And there's the basic problem. Metro dwellers view Central and Eastern Oregon as their playground. Screw the folks who live there and have to try to make a living primarily off the land. I can't imagine why they aren't happy with the Dems in Salem informing them of the best way to do that.
total bullshit
I've actually lived and worked in Burns and John Day; in Bates. I know plenty of people over there and have a brother who lived in Lakeview and Jordan Valley and Klamath Falls. A sister who lived in La Grande & Enterprise. I'm not stereotyping everybody over there....just the fucking idiots that want to live in Idaho but lack the courage of their convictions to move there
and this playground narrative...which I've heard ad nauseum....is bogus as hell. Much of that land over there is publicly owned. BLM & Forest Service. That belongs to all of us...equally. The whiners who live over there don't have any more right to that land than anybody who lives in the Willamette Valley...or Denver for that matter. You goddamn right that's as much our playground as it is their pasture or their woodpile.
What pisses off so many of them is that they don't get to profit off that land as much as their perspectives tell them they should. That somebody from Albany or Eugene have just as much right to say what goes happens on public land as somebody in Burns. They piss and moan about socialism and welfare, but state money is a one way pipeline heading from this side of the mountains to over there, and that money builds and maintains the roads they drive on, the fences they keep their cattle behind, and the lights they see at night with. And that includes the water they depend on that falls as snow on public land in the winter and turns into irrigation on private land in the summer.
The fabric of their lives & lifestyles is supported by many forms of socialism and public resources mostly funded by the people they hate.
I've seen that bullshit all my life...I'm a native Oregonian. It was illustrated perfectly by those fucking Bundy assholes and their ilk who took over the Malheur Refuge. An Asshole family who racked up over a million dollars in grazing fees on public lands they refused to pay, then went and trashed more public lands protesting how unfair things were.
They wanted the refuge to be given to the local ranchers even though not one single rancher in the area was around when the Malheur was created nearly a century ago. And when the Paiute Tribe, who originally owned that land suggested that if anybody should be 1st in line for that land it would be them, those fucking hypocrite Bundy's said the Paiute weren't entitled because it was
"settled law" , it was just tough shit for the Paiutes...stand aside red man and let white men take more. Good god the ignorance and arrogance behind that mindset was the perfect narrative of the venomously stupid thinking behind the takeover considering that there have been about dozens precedents about public land set by the SCOTUS...you know "settled law"
I spent 3 days over there as a volunteer helping clean up the mess those fuckers made. The piles of trash they left behind; the ditches and pits they dug; the infrastructure & equipment they broke and busted and stole. I've spent years doing volunteer work in The Steens and at Hart Mountain. I know the region and I know the people
you say people over there have to "
make a living primarily off the land"...that's fine with me. Just as long as the land they are making a living off of is theirs and not mine. I don't even mind significant levels of grazing or logging. But I have just as much right to set what those levels are as they do. So when I see some of them pouting and acting like life isn't fair to them alone because "liberals" participate in democracy, I don't give a shit.
