Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.
His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.
Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming
Probably the most revealing thing in the article:
The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”
In other words, they're carpetbaggers.
Wyoming has always had a very high transient population. Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region. Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't. Joseph M. Carey wasn't. A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day. Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian. Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.
This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here. You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here. If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different. Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.
But earlier arrivals did try. They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.
The recent arrivals don't. They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.
They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.
Or were.
Recently, however, something else has been going on. Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them. One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin. They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.
Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it. Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.
Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.
The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.
No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.
Populist do, as they're ignorant.
Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone". The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level. Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States. You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners. When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran). I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school. There was one Jehovah's Witness. In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest. By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister. But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.
I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value. It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves. People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.
And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.
Now, that's being fought over.
The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.
Labels: 2020s, Blog Mirror, Carpetbaggers, Catholic, Culture, Education, Francis Warren, Government, Joseph M. Carey, Mormon, Music, Politics, Populism, Protestant, religion, Wendell Berry, Wyoming
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