#malheu

Of course the #OregonStandoff is in the limelight a lot right now, given that Robert ‘LeVoy’ Finicum lost his life this week in what was almost an inevitable showdown between immature ideologues and the authorities they threaten.

Death should never be celebrated, and it’s depressing to see so many normally rational people saying some truly despicable things almost in glee. He was a disturbed man, if anything there should be sympathy for the circumstances if not for his actions and beliefs.

Now, on to the main crux of what I need to write here, which will focus on their vague claims about land, the BLM and what they want to achieve through their terrorist actions.

Theft of land is a common theme in their disjointed and vague rants, but this is actually bullshit of the highest order, which might explain why none of them is actually able to clearly present their case when asked. Yes, it’s true that the US government manages vast swathes of land across the Western US, but the idea that this land has been “stolen” is fundamentally flawed.

Why do they claim it’s been stolen? Because they do not seem to understand that the government is the US, it is the public, it is the democratically elected representation of the people and its role is to operate in the best interests of those voting public.

This land has not be stolen from anyone, at least not since it was originally stolen from the Native peoples of North America.

Who owns this land? You do, all of you. This is not land claimed by some invisible authoritarian entity, snatched away from private hands, from ranchers or from states. It’s owned by all of the American public and managed by the elected government through the BLM and their partner agencies.

So, when you hear an irrational anti-government preacher like Ammon Bundy who claims to be a “Patriot” screaming into a camera about how land has been “stolen from the local people”, just know first and foremost that this is absolute bullshit being preached by someone who bases their beliefs on the notion that the government of the people is a rogue entity and shouldn’t exist.

This whole thing stems from the fact these people loathe the democratic system of government the rest of the population enjoys. They say the land has been stolen because they do not recognize the federal government.

And why is that? It really comes down to a long-running distrust of any government not representing their specific interests.

These are men who are generally racist, generally fundamentalist in their beliefs (whether that be God, Guns or Constitution) generally homophobic, generally paranoid, and they generally loathe any form of progress on any issue unless it’s in their favor.

When you think about delusional militia in the woods building bunkers, Tea Party radicals in politics preaching sexist and racist nonsense while pounding their Bible, or racists standing outside Mosques threatening innocent women and kids - these are the kind of nutters we’re dealing with at Malheur right now.

Yes, it might be stereotypical to suggest it, but these men generally are a stereotype of everything extreme right-wing. I guarantee you these men consider themselves to be “survivalists”, I guarantee some of them frequent sites like InfoWars and AboveTopSecret, I guarantee they are Trump or Cruz supporters (if they can bear to support any politician), I guarantee they are Pro-life, I guarantee they are against same sex marriage, I guarantee they’ve all made racist statements about Obama being in office, I guarantee some of them are ex-military, I guarantee most of them are known to their local PD’s for being belligerent assholes who want to challenge every little thing every day of their damn lives as if it’s all a crusade against them.

Now, there’s suggestion that some locals are “on their side” when it comes to their nonsense fight against the “tyrannical BLM and feds” - the truth, if you actually listen to any of those locals who have an opinion on it, is actually rather different (and just as confusing).

There are locals in Oregon who are on their side when it comes to opinions about land, but they are just as deluded about what has happened to that land. They too seem to think the land has been “stolen”, as if it’s been packed up in crates and taken to DC.

Mixed in with the nonsensical beliefs are angry opinions about mining, about their way of life changing, about their small community being damaged... as is often the case, the older generation of a community pines for how things used to be, they always look for someone to blame for how their lives have changed over the course of 30 or 40 years, and in rural communities the entity to blame is often the distant federal government. This is usually the entity they end up blaming for everything from the taxes they pay to the pot holes in their roads, from the price of a beer at the local bar to the fact that little Timmy now wants to move to the Castro and wear dresses on stage.

There are some undeniable facts that these traditionalist locals want to blame on the “big bad gubment” that a little sensible conversation would probably fix. For instance, it’s not the big bad gubment’s fault that mining collapsed. This was a global trend. The same happened in the UK in the 70′s and 80′s, remember Thatcher and the miners? The loathsome woman might have done a lot of bad in her time in power but she was right about the mining industry. Sure, it could have been handled better, but the industry was dead, the miners couldn’t accept that, they wanted to be continually subsidized by the general public to do nothing more than dig endless pointless holes in the ground.

So, when the Oregon locals complain about the end of mining and the job losses, remember that this was not the big bad gubment destroying their local industry, this was inevitable shifts in global markets ending the viability of that industry. Sensible people would have understood that life evolves and they need to change their focus to something actually viable. If your business is declining you invest in something else.

As a part of this the locals also complain that life is leaving the small communities and their kids are “having to go to California”. Again, this is not the fault of the government, this has been happening to smaller communities forever. I’m sorry to say it, but most kids do not want to scrape by in a little town working their fingers to the bone for the rest of their lives. Kids these days have plenty of opportunity to see how others are living and succeeding in larger communities and they will ALWAYS be drawn to that!

It’s not the government’s fault that your kids want a better life than you had slaving away on a ranch for a meager living.

In the 70′s and 80′s they saw movies and TV shows and were drawn to the lure of the big city, and now they see it everywhere thanks to the Internet. They see that life elsewhere is not stagnant, rigid, backward, limited, and they want to be a part of that, they want to experience that energy and opportunity for themselves. Can anyone blame them?

Another of the big complaints is that ranchers have a deal with BLM to graze cattle on those lands. They’re angry about that because they either think it should be free, or their views have been influenced by the core belief that land “has been stolen”. Again, land has not been stolen. When it comes to the cost of grazing, BLM offers them that at the lowest price possible. If anything, the public is being ripped off here because BLM gives those ranchers use of that land for an insane discount.

I’ve seen various statistics for this, and it seems to depend on where in the country we’re talking about, but while BLM charges them about $1.50 per head of cattle for grazing on public land (while managed and controlled to prevent damage and abuse of that land) private land owners charge something more in the region of $20 per head of cattle.

So, these idiotic ranchers supporting the likes of Bundy are really only making their lives multitudes of times worse if they want to hand that public land back to private interests.

And that brings me to the final point in this terribly long post (sorry about that) - before the federal government managed to wrestle away all that land who was it owned by? Much of it was unused. Much of it was in private hands, but those private hands were a cartel of gangsters who pretty much did whatever they liked to whoever they liked. Before the “big bad gubment” started managing those lands for the public they were run by a group of corrupt, criminal, dangerous companies and individuals who wouldn’t think twice about dumping dangerous waste, about poisoning entire communities, about chasing people off their land and claiming it as theirs. It was the wild west, it was dangerous and violent and wholly lawless.