TIME TO ASK AGAIN: ARE WE TO BE A NATION OF WEENIES?

It was the search for minerals, along with fur trading, that brought the white man to the Missouri Territory and the exploration that laid down the pattern for settlement and industrial growth this state has attained.

Long ago, men stopped hunting bear and other furry creatures as a business, but the search for minerals both metallic and non-metallic goes on. The discovery of new ore deposits, the great demand for minerals of all kinds and the highly sophisticated methods by which ores are discovered, recovered and made usable has established the mining industry as one of the most important in Missouri. The mining industry of Missouri also tells its own story of hope and heartache, joy and dejection, and the characteristics of the rugged individualists who built it.

From "Underground Treasures: The Story of Mining in Missouri, excerpted from the 1977-78 Official Manual of the State of Missouri,

by then-Secretary of State Jim Kirkpatrick, the Show Me State's

longtime "Mr. Democrat"

It used to be among the proud boasts of every Missourian that our state is a major mining center. The Show Me State has long been first in America in the mining and production of lead.

Back when the primary business of schools was teaching youngsters, rather than "making sure they feel good about themselves," every school child learned of the importance of mining in the state's history. Thousands made it along on a fascinating field trip to the Lead Belt area, there to descend into a wonderfully mysterious, subterranean world, the better to gain first-hand knowledge of this vital industry. I still remember my trip, back in the late '60s, and how absorbing it was down there, deep in the cool wonders, below the town of Bonne Terre. 8th graders took a class called Missouri History (do they still?) in which this, among other salient facts about our state's magnificent heritage, were drilled into them.

As recently as 1980, I was managing a long-shot challenger's campaign in the old 10th congressional district of Southeast Missouri. Everywhere we went that long year of seven-day weeks and 16-hour days, the candidate faced the now-familiar charge of being a "carpetbagger" (our guy had spent his entire adult life in Washington, moving back to Missouri at the end of 1979 to run for Congress).

To this charge, Bill Emerson answered, "Not only am I a Missouri native, reared in Hillsboro and educated in the public schools here," (next came the candidate's proudest boast, as indicative of his strong heritage of having come from "real" Missouri stock) "but my stepfather is a miner with St. Joe Lead, worked for them for 43 years until he retired. It's the only job he ever had ... He and Mom a retired public school teacher live over in Viburnum, at the western edge of Iron County."

Does that proud boast of a mining heritage sound a tad dated now? It does if you're a Sierra Clubber. Cape Girardeau was host a couple of weekends ago to a meeting of the state's Sierra Club crowd, which seeks to exterminate every last mining job in Missouri and, one must assume, America and the world. Mining is bad real, real bad and lead mining is positively horrific, if you listen to the freaks, nut cases and Chicken Littles who populate the Sierra Club.

At that meeting of Missouri's Sierra Clubbers held here two weeks ago, our reporter quoted a key club official, Dan Lehocky of St. Louis. The article had this quote from Mr. Lehocky, who is identified as conservation chairman for the state chapter of the Sierra Club:

"`We have to stop thinking of lead as a natural resource and start thinking of it as a toxin,' [Lehocky] said.

"`Lehocky said the Sierra Club is working to make sure no new mines start up and more recycling of lead takes place.' He said the club will lobby, monitor, appeal, harass and publicize to reach that goal."

That Page One article was adjacent another ("Group continues call for timber harvest ban"); this one related the anti-timber efforts of the Sierra Clubbers' soulmates who call themselves the "Shawnee Defense Fund" over in Southern Illinois. Should you care, you can read about the cranks who perch 50-feet up in a tree to hold a "tree-top press conference" about the dangers of harvesting trees the renewable resource in our forests.

It's worth noting that the protesters tend to be elites well-paid people with time on their hands whose incomes derive from tax-paid sources, such as university faculty. The miners whose jobs they eliminate typically never got close to a college or university.

Is there a common thread in these incidents? I ask a question I've asked here before. We Americans are descendants of hardy pioneers, of great men and women who tamed a vast wilderness with nothing more than a horse, a plow and a Bible. After all this, are we Americans becoming a nation of weenies?

Have we come all this way to be a nation of weenies? Shall we be terrified of a little harmless Alar on our lunch apples? Should we be taught to fear lead as a dread toxin instead of a resource to be mined? Are we to refrain from ever harvesting mature timber, so that new and more vibrant, hardier and faster-growing trees can be planted in their place?

I note that it is November, and November means deer season, and many of my friends are out deer hunting. (I am no hunter and have never been, and may never go, after these four-legged creatures.) And our deer hunting friends are hunting a critter whose population is simply exploding. Decades of the finest conservation management techniques (including hunting) have left us with more deer than ever. In a cover story, USA Today estimates that the U.S. deer population is at 14 million, a high for this century.

Here in Cape County and across the country, one reads stories that there are more collisions between deer and cars than ever before. Farmers, orchard owners and suburbanites are complaining of deer eating all manner of green, growing things, to the point of causing real economic losses in the tens of millions of dollars.

The animal rights activists are taking to the woods to protest deer and other hunting, disrupting this lawful activity just as their soulmates do the legal harvesting of trees.

I repeat: Are we, the descendants of great pioneers, becoming a nation of weenies?

MDBR