unPHILtered: The Way I See It by Phil Robertson Read Free Book Online Page B

told them not to be nosy.
    I’ve made it my ambition to live a quiet life. Once the Duck Dynasty cameras are turned off for the final time, Miss Kay and I are still going to be living in the same place we were before, in the same house on the banks of the Ouachita River. I’m going to wake up every morning, spend most of my day in the woods or on the river, and then enjoy a quiet evening. There won’t be a cell phone attached to my hip. I’m going to be doing the same things when I’m old and gray. Here is one of the few bits of advice I’m ever going to give the news media: Write anything you want about me, good or bad, on your websites and blogs. I don’t own a cell phone or computer, so I’m not privy to that information. I’m not hearing you—ever! You might as well not say it.
    I can promise you one thing: you’ll never find me logging on to Facebook or Twitter or e-mailing or texting someone. If someone needs to talk to me, they know where I live. They can come talk to me face-to-face, instead of sending me a tweet of 140 characters or less. Seriously, what can you really say in less than 140 characters? We’ve become shallow and uninformed. If my friends and associates can’t get to my house, then they can call me on the phone—the kind that’s attached to the wall. Good luck getting me to answer it.
    You have to understand that I’ve never e-mailed anybody in my life and have rarely written anyone a letter. One day, as I was walking through the warehouse of Duck Commander, I saw six women sitting in front of computers.
    “What are y’all doing?” I asked them.
    “We’re answering your e-mails, Mr. Robertson,” one of them told me.
    “You’re doing what?” I asked her.
    “We’re answering your mail, sir,” she said.
    “All of you?” I asked.
    “Yes, all of us,” she said.
    Apparently, I was receiving thousands of e-mails every day. Miss Kay, Uncle Si, and each of my sons were getting nearly as many. I had no idea we had so many long-lost cousins in Nigeria or some other faraway land who were in desperate need of money. I had no idea I’d ever entered the Irish lottery. I could only shake my head and say, “Well, good grief.”
    One of the craziest things to me is the fact that Duck Dynasty has become a social media phenomenon. We love each and every one of our fans, and fortunately they love our show and family. But the show’s popularity has turned our quiet lives into not-so-quiet lives. Hey, it’s one of the hazards of reality TV. The irony of it to me is that millions of fans—and a lot of them are the people who are on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media—were probably attracted to the Robertson family because they saw us as people who minded our own business, worked hard, builtduck calls, and loved God and each other. Maybe they thought we were interesting or maybe they thought we were weird. I like to think they were attracted to the fact that we live godly and productive lives. I’ve chosen to live my life kind of like Americans did fifty or sixty years ago. I think a lot of Americans would like to live the way their grandparents and great-grandparents did, when times were much more simple and a lot less stressful. But most Americans have been caught up in the rat race, and they’re afraid to give up the conveniences of the twenty-first century. I think simpler lives are what a lot of people in America really want, but they’ve been consumed by the modern-day American culture. They’re living wide open and romping and stomping to make money and climb their way to the top. It doesn’t have to be that way.
    We really need to decide what’s important in our lives. Life doesn’t have to be so complicated. We need to figure out the people we want to spend our time with and what we want to accomplish. We need to examine our commitments and declutter our lives. If we have stress coming out of our pores, we need to commit to doing less each day. Hey, it’s okay to even