Rocky Barker, a reporter for the Idaho Statesman, frequently writes about outdoor issues, including fires, and spent a lot of time in Yellowstone covering the 1988 fire siege. Recently he was in Burns, Oregon reporting on the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the effects it has had on the community and especially the federal employees.
One person who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he wrote, upon returning from a Christmas trip was immediately ordered to take his family and leave. The USFWS had heard that one of their employees was going to be taken hostage.
It is an excellent article which you should read.
In the excerpt below, Mr. Barker was talking about harassment of federal employees in the West:
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“…What makes the harassment, threats, intimidation, bullying and disrespect worse is that it happens routinely around the West. I saw it with firefighters just trying to do their job near Kamiah last summer, when armed landowners confronted them and told them to leave. I wrote about a similar incident near Riggins.
In the Riggins incident, the ranchers said they were not trying to intimidate the firefighters. But to many people, wearing a gun and being aggressive is quite threatening.
[…]
“The notion that on the ground federal land workers are some sort of jack-booted thugs out to take over others and their way of life is horrible and it’s nonsense,” said John Freemuth, senior fellow at the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University.
“I just have to laugh at this,” said Freemuth, a former park ranger who has worked with lots of federal and state natural resources workers. “Except that it leads to the twisted paranoia that oozes out of the Bundys of this world.”
[…]
Freemuth reminds us that the employees on the ground, the ones on the front line, are not usually the policymakers. The courts, Congress and the executive branch are usually the architects of the policy that employees take the heat for.
“Congress doesn’t fund these agencies like they should be funded, employees are overworked and they are not on the ground as much as they used to be,” Freemuth said.
In our small towns across Idaho and the West, as my BLM employee said, federal employees have spouses who are ranchers and loggers, and loggers and ranchers have spouses who are federal conservationists or other staffers. “You just go down the line; that’s how you are a part of the community,” he said. “You’re integrated.”
The men and women who work on our rangeland and in our forests, often alone in green and white pickup trucks way out in the boonies, need to know they won’t be held hostage to someone’s alternative view of the Constitution or their own brand of justice. The Burns siege should teach us that it’s time for a bipartisan salute to federal public servants…”
Ha ha, you would know as good as anyone wouldn’t you Steve. I still get chills thinking of your “exciting” day.
I completely Agee brother!