Friday's postcard, and living in the shadow of a rogue state
August 25, 2023
Kids about to jump in at Lake Pend Oreille, near Sandpoint, Idaho, summer of 2013
What Idaho is losing
From Spokane it’s hard to imagine eastern Washington without northern Idaho. Much of the money that made my adopted home city so prosperous, that delivered its early boom and architectural elegance, flowed downhill from Idaho mines. Our enviable supply of clean water flows from sources in the Idaho panhandle. It’s a reasonably short drive to mountain lakes and trails to huckleberry patches.
Then there’s the utter craziness. There’s the swaggering public thuggery, dating back at least to the Aryan Nation’s Neo-Nazi encampment at Hayden Lake (1974-2004) to the thwarted attempt by 31 angry, young white men last summer to violently disrupt the “Pride in the Park” LGBTQ+ celebration in Coeur d’Alene.
There’s the growing movement toward censorship of library books, including the depressingly moronic campaign in Bonners Ferry accusing the American Library Association of promoting pedophilia and attempting to rid the highly-acclaimed local library of 400 books that weren’t even on its shelves.
When librarian Kimber Glidden recently explained why she was leaving her job after just nine months she wrote: “Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.”
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So this happened yesterday. An employee at a store in CDA, ID was speaking loudly with a customer about civil war coming. The employee laughed after he said this, remarking that will be good because there will be so many less of 'them' to deal with. I became sick to my stomach and nauseous listening to them discuss, in a conversational tone, the murdering of their fellow Americans just because they were from a different political party. I spoke to the manager and she was grateful that I spoke up and said she would take another manager with her and speak to him immediately. Fear is an ever growing undercurrent here in North Idaho as these voices grow louder, increasenly more violent and recklessly unrependent.