fan there, and in the late afternoon I take something to drink and relax from a busy day. The summer had just started when I walked down toward the pergola with our customary drinks, one in each hand, and as I passed a birdhouse on a post on the way down there I suffered the first attack of the season. Yes, these Delta Red Wasps had taken over the birdhouse. I lost both drinks, and took a sting over my right ear. Then a couple of days another massive swarm roared out from a crack in a wooden fence, and I took two hits. A day later I was attacked again right out of our kitchen door. I was stung again so close to where the second bunch nailed me that I thought my arm was going to drop off. Okay, enough about red wasps, ‘cause plenty of other Arkansas insects can deal you quite a bit of misery. This week I was trimming some vines out of the azaleas, and I thought my ankle was on fire. I looked down and I had one foot on a fire ant mound. Thousands of fire ants had covered my running shoe, leg, and ankle. The next day my lower leg looked as if I had been hit with birdshot. Yeah, fire ants live up to their name, and my lower right leg looked as if it had been on fire. But, I love living in sub-tropical L. A so I put up with the biting and stinging insects of summer, knowing I won’t have hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes to contend with.

Get Vaccinated! Okay, I understand the hesitation some folks have to be vaccinated, so let’s look at one more reason for a person to get the shot. Let’s say you really believe it’s your business, if you don’t want to get vaccinated, and you figure most kids will be able to survive a case of COVID-19. I’m not saying those are good reasons, it’s just how you are mentally juggling the facts. In other words you believe the vaccine needs to be proven over a longer period of time, and you are wondering if some of those wild side effects might have some validity. And you’re not going to get vaccinated unless you have a good reason. The CDC and millions of vaccinated individuals aren’t good enough. Okay, I’m going to give you the best reason crass, money-loving Americans can have. If you don’t get vaccinated and the damn COVID-19 gets totally out-of-hand again, you unvaccinated folks are going to screw up the economy. Yes, you unvaccinated folks are going to be the sole reason for a bad economy. Just look at the hospital’s admittances and see who is being hospitalized. My God; do you want to go through 2020 again and risk not only a spiking of virus cases, but a real possibility that the virus will cause the economy sink into another recession or worse? You unvaccinated are not only endangering others, but you are a serious threat to the world’s economy! If we don’t get the virus under control your job could be in jeopardy, your stocks could plummet, and you could ultimately lose your job along with all your benefits and retirement funds. Bankrupt companies can’t offer vacations, health coverage, and retirement benefits. Those are facts. Are you willing to risk all of that because you have some goofy idea unsupported by any scientific evidence, which says taking the vaccine shot could possibly do you harm? Well, let me give you more undisputable facts. If you and the millions more who continue to not be vaccinated, then you will risk plunging the world’s economy into a severe recession and possibly a depression, and you don’t care about the millions of kids who aren’t approved to get the vaccine? Kids will die because of the unvaccinated millions! Those are more facts! If you don’t get vaccinated you will be partly responsible for the death of thousands of children, and sooner or later you will very likely get the virus. (That comment is from an infectious disease physician.) Think about that for a minute and reflect on your death if the virus attacks your lungs, and you spend days on a ventilator before you die a horrible death. Or if you manage to recover and the doctor looks at your x-ray’s and comments that you won’t be able to return to work until your damaged lungs improve, and they may never be strong enough to give you a productive life again. Still want to thumb your nose at being vaccinated? Have you ever listened to the unvaccinated men and women on respirators begging for the vaccine? It seems to me that getting vaccinated is like everything else in life. There are risks and rewards. If you are questioning whether being vaccinated is a threat to your health in any way, and you think the Mr. Pillow guy and Sen. Rand Paul just might be right, I suggest you visit a couple of places to see the risks involved by not being vaccinated. Take a quick on-site look at a local emergency room and the Intensive Care Unit. Then ask a nurse how many are vaccinated? When that nurse tells you that almost every person in Intensive Care is unvaccinated that should be enough proof for anyone to take the shot. It’s not as if this idea of getting a vaccine to keep a person from contracting a disease is a new thing. Vaccinations of all kinds have been with us for several generations. Kids can’t attend public schools without a series of vaccinations, and when Vertis and I went to Africa, we had more vaccinations than I can count, and one afternoon we had three at