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900 W. Main St.,
PO Box 690 Grangeville, ID 83530
Phone: 208.983.1200 |
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| Against arrogance, bullying, name-calling ... |
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| Letter - Gildner |
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Skip Brandt has been calling his fellow citizens "anti-logging" and "radical" even "anti-American" and "Communist" if they don't share his point of view in the land-exchange discussion.
I don't share his point of view. I am not anti-logging or radical -- whatever that means -- or anything else he might think to call me. My father was a carpenter and builder, my brother followed his good example. My grandfather owned a lumberyard in northern Michigan. My parents and I lived on the second floor of that lumberyard after our house burned down. I grew up liking very much the scent and feel of wood. And where it comes from. Twenty years ago I moved to Grangeville because of its forests, the fishing, the rich opportunities for solitude. The house I found to live in -- made entirely of wood and surrounded by trees -- looks out toward Blacktail Ridge.
What I am against is arrogance, bullying, name-calling -- a willful ignorance -- especially when such ignorance causes harm, as in, for example, the poor husbanding of our natural resources by either private or public concerns.
When I lived in eastern Europe -- before and after the Berlin Wall came down -- I worked for freedom of thought and expression against real Communists, including former Communist officials who couldn't quite abandon their old habits of behavior. Skip Brandt's verbal indiscretions and attacks remind me too much of those name-calling bullies.
Most Americans find such arrogance offensive, if not vicious, and their elected officials who adopt it are sooner or later seen as repugnant. History shows us this over and over and over again. But small-minded people never seem to learn, or want to learn, what it means to live in a country where civility counts and her citizens can and should never be afraid to speak their minds.
Gary Gildner
Grangeville
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