On Saturday, January 2nd, a group of armed men occupied the stone-walled offices of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Harney County, Oregon. Created by President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, to protect egrets and other birds from hunters who sold their plumes to clothing manufacturers, the refuge is centered on wetlands in a region that is mainly high desert. At more than ten thousand square miles, Harney County is bigger than eight states, including New Jersey…. About seventy-seven hundred people live there; more than ninety per cent of them are white and the rest are nearly all Native American or Latino. Three-quarters of the county consists of federal land, which is owned and directly administered by the United States government. – Jedediah Purdy in The New Yorker
This protest in The Beaver State got me all excited, I’ll admit it. Had half a mind – about what it’d take – to grab my gear and haul ass to wherever the hell they’re holed up. You always hear about the angry old white men in Florida. Well, it’s true. Although I’m angry about a whole lot of different shit than most of my neighbors are. So, this stand-off is a perfect opportunity to have my voice heard.
Angry Old White Male Lives Matter!!!
Like those ranchers, I think mandatory sentencing is a draw-bridge too far. Five years in the Federal pen for arson. Really? Nobody got hurt.
Looking on the bright side, they can meet some interesting people.
Hereabouts, an old white male got angry at six of his neighbors, shot a pistol into the air twice and is now facing a one-hundred-and-twenty-year (120) sentence. That’s mandatory. Of course, Florida, infamously famous for letting George Zimmerman walk, has offered a deal of just eighteen (18) years if the no-longer-angry old white male pleads guilty.
The entire oxymoronic justice system needs to be re-evaluated and improved. And obviously, at its core and surface and middle, is the idea of government overreach. Right? No way in hell an old white man should be victimized by mandatory sentencing.
On second thought, I visited Burns years ago. Can’t imagine the town has improved much, so I am waiting for nicer weather.
More from Jedediah Purdy in The New Yorker: ” Quite understandably, the sight of armed white men laying claim to public land when black children are shot for brandishing toy guns has drawn the discussion of the Malheur occupation to race, but much of what has been said is too simple. The deaths of Western separatists in standoffs with federal agents in the nineteen-nineties at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, show that there is no clear-cut white immunity. But the occupiers’ sense of dispossession is fraught with racial and other ironies. Harney County was largely Paiute land until the Civil War, and later settler pressure and violence eroded the tribe’s claim to lands that were nominally reserved to it. The age of settlement lasted a few generations in eastern Oregon, beginning with the bloody dispossession of indigenous peoples and ending with the rather gentle conclusion of federal privatization.
American vigilantism is never racially innocent. Its two parents are self-mobilization on the frontier, usually against Native Americans at a time when homesteading was reserved to whites, and the racial terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during and after Reconstruction. It is too much to call the occupiers “domestic terrorists,” as the Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh or the Klan were, but it is also obtuse to ignore the special comfort that certain white men have using guns as props in their acts of not-quite-civil disobedience. After all, guns were how they acquired their special sense of entitlement to public lands in the first place.
What I’m thinking is, let’s ignore the fact these ranchers want to use public lands, lands that belong to all of us, to line their own pockets. Let’s focus on the mandatory sentencing issue.
Maybe all the mothers with children serving twenty years for three rocks of crack could heed the call to arms from Harney County.
Maybe all the children of the mothers and fathers shot by police for no particular reason could head to the Hammond ranch in common cause.
I can see Reverend Al Sharpton’s hair arriving in a show of solidarity in the fight over government overreach.
Another Spike Lee Joint perhaps.
And the ranchers could open a gift shop.