one time including one for cholera. It was just a blip in a day, and we never thought anything about being vaccinated. Over the past century the advent of vaccines has been one of the major accomplishments of medical research, and millions of people’s lives have been saved by vaccines. I’m ready for the COVID-19 booster, and I may be getting a shingles booster. The number of vaccines for the prevention of a variety of diseases has steadily increased over the years, and that is directly related to our increased life expectancy. Recently, life expectancy has taken a dip because of COVID-19, and if you don’t get vaccinated, you have a good chance of being part of the dip. Are you going reach in the hat and draw a black bean, as the Texians at Goliad did, and end your life because you were so damn stupid that you let politics keep you from being vaccinated? Hell yes, being vaccinated is political! Look at the number of unvaccinated Republicans and Democrats. Goofy governors who ban the use of masks, and look at the group at the January 6th Capital riot. How many did you see wearing a mask? Or you saying by not wearing a mask or being vaccinated that you had rather die than be mistaken for a Democrat? If you can give me a reason why a lot more Republicans are refusing being vaccinated than Democrats, I would like to hear it. Today, I believe we are at a crossroad in the virus fight, and the fork in the road is obvious. One direction will take us muddling along until we reach herd immunity and hundreds of thousands more Americans will die including an ever increasing number of children. The other route in the road will necessitate we take the measures to assure +90% of the public, who are qualified to receive vaccinations, are vaccinated. The way to achieve this virus-killing number is to require a vaccination passport, and that COVID-19 passport is no different than the doctor’s note that every public school child has to have before he or she can attend school. We must demand it! Until every grocery store, gas station, and movie theater requires it, we won’t get rid of the virus. Americans have always risen to the challenge, and I believe we will today. LSU is leading the way by demanding a proof of vaccination to gain entry to the football stadium. My God, I hate to say it, but we need to follow LSU’s example. Of course, most of New York City is heading in that direction, and when Walmart make it mandatory to enter a store, we will know the virus is on its way out.

The End of War Haven’t we seen this before? Folks hanging from helicopters amid the takeover of South Vietnam by North Vietnam, after we spent a trillion dollars and thousands of Americans were killed? The only differences I can see in Afghanistan are bigger airplanes, and how the South Vietnamese put up a fight. The National Afghan army basically just walked away. But let’s forget all the excuses, stop the finger pointing, and see if we have learned a lesson in nation building. Yes, after we routed the Taliban twenty years ago, we were going to lead Afghanistan down the path of western democracies. We trained a National Afghan army complete with elite units. An army that on paper looked as if they could easily handle the rag-tag Taliban. My son, as a Green Beret SF spent a year in a warlord’s compound doing part of the training. (His interpreter has managed to flee.) But before we go any further, flashback to March 6th, 1836 where 180 Texians are holed up in Mission San Antonio de Valero. (The Alamo) (Yes, the Valero Company is headquartered in San Antonio.) They are being attacked by 1500 Mexican troops and face certain death when the Mexican General raises the no-quarter flag. They chose to fight and die rather than surrender. Now let’s fast forward to the present. The Taliban’s quick takeover certainly wasn’t because the National Afghan forces were a hit with a blitz of armor and thousands of crack troops. No! It was a bunch of bearded guys riding in the back of Ford pickups. The guys in the pickups took most of the villages by just showing up, and after the regional towns quickly fell it was just drive into Kabul. That caused our panicked pullout, which is turning out to be horrible. However, if you had the facts our military was considering two months ago, I doubt you would have done anything differently. Well, have we learned anything from our latest humiliating loss to a third world country? Yes, it was a total loss, but the screw-up was even going in. That’s right. Now, I’m going to compare our country with a country, which has been down the Afghan road and has suffered the same humiliating defeat. I believe we have something in common with the Russians. Russia and the United States should have learned they can’t impose their lifestyle and system of government on a people whose deep religious convictions are at odds to the new government. Just let that sink in and consider this: I believe it is time to declare an end to war. Let me explain what I mean by war: Since recorded history countries have used a mass military force to impose their will on other people. The reasons differ, but the use of on-the-ground large military force has pervaded history. I believe it is time for our country to draw back from engaging in military