I have held off writing about this frustrating and disturbing event in my home state for 21 days now. Tonight the muse moves and I cannot help myself.
An alternate title for this essay could be "An open letter to Ammon Bundy". I don't want to give his name any more press than it has already gotten since he and a gang of gun toting, highly delusional and selfish white men decided to take over a huge, very famous and well loved bird sanctuary. I don't include him in my title. If, however, I could sit down and relay my thoughts to him in person (not deluding my self for a minute that he has the ability to listen), these are some of them, censored.
Why do you think you are special? So far I have learned that your father owes 1 million dollars in BLM range fees, and you owe a loan for 500,000 to the government. As it stands right now the cost of your occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is $133,000 per day. I was never too good at math, being an English major, but I can use a calculator and it seems that your family now owes our country (taxpayers of which I am one) $5,793,000.00.
Even after seeing the people of Burns, whom you purport to 'represent', beg you, in tears, to leave, you are unmoved. Is it the guns, the religion, or a combination which give you that stoic sense of power? People who need guns to advance their cause have no morals, and no real cause.
You reiterate how your 'way of life' has changed, affected like all occupations by the circumstances of our current times. To understand that everyone is affected by water shortages, land scarcity, outsourcing, corporatization of industries (like the raising and marketing of beef), and many other factors requires a broad perspective.
In case you were not sure, your pain in this is not relegated solely to ranchers and farmers. I have 2 stories to illustrate the economic challenges of working families in the west:
The first is the image I hold of my young husband falling into bed after a work day lifting a hoe-dad for 8 hours, dead asleep, dirty work clothes and all, before dinner. He was a tree planter west of Port Angeles in 1978. The logging jobs paid more, but the timber had been ravaged to where the Spotted Owl was merely an unfortunate poster child and the loggers were bemoaning their lost 'way of life'. Emotions ran high around the North Olympic Peninsula in those years, but we worked at what we could, raised our 2 children, and tried to improvise into an obviously evolving economy.
After my husband's death at 35, I worked for an independent bookstore on the Oregon Coast for 10 years. It was a beautiful store, well run and the recipient of continuous compliments. We watched the profit margin fall steadily every year as big corporate stores, then Amazon undercut our prices. People would come in and take notes on our carefully chosen titles, then go away and order them cheaper somewhere else. By 2003 the doors closed forever, and the owners left with nothing. The world is a mercenary place. Did your Mormon parents tell you that? My Catholic parents did not tell me that. It has a been a long, rude awakening all my idealistic life.
I have read that you have 6 children. I assume your wife has total responsibility for all of them during your male bonding hiatus away from real life. What are your children learning from all the laws you have broken in the past 21 days? Will you be surprised if they end up having no respect for the property of others? What about their school activities and the nurturing they are missing? And, while I am on the subject, why in the world did you have so many kids, especially if you see your calling as being somewhere else besides home? I call that irresponsible.
Given these facts, why do you consider yourself a leader, and why do others? Because you wear a cowboy hat? Because you consider yourself a Mormon patriarch? Because you were raised to 'know' you were destined for a life of privilege?
By this time you must have heard the refrain ... if your gang had a different skin color, or a religion other than Christian, you would have all been taken out by now. There is no way to end this missive, no way for me to go to sleep tonight and feel unworried about the birds I love at Malheur, and the damage you are doling every day. There is no way to address income inequality, corporate oligarchy, the apathy of affluence and the general unfairness of life. You have only made my sleep worse, my prayers multi-faceted : Please God, don't let people with guns rule our world.
