Trace Adkins - A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck

CONTENTS

CALLIN EM LIKE I SEE EM

W RITING THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AN INCREDIBLE LEARNING experience, and what I have learned is that I do not particularly like writing books. However, I have been urged by several people to do this and I agreed to, so here it goes

I stand for personal responsibility and against anything that undermines it. So much of what I see in our country today represents a hell-bent flight from responsibility to victimhood. From acting on ones convictions to going along just to get along. From making decisions based on moral principles to taking the easy way out. Thats not what the United States of America is about, and thats not the legacy our children should inherit.

In this book Ill refer to my life experiences, but its not the next celebrity confession. Ill be talking about the state of this country as Ive seen it from my boyhood in small-town Louisiana to these days of headlining concerts across our land. Ill talk about my journey from being an oilfield hand with few responsibilities (except an honest days work), to being a father of five daughters and the president of a small corporation.

Ill be touching on some of todays hot-button issues: trade unionism, energy and the environment, Republicans and Democrats, illegal immigration, the war on terrorism, and freedom of speech. Ill also have some things to say about blame games and pity parties, fatherhood and the personal conflict I face from not having had a real job since I became a full-time musician.

With me, what you see is what you get. I dont put on airs, I dont pull punches, and most important, I dont take myself too seriously. Im not in the loop inside the Beltway, and I dont claim to have the scoop on anything.

I just call em like I see em.

Chapter One

THE DAY THERE WERE NO PLANES

I TS A DAMN GOOD THING I WASNT THE PRESIDENT AFTER 9/11 because I would havelets not go there yet. But there are defining moments for every generation. The events of 9/11 were my generations defining moment, so well start there.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in my garage watching TV like I usually do. Its my morning ritual. When Im home and off the road, I go out into the garage for a cigarettebecause I cant smoke in the house, which is cool. On that fateful day I dutifully retreated to the garage with my big mug of black coffee. I watched the Weather Channel to see if I was going to bother going outside, and then I flipped over to Fox News to start my day.

I was watching live news coverage when the second plane hit. As the shocking facts came together and it was apparent that the Twin Towers were being attacked by terrorists, I felt a deep rage building up to a boiling point. I was seething inside over the fact that someone would hate Americans so much as to commit such a heinous crime.

Then, like so many Americans, I needed to deal with the 9/11 tragedy on my own home front.

By lunchtime, after I had gotten over the initial shock of what had happened, I focused my attention on Mackenzie, my three-year-old little girl. I knew that what had just happened didnt mean anything to her and that she had no idea what was going on.

At the time we lived just south of Nashville International Airport, far enough from it that the noise didnt ever bother us, but still within its busy flight patterns. When the winds came out of the north, the aircraft flew high over our house on their approach to BNA. My little girl loved to watch the planes come over.

So that day, I took her outside and went to the front yard where we could both clearly see the sky. We lay down on our backs on a grassy knoll with the noonday sun beating down on our faces from a completely cloudless canopy.

I leaned over to Mackenzie and said, Lets see how many airplanes we can count.

She was excited. So we waited. And we waited. There were no planes. No planes at all. Now, you cant keep a three-year-olds interest for very long.

There are no planes, she finally said and jumped up. Cmon, Daddy, lets go do something else.

I held Mackenzie in my arms for a little while. Then I said to her, Look at me, sweetheart, and I want you to remember this. There was a day when Daddy took you outside to see the planes and there were no planes flying anywhere in the sky. No planes.

Why, Daddy?

Today the president said, No one can fly planes today, so there are none. Todays the only day this will happen. You will never see this again. I want you to remember what Daddy showed you on the day there were no planes.

That was the only way I could impress upon a three-year-old the importance of that sad and terrible time.

Chapter Two

CIVIS AMERICANIS

T HE 9/11 ATTACKS REALLY MADE ME THINK ABOUT MY children and their future twenty years from now. Would they be free to pursue their everyday hopes and dreams without fear, without worrying that some evil person was going to plant a bomb in the mall or blow up an airliner? Were my children going to have to exist in a country riddled with fear?

Having to live in constant dread is like being forced back to the caveman days when every time you stepped outside, you had to worry about whether a saber-toothed tiger was going to eat you. Before 9/11, I thought civilization had progressed beyond that point. Yet with all this pent-up religious tension, Im not so sure anymore.

Had I been president in September 2001, once we ascertained that Islamic fundamentalists had committed this atrocity I would have demanded a conference call with every Arab leader in the world:

Listen. If this is the first salvo, the first shot, and if this is going to continue, then let it be known today that it will not continue for very long. We have the firepower to end this, and were willing to use it. My children and my grandchildren will not live in fear for the rest of their lives because thats not living. Thats just existing.

I would have put it all on the line.

Im warning you folks right now, Im willing to end it all. I will incinerate this rock starting with Afghanistan, and I mean it. If youre not going to get with the terrorist eradication program and get your shit together, and if you permit this stuff to go on in your own countries, by God, I will end this now. We will all go to our maker and well let Him decide who was right. (It would have been at that moment, hopefully, that some sensible person in my administration would have dropped a horse tranquilizer in my coffee.)

The United States didnt ask to be the security force for the entire globe. That role is being forced upon us because nobody else will stand up against the evil in this world. Thats right. Were being forcibly put in a position of responsibility because of the apathy and negligence of other world leaders. We didnt ask to be the World Cop, and the American people dont want that job any more than anybody else does.

I used to watch the television series West Wing. I loved that show, and in the early days, although Im a conservative, I never missed an episode and recorded the ones that I did miss. I dug it. It didnt make me question any of my political affiliations; I enjoyed the show and kept it in perspective. My favorite episode was when Martin Sheen, as President Jed Bartlett, equated freedom and our way of life to the time of the Romans, when a Roman citizen could travel anywhere in the known world. And if ever he was confronted with potential trouble or danger all he had to say was,