missions, which require large numbers of on-the-ground soldiers. Consider this: Our country is the only true superpower in the world militarily, economically, technologically, and socially. It is obvious, if we want to impose our will on another nations, we have the clout to do so. In the past we have rushed to use our military might without giving our non-military strength enough time to bring about the desired position our country wants to achieve. I believe we have passed the time where evil madmen ruled with the desire to dominate vast amounts of land. Naturally, if a Hitler or Mussolini turn up, they must be met with overwhelming force and eliminated. However, a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or other low rent dictators can be handled without committing American ground forces. It is time to declare an end to large numbers of American troops being used to eliminate the threat of these people. We have the clout to bring about the desired results without sacrificing the lives of our citizens. As a parent, when my son was in Afghanistan, I did not think it was in our national interest to have him killed. We could have accomplished much more by an economic blockade, severe aerial bombardment, and clandestine Special Forces and Seal attacks. Consider the countries we have invaded: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. I do not think the thousands of Americans killed in these wars were worth the sacrifice. And if we survey all recent the military intervention, I believe better results could have been achieved by not using our on-the-ground military. In the past one million American heroes have died as the result of on-the-ground conflicts around the world. An overview of these wars would place only the Second World War as a war needed to defend North American democracy. Today, our nation has reached an unheard of plateau. We have the means to impose our will on every nation on earth, and if we use our resources wisely, it can be done without putting thousands of American soldiers on the ground risking death. We have the obligation to every American to protect freedom, but in doing so we have another obligation. That paramount obligation is to protect the lives of every American. We can do both. Yes, without risking large numbers of young American lives, we can influence or actually impose our will on these countries if we so desire. This is not a call of isolationism, but a call to save American lives. Why subject thousands of young men to the dangers of modern warfare when we don't have to? If we really believe we are economically connected to the rest of the world, as New York Times columnist Tom Freedman said we are in THE WORLD IS FLAT, then just being the economic powerhouse enables us to impose our will on other nations. Obviously, we must have the patience and courage to tighten the economic strangulation of a rogue nation until submission to our nations will is achieved. With the power we now have in our nation's total package, we could prevent Iran from exporting a drop of oil. Yes, some of our allies who are illicitly profiting from skirting the embargo might object, but the fact is, if we so desire, we could isolate Iran into submission. As the screws tighten economically, it would be only a matter of time until submission. The same thing is true with North Korea. If we subjected North Korea to total economic strangulation, they might threaten to use their nuclear weapons, but they wouldn't dare. They know if they did it would be a total annihilation of their country. They may be crazy, but not that crazy. Our latest major on-the-ground military action was Afghanistan because they were harboring Osama Ben Laden, who attacked us on 9/11. We did finally get him, but it was with a Seal Team, and not a single American was killed. Seals and Green Berets are the future of military action in this country along with all the other non-military ways to impose our will on countries or individuals who would dare attack America. It is time to call an end to war.

Vertis I’ve had a number questions about Vertis, my wife, so I’m going to try and tell you why she’s my Woman of the Year; this year and every year. Vertis was the first child of John and Marjorie Burton, born in Dr. Kennedy’s Clinic on Main Street in downtown Smackover. She spent her early years in Oklahoma City. Vertis was 13 when they moved back to Arkansas. She was 15 when she accompanied a friend to the Smackover Public swimming pool where the friend had arranged to meet a possible new boyfriend, and it just so happened that the possible boyfriend was a good friend of mine. I went along, to meet the friend of the friend, and I was having reservations after I found out the girl I was to meet was a 15 year-old preacher’s kid. It took a coin flip to get me to the swimming pool. When we walked out of the dressing area I saw two girls in the shallow end of the pool, and it crossed my mind, I hope the preacher’s kid is the blonde....She sure doesn’t look fifteen. Yes, Vertis was the blonde, and she just lacked a week being sixteen. After an introduction, my friend and Vertis’s friend went to the other side of the pool, and left Vertis and I sitting there. It was strange, because we were strangers one