It’s Better This Side Of The Ragged Edge

When the plainsmen, trappers and mountaineers stretched the American frontier westward, they brought a spirit of independence that doesn’t cotton to much government intrusion.

So it’s our heritage, we sons and daughters of the pioneers, to mistrust government or anyone else who tampers with our individuality or who cramps our freedom. That may explain why such spit-in-your-eye movements as the recently reported Republic of Idaho, situated in Benewah County, pop up here from time to time.

So far, the Republic of Idaho’s disaffection with government, particularly the court system, hasn’t reached the alarming proportions displayed recently in Texas.

No one’s been shot. No one’s been kidnapped.

Mostly, the 30 or so Republic of Idaho advocates have been meeting for a couple of months to express their scorn for tax forms, driver’s licenses, courts and other manifestations they attribute to a sham government.

Actually, many mainstream folks fervently share some of the same concerns. They aren’t running around fulminating about black helicopters or one-world conspiracies masterminded by the Trilateral Commission, but they think government is too big, too intrusive. They’re tired of regulations, but they don’t deny the authority of the courts or drive without a license.

By advocating more-extreme protest measures, members of the Republic of Idaho movement resemble their Texas counterparts - or the Montana freemen, whose 81-day standoff with federal authorities focused prolonged national attention on that state last year.

This region doesn’t need any more of that.

In the early 1980s, the Inland Northwest spawned Randy Duey, a Spokane County neo-Nazi and member of The Order. No one sympathized when he went to prison for racketeering.

But by the time Randy Weaver was shooting it out with the feds on Ruby Ridge a decade later, he was being treated by many of his neighbors as a folk hero.

That’s not the only measure of growing anti-government feelings. This week, a federal appeals court voiced its worry about jurors who express their anti-government views by ignoring the law and judicial process and rendering verdicts that match their political convictions.

Western individualism, by many standards, is a fine quality. Any attitude that breeds confidence and self-reliance has a lot to recommend it. But when those traits mutate into paranoia, anarchy and disconnection from the institutions of social order, beware.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board