Another story from her book, about her father, Ron Arnold, a rancher who died in 1994 after jumping into a grain bin on the family farm.
She remembers watching Ron out in the yard, and seeing him “take a knife to his brand-new pickup, fresh from the dealership.”
“He was cutting the seat belts out,” Noem writes.
“‘What are you doing?’ I asked, wide-eyed.”
“The government is trying to pass a law to say we’re required to wear seat belts,” Noem says her father replied. “No government is going to tell me I have to wear them. So I’m taking them out.”
As Noem tells readers, “the message was clear: the government telling us what to do was not right.”
Acorns don’t fall far from the tree.
