Shannon Nickinson
Here we are, facing the Hayseed Factor again.
Just when our own congressman, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, was on the big stage thanks to his position as chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee during an epic shameful scandal about the way the VA medical system treats veterans, he had to go and do it.
Make us looks like hayseeds again, uttering this bon mot of wisdom on MSNBC:
“Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Were there men that were causing — were there, were there cars running around at that point that were causing global warming? No. The climate has changed since Earth was created.”
If only Jeff had paid attention in science class at the University of Florida. Or even in high school a little. Heck, if he even bothered to watch “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” on Fox TV on Sunday nights, he’d clearly know why the dinosaurs went extinct.
It was an asteroid, Jeff, that crashed into the Earth. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, noted astrophysicist and host of “Cosmos,” a reboot of the program created by his mentor, Carl Sagan.
Neil paid attention in science class. ALL of them, actually. He knows — and explains beautifully, by the way — the difference between weather and climate.
Watch www.cosmosontv.com and learn.
But Miller isn’t alone in being afflicted by science-phobia, especially here in ye olde Panhandle.
On May 1, Eric Hovind took to Piedmont Road to persuade folks that the washing away of their topsoil and roadbed was proof of how the biblical flood for which Noah built the ark could have created the Grand Canyon in 40 days and 40 nights.
As opposed to the millions of years geologists say it took to carve that beautiful canyon through the Earth’s crust.
It’s probably not what the folks who saw 26 inches of rain wash away their street and flood their homes in April wanted to hear. You can watch it here.
The Hovind name is familiar to Pensacolians. His father, Ken Hovind, was the founder of a creationist museum that supported the position that dinosaurs and humans shared the Earth.
Kent Hovind is serving time in federal prison for income tax evasion. He never paid payroll taxes for his employees because, he claimed in court, everything he owned — including his business — belonged to God, who didn’t require him to pay income taxes.
Guess his literal reading of the Good Book stopped before that bit about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.
What is most bothersome to me is not that these incidents serve to open us up to mockery.
We live in Florida, a state that attracts weird like blood draws mosquitoes.
What is more troubling to me — and what should be more troubling to all of us — is that these incidents serve to further the perception that science runs into a dead zone when it gets to the Panhandle.
And that, friends, is economic suicide.
The world in which we compete for industry, business and economic development is a wired world.
If we want to draw the thinkers and doers from Austin or Atlanta or Nashville, we can’t afford to let this be the viral video we send out into the world.
On the 2014 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, 53 percent of Escambia County fifth-graders were proficient in science. For eighth-graders it was 45 percent.
When businessmen see that data, when they see Jeff Miller and Eric Hovind, they will do worse than crack jokes at our expense.
They will dismiss us as an intellectual backwater, a place where good ideas don’t get off the ground because people are still arguing about whether the Earth is 6,000 years old.
They will write us off.
Then the joke really will be on us.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of www.progresspromise.com in Pensacola. Follow her at twitter.com/snickinson. Her column appears courtesy of Context Florida.
One comment
Lori Wallace
June 22, 2014 at 3:23 pm
Excellent, well reasoned, and fact based commentary. We need more of this, and much less of the Jeff Miller’s in our state.
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