The Battle for Idaho

 

Three of the men who were arrested after being found in the back of a U Haul van near a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene. Photograph: KXLY/Reuters

As reported in The Guardian, only one of the thirty-one in the van aiming to attack the gay pride parade was an Idaho resident.  That is symptomatic of the trend in immigration to the state -- much of Idaho's rapid population growth is fueled by right-wingers who are contributing to the increasingly bizarre political climate.

* * *

It is a sad thing for me personally to see Idaho portrayed in weekly headlines as a haven for hate spewing, gun-toting extremists.  I was born there and retain great affection for the State.  My family took me to Seattle when I was just two, but I grew up listening to endless stories about hunting and fishing in Idaho.  With that family history in mind I returned to live in Idaho in 1977.  

We lived in Glenns Ferry in southern Idaho.  Our two daughters started school there and one of their teachers was a cousin.  I had a variety of jobs in my years there which included truck driving, bucking hay, maintenance of the county fairgrounds and working in the commercial trout farms near Twin Falls.  During the winters when work was hard to find much of our diet was venison and small game, and I stalked coyotes for their then-valuable pelts.

Our time in Idaho coincided with the saving of the populations of the great birds of prey which had been decimated by pesticide poisoning.  The captive breeding techniques which kept Peregrine and Bald Eagle populations viable were developed mainly by Idaho falconers.  I flew prairie falcons and goshawks and I knew Morley Nelson who led the effort to establish the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area.

As in most of rural America our neighbors were politically conservative.  They were also generous to a fault and tolerant of our city-bred liberalism.  In the 1970s Richard Butler built a neo-Nazi compound in northern Idaho, but I never heard anyone express a favorable opinion about that aberrant group, and there were no people carrying assault weapons to public gatherings.  

It is disheartening now to see the capture of government in Idaho by the extreme right, but I think the war is not yet lost.  I was pleased recently to see an editorial in the oldest and biggest newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, praising the work of the January 6 House Committee and calling on the State's Congressional Delegation "to speak out and denounce the Big Lie".