My father, a Marine, turned 90 in Anchorage yesterday. May our Republic live. I am not a Democrat. Socrates and Aristotle best described Democracy as mob rule, and if you look up the Latin you will find the same, which road I fear we are on to ruin. No, I am not a Republican either, except in principle. Democracy is when the public finds out, encouraged by self-dealing politicians, that they can loot the Treasury. In the current political climate I have trouble calling myself a Republican, either, because nowadays in Idaho they act so much like Chicago Democrats.
I used to admire Shoshone County Democrats, because they had an understanding of the Republic in mind. Fred Catamessa, George Gieser, Bill Noyen. They were Democrats but they had a healthy respect for the Republic. They knew their role; they were not the leaders of Shoshone County: they were its representatives, their servants. Their door was always open: the only time it was closed was to discuss personnel matters which, rightfully, are nobody else's business.
These people running the Republican Party, at least the ones I saw two Friday nights ago in Wallace, might as well be iron-fisted Democrats from Chicago. Idealogues, power-mongers, and it scares me.
Is there a party that can accommodate the personal views of the social libertarian, the governmentally and fiscally conservative, at the same time? Is there a place at the table for the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the straight and the gay, in this conversation?
May I grow pot in my basement for my own personal use and keep a full-auto in my gun-safe to protect my family at the same time?
May I oppose abortion as an act of murder while at the same time thinking that the mother may not be ready to rear a child, and may I participate in this horrible conversation with my daughter or son without you or some government breathing down our neck?
(And may I honestly participate in such a conversation while our drones slaughter born and un-born children in Afghanistan, the same place we send our young men and women to die? Children who are just like our children?) I have had the privilege of traveling the world, and it strikes me that mothers, fathers, and children a pretty much just like us, and that they are kind folks.
May I support a gentle sheriff and support his deputies a raise while opposing the horrible militarization of our police departments funded and mandated by the feds?
I want my grandchildren to grow up better educated than I was, but fattening teachers' salaries and building fancy new school buildings have not done this in the 50 years of our “Great Society.”
So, what do we do? Does this mean I dislike teachers? Of course not. I would like a conversation about this. A very local and very intense conversation. I want to know the teachers' wisdom but I don't want to talk about just money. I want to know what else they care about.
May I support honest money, backed by gold and silver? May I advocate that a working man's wage buys the same amount of groceries every month, until he gets a raise? Because right now it doesn't: a dozen eggs costs a miner, in real terms of his hourly wage, more now than it did a month ago, and lots more than a year ago. Where stand our miners, in honest terms of living standards? Lower. That is not what their fathers worked so hard for. What do you call a person who wonders this way? Does that make me a Bircher or a Bolshevik? I do not know.
But I think I would rather drink hemlock with Socrates than tea with the lot in charge of our local politicians. I want answers to my questions, and I need a political party that will talk with me and not at me: One that offers a forum to discuss my worries, a forum with decency, courtesy, politeness, mutual respect: in a word, Comity. Our Republic is at stake. Let us be gentlemen, and patriots, and friends and neighbors, lest we be consigned to the ashes of history. I want to know my Dad's and my Grandfather's service accounted for something.
Selah.
