Bill LaCroix - November 23, 2005
Press Conference
KUFM Commentary
aired 11/23/05
On Sept. 22, three longtime Bitterrooters were intimidated from attending a local Forest Service press conference by armed law enforcement officers wearing bullet-proof vests. The press conference, orchestrated by the Bitterroot National Forest to announce Montana\'s first timber sale under the Bush Administration\'s new \'Healthy Forests\' guidelines, was publicly funded, initiated at the behest of the public and was in fact attended by selected members of the public as well as by three local politicians. The armed guards, according to Supervisor Dave Bull, were there to insure that this public meeting would be attended only by those he wanted in. Stewart Brandborg was one of the excluded men. Now in his 80s, he\'s a giant of the modern conservation movement, whose lifetime of work and commitment to protecting wildlands is unquestionably why we enjoy the existence of many of those wildlands today. Ironically, a portrait of his father, Guy Brandborg, who served as Bitterroot Forest Supervisor from 1935 to 1955 and an early conservationist in his own right, hung on the wall where his son was rudely blocked.
Shock and anger, in other words, were appropriate responses, and after some soul-searching these three local activists decided that it was also an unfortunate but appropriate necessity to file a lawsuit alleging that their First Amendment rights were violated. Of course, it\'s all the rage these days among right-wing pundits to lambast our legal system when it doesn\'t suit their purposes and it\'s easy for some to mimic their not-quite-thought-out arguments. Sure enough, the Bitterroot Three were promptly attacked by these critics, including editors from our local paper, who alleged with Alice-In-Wonderland logic that by recognizing and standing up for their constitutional rights they were trivializing them, and that in any case there\'s no reason why Montanans should hold a local supervisor to a higher standard than our president, who has repeatedly and explicitly taken aim at our constitutional rights over the last five years. Where, they asked condescendingly, is the right to attend a press conference enshrined in the Constitution? Well, before I answer that question I\'d like to say that I know and respect people on both sides of this incident, and in fairness I\'d like to step back and look at it in context with the larger Big Sky picture. As always, Montana is a fascinating microcosm of the forces in play behind some of our nation\'s major issues. The Wilderness Act, lone-wolf resistance to great wars, indigenous victories over superior military force and the demise of the Brady Bill all had their headwaters right here in our own personal land of the Great Divide. We also fed major tributaries to the failed movements of right-wing Militias, Creationism, and an extended period of disastrous one-party rule. Maybe it\'s because there\'s less people per acre here, and we can play out our dramas on a personal level and so can see more clearly the motives and emotions behind them. Maybe it\'s because, although there\'s less people per acre, there\'s more people per capita who more firmly believe and wish to seek out the American ideals of freedom, individuality and wide open spaces. Whatever the reason, and whatever our political persuasion, we seem to cherish our image as a modern relic of Jacksonian Democracy, where everyone who could read did and everyone had an opinion whether they read or not. Maybe that\'s why we share a collective insistence on directly participating in our democratic process, and why we have an undeniably heartfelt belief that we can have an impact. That said, I\'d also like to point out that the reason we live in a relatively peaceful democracy is because we have peaceful avenues for protest, and citizens who understand that if you don\'t use those avenues you lose them. While it\'s true that some of us have grown accustomed to spoon-fed media fests orchestrated by government officials to give the illusion that the only people who disagree with the official view are \'dangerous\', we live in a state--and a country--, where righteous indignation at such behavior is expected and protected. Why shouldn\'t Montanans feel like they can take aim at such tactics when and where they think they can have some effect on them? And why shouldn\'t we use one of our best and most appropriate paths for reasoned protest--our legal system--to do so. We have in the past to good effect, and we\'ll do so again. Phrases like \'freedom of association\', \'freedom to peaceably assemble\', \'the right to petition the government to redress grievances\' may sound dry and silly to those who don\'t read a lot or don\'t otherwise fully understand the power of words. But these words are our appropriate paths to peaceful change, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the power, emotion and history behind them. Stewart Brandborg and his father Guy stand on equal footing with such conservation heroes as Bob Marshall, Mardy and Olaus Murie and Aldo Leopold. To claim that our concerns at having such a man treated so poorly, aptly expressed in legal terms of his choosing, is trivializing the democratic process is equal to accusing us of trivializing the mountains around us that we wake up to and honor every morning. Where\'s the phrase \'press conference\' mentioned in the Constitution? We think it’s right next to the phrase \'equal rights\'. These are times of significance and decision for Montanans and for all Americans in terms of land-management. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act, after all, is just a piece of a bigger picture, where multi-national mining interests as well as off-road vehicle companies who pay their taxes to countries like China, Japan and Canada are working the halls of Congress as I speak to have our representatives give over more and more of our remaining wildlands in order to realize their vision of the Disneyfication of those lands, let alone the mere logging of them. And SWAT-style supression of critics will continue to be the backdrop to their machinations if we allow it.
I think we Montanans just have the sheer luck to grow our thoughts and expectations to fit our scenery and I\'d say that if we\'re going to continue to pick big issues to have community squabbles about we may as well take advantage of the extra elbow-room we enjoy here in Montana and learn from them. Do we look the other way when these incidents happen so long as we think we can get into some more wild places with our helicopters and ATVs. Or should we step back to consider the consequences, to our neighbors and to ourselves? Either way, we still live in a human-sized community, and so have the increasingly rare privilege of intimately observing larger societal runoff patterns that originate or otherwise play out here, and if we want to, we can anticipate their likely angles of repose. Either way, it\'s ultimately a local decision, whether or not to make the attempt.
Bill LaCroix
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