minute, and five minutes later, we were chatting it up as if we were old friends. We sat there and talked until the pool closed. I didn’t see Vertis again for a couple of week, but one Friday night my friend and I stopped by the current teen gathering place, the Dairyette, and a carload of Smackover girls pulled up. I spotted Vertis and minutes later we were in the backseat of my friend’s car cruising down north West Avenue. I asked Vertis for a date, and from that minute on, we were with each other at every opportunity, until I went back to college. That semester we wrote each other every day. In the 60s long distance calls were too expensive. I’ve lost count of the times I hitchhiked the 6 hours to south Arkansas to see Vertis. That spring Vertis took a bus to Fayetteville to attend GABALE, the 1960s spring fling, stayed with a friend in the girl’s freshman dorm, and we danced to the music of Chuck Berry in the old Barnhill Fieldhouse. My college friends were shocked because I had an unofficial Razorback Beauty as a date; a drop-dead good-looking blue-eyed blond. That next summer all we could talk about was when we are going to get married. We finally decided, since I was going to be in Graduate School working on my Masters and Vertis would graduate from Smackover High School early and enter the University as a freshman, we needed a nest egg, so I would continue to at the refinery until mid-January, which was the college semester break. We had five days to honeymoon, and we picked New Orleans. The semester started off fine, but, even though I had a part time job, we ran out of money as the semester ended. I struggled to find a summer job, but I finally did. It was working offshore in the Gulf as a roustabout. Vertis stayed with my mother, and we saved every penny. We knew Vertis couldn’t stay in school, and as soon as we got back to college, Vertis went to work in a downtown department store. But when she found out the Baldwin Organ Factory paid 35 cent more an hour, she jumped at the job. She started doing the worst job in the factory; spray-painting organ consoles. However Vertis knew how to work and soon she was promoted to the assembly line soldering the electronic keyboards. She had a quota, and in a few weeks she was meeting her quote early. With student loans and cutting grocery coupons, we made it through the year, and I managed to find a job with Exxon as a production geologist on the King Ranch in Kingsville, Texas. As we drove south, to Kingsville, Vertis teared up. We had left a beautiful Arkansas spring, and eight hours later we were driving through mesquite. Quite a shock to a couple of newlyweds. I worked in south Texas for two years, and then, to pay off college debts, I transferred to Benghazi, Libya. Kingsville was a piece of heaven compared to Benghazi. I flew over before Vertis did to acquire housing, etc. Then at 19, Vertis took her first flight from El Dorado to Benghazi via Rome. Vertis was a real trooper while we were living in Libya. I was in the desert for two weeks and then back in the Benghazi office for a week. While I was in the desert Vertis couldn’t leave the house at night, and to make things worse, the town had rolling blackouts because the city had grown and couldn’t keep up with the electrical demand. She spent many evenings chipping off ugly green paint from our fireplace just to kill time. She still remembers one special night when she tuned in the BBC on her battery powered shortwave radio. Sitting there by herself in the dark, she listened to the funeral of JFK. We made it through those two years, and then transferred to Corpus Christi, Texas. Two years later, I quit one of the best jobs a young geologist could have, to work for a small independent oil company, and a year later, after we adopted two babies, I quit the small oil company to become an independent geologist. We had less than $15,000 in savings when I quit, and when I spent $4500 to buy oil leases the first couple of weeks, which I hoped to sell, Vertis never complained. She was always supportive, and never questioned what might seem to be my erratic moves, which, if they weren’t successful, could have put our young family in serious financial difficulties. She was always an ear to hear everything I was doing, and what I was proposing to do, and when we had success, we celebrated together, and when something that I or she was doing failed, we grieved together. Vertis has a heart of gold, and the very idea she would just walk by a Salvation Army Kettle without dropping something in, doesn’t cross her mind. She also has the voice of an angel, singing solos in church at age 5, and joined the adult choir at 13. However, behind that beautiful face and figure is a smart, savvy woman, who has been the driving force behind downtown El Dorado’s renaissance. For years El Dorado didn’t have zoning, and when we started our downtown redevelopment, Vertis would go out recruiting to the Mall or Hillsboro or north West Avenue and sit down with someone she believed would be an asset to downtown and make them a deal they couldn’t refuse. The great group of businesses we have in our downtown wouldn’t be there, if it weren’t for Vertis. I guess to sum up my life partner, I’d have to say, I’m a very, very lucky man.