Nativism Is No Virtue

Amazingly, I’ve found common ground with Freedom Caucus legislators Ken Pendergraft (R-Sheridan) and Steve Johnson (R-Cheyenne). They recently wrote in APG papers about the false conceit that you have to be born here to want to help Wyoming.   They correctly stated, “If the only qualification for good policy is a birth certificate stamped in Wyoming, we’re in trouble.”  Too bad they didn’t stop there and omit claiming  the Freedom Caucus,  infamous for recent blunders like gutting public education and encouraging guns everywhere including grade schools, aspires to “uphold the Constitution.” 

Still, they’re right that Wyoming birth qualifies no one  as an authority on Wyoming.  Like so much else, no one chooses their birthplace.  Same with skin color,  sexual identity and  family of origin.  Everyone’s entitled to relish heritage, but not to borrow glory.

Not that I don’t try.  The Reps. continued, “Ideas should rise or fall on their own merit—not on where someone’s great-grandfather ran cattle.”  As it happens, mine ran his in  Laramie County, which then stretched all the way up to Montana. My forebears were, wait for it,  immigrants, having struck out twice further east.  Like most immigrants, they wanted better lives. To this end, they relied upon the kindness of a Native American family.  They looked after my  12 year old grandfather one winter while his father went back to Iowa to bring out the family by train. In time, Yoders did pretty well.

To the extent that this story might inform my own ideas about immigrants and immigration, wonderful.  But I deserve no points for the postholes my ancestors dug for the Swan Company or the Bear Creek homestead they bought out and improved.  

When Becket Hinckley, born and raised in Basin, ran successfully  for a Cheyenne seat in the 2000s, he was vilified as a Californian—he’d attended Stanford.  This parochialism inspired my letter to the editor with which today’s Reps. Pendergraft and Johnson should logically agree.  

Now, protesters are showing up all around Wyoming to resist the excesses and abuses of the Trump administration.  Congresswoman Hageman has received her fair share of complaints about them. What has been her reaction?  When her responses were jeered in Laramie March 19, she derided the protesters as “organized.” Her apologists claimed protesters were paid and brought in to flood the event.  I attended her March 20 Wheatland town hall, which was packed with what looked and sounded to me like Wyoming people.   I repeatedly heard, “I’m a lifelong Republican, but I’m worried about__________ .”    

Hageman thereafter switched to virtual town halls but is now doing  very controlled in-person events.   You must preregister, giving your full name, address, and e mail address, and agree to receive her newsletter.  Whether out-of-staters or even out-of-county Wyomingites can go is unclear.

I bet no one except security is  being paid to show up at the rallies I attend.  I recognize many--from church, book group, volunteering and around town.  They’re hardly out-of-staters “being brought in” or “paid.” At one, I asked a mother and daughter  where they were from--Saddle Ridge, in north Cheyenne.  Most people driving past the Capitol honking in support display those ugly new Wyoming plates.

But so what if some protesters are not Wyomingites? Does it make their concerns about the state of the country any less compelling if they call Nebraska or Colorado home?  I write to  senators from other states whenever the spirit moves me.  To his staff’s credit, Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) answers, even though I live here.   His recent reply was quicker and lots better than what I get from my own. Barrasso’s bland assertions about the “waste, fraud and abuse”  co-president Musk has “found” are unconvincing and he simply ignores the fallout his constituents suffer under Musk’s ridiculous chainsaw.

Call me naïvely optimistic, but I take hope in people everywhere exercising their  First Amendment rights now. People are insisting their leaders hear how disgusted they are with their failure to check the administration’s outrageous conduct. It’s healthy for the body politic to remind everyone where  the real power in this country lies-in us. If that means that we, the people, have to walk around carrying signs, so be it. Mine  reads, “We Do Process, Not Kings.” I wish I’d had the wit and the ability to needlepoint one I recently saw on TV: “I’m So Angry I Stitched This So I Could Stab Something 4000 Times.”