Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs,” recently spoke at a gun show where he told of three life lessons he learned from people who own guns. The people had all made an appearance on his show.
THE FIRST LESSON – “BROWN BEFORE GREEN”
A Nevada pig farmer who hunted to feed himself and used leftover Vegas casino buffet food to feed the pigs that he, in turn, used to feed the city, was that brown–not green– was the real color of conservation and planetary health, and the money needed to maintain it.
“Brown before green,” Rowe said. It is the dirt, the muck, the ground-up brown slop, that produces the greenery that denotes planetary health.
“Brown is best,” the pig farmer told Rowe. “Brown is fundamental. Green is symptomatic.”
This pig farmer, despite the fact that he was cleaning up the excesses of the city to feed the city, came under attack from various government agencies–the “army of angry acronyms” Rowe called them–at the urging of neighbors who didn’t like living near a pig farm that was there decades before they were.
Rowe’s message was that you don’t have to march with Al Gore or fly on fancy jets with Leonardo DiCaprio to be a conservationist. To be green, sometimes you have to be brown.
THE SECOND LESSON – “IF YOU WANT TO GET HOME SAFE, THAT’S ON YOU.”
His next lesson, gleaned from crab boat captains he met as a narrator for the show “Deadliest Catch,” was a riff on moral hazard, a term economists use to describe how insurance increases the likelihood of the risky behavior it’s attempting to mitigate.
Rowe told the story of his one stint on a crab boat, in the middle of a raging, freezing storm capable of wiping out the boat and its entire crew. When he told the captain that maybe they should turn back, because safety comes first, the captain scoffed at him.
“Safety first? I’m the captain of a crab boat,” the captain, also a gun owner told him. “My job is not to get you home safely. My job is to get you home rich.”
“If you want to get home safe, that’s on you,” the captain said.
His point? That when your safety becomes the priority of other people, it ceases to be your own responsibility, and the result is almost always less safety.
“Personal responsibility is your best defense against a potential calamity,” Rowe noted to a room full of gun owners who regularly exercise their Second Amendment rights to carry firearms for personal defense, a lesson they all knew instinctively.
THE THIRD LESSON – “BE WARY OF EXPERTS”
His final lesson, learned from sheep farmers, was that sometimes experts don’t really know what they’re talking about. He learned this by watching sheep farmers castrate young lambs, but not in the way counseled by so-called animal humane experts.
When Rowe watched them castrate the animals using the method recommended by so-called experts, it was barbaric, as it caused several days’ worth of horrific pain for the animals. The preferred method of the farmers on his show, although revolting in appearance, was over in an instant and saved the animals from the lengthy pain of the method demanded by the experts.
“Be wary of experts,” he told the group. “Don’t dismiss them out of hand, but don’t always assume they know what they’re talking about.”
“A pig farmer might know more than an MBA. A farmer might know more about being kind to animals than a self-appointed expert.”
Mike Rowe certainly has a way with words and with common sense. He’s great at taming the left and gives great comebacks to their snarky questions about President Trump. He’s all about freedom and patriotism. He’s unafraid to support gun rights. There’s not much we don’t like about the guy. He a great American!
Check out Mike Rowe’s non-profit mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which focuses on restoring appreciation for skilled trades and those who practice them. This cause is near an dear to Mike Rowe who has a fantastic Facebook page supporting blue collar workers and tradesman.
