Ammon
Bundy and a group of armed supporters, including his brother Ryan, were
arrested in Ore. on Jan. 26 Here's a look at the Bundy family's history
of anti-government actions. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
And then one of Bundy's sons, Ammon Bundy, did it for me.
He told CNN this:
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I want to emphasis that the American people are wondering why they can't seem to get ahead or why everything is costing more and you are getting less, and that is because the federal government is taking and using the land and resources.
Ammon
Bundy used a Facebook video posted Dec. 31 to summon an armed militia
to Burns, Ore., by Jan. 2. When they arrived, they took over a federal
building. After the protest, Bundy told a reporter why this fight is so
important to him. (The Washington Post)
Tensions between the federal government, which owns large tracts of land out West, and ranchers have existed for more than a century — basically since the government stopped giving away land and started actively preserving some of it.
In the Bundy case, government officials were trying to round up the family's cattle in the spring of 2014 in response to years of federal land grazing fees that went unpaid by the Bundy family. But things suddenly turned toward violent. Armed protesters that caught government officials off guard tried to prevent the cattle round up, resulting in a tense days-long standoff and the government's eventual release of the cattle. The government has yet to press charges of any kind on Bundy or try again to collect the cattle or grazing fees, and a report says the standoff has invigorated anti-government groups.
[Everything you need to know about the long fight between Cliven Bundy and the federal government.]
The tug-and-pull of land ownership appears to be what motivated the larger group of an estimated 300 protesters in Burns, Ore., who protested peacefully Saturday against what they saw was unfair treatment of two ranchers facing prison time after being convicted of arson.
(The father-and-son duo say they were burning the land in 2001 to try to knock off an invasive species on about 130 acres of leased federal land; prosecutors argued that they were trying to conceal poaching.)
But based on Ammon Bundy's comments, the splinter group that broke off from the protest and drove 30 miles across the snowy desert basin to take over a federal building appears to be motivated by something much more emotional: frustration about things — the economy, their land, politics, any number of issues — not going their way.
Less important to this group of hard-line occupiers is the actual dispute, whether it is ranchers being jailed in Oregon or the government rounding up the Bundy family's cattle in Nevada. More pertinent to them is the opportunity to take a stand against the federal government, which they perceive as taking advantage of the little guy.
We should pause to note that ranchers who flout the law as egregiously as some in this group have are rare. Even the Bundy family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, who welcomed sympathizers from across the country to his ranch in April 2014 and allowed them to point guns at federal officials, seemed surprised at two of his sons' undertaking in Oregon.
"That's not exactly what I thought should happen, but I didn't know what to do," the elder Bundy told the Associated Press.
But lots of Americans probably agree with the younger Bundy's assertion that they can't get ahead thanks to government, which is either hamstringing them and/or abandoning them (depending on their political views).
The large majority of Americans who want to express those grievances politically can be found at rallies for GOP front-runner Donald Trump or Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). The popularity of these two politically polarizing presidential candidates is still being dissected, but most political analysts seem to agree that it stems in part from people feeling that the nation has left them behind.
I'd argue there are similar sentiments playing out in Oregon right now. The difference is that out West, where ownership of land is a major issue, this hard-line group of people and ranchers manifest their fears in a potentially much more dangerous way — by trying to physically take land from the federal government using a tool long forgotten by most Americans: a group of armed men.
Amber
Phillips writes about politics for The Fix. She was previously the
one-woman D.C. bureau for the Las Vegas Sun and has reported from Boston
and Taiwan.
end quote from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/03/what-that-militia-in-oregon-really-wants-in-1-paragraph/
I tend to personally see this (what they want) as a conflict that is similar to when cattle ranchers were killing farmers for putting up barbed wire during the 1800s.
In other words it is a sign of the time where free range is starting to be locked up more by government and citizens because when cattle free range over public land they completely destroy the ecology, pollute the water with feces and giardia which makes people downstream sick or die if they try and drink the water without boiling it or treating it in some way. Cattle are one of the many reasons why people cannot anywhere in the U.S. now drink water in the wilds without filtering or treating it without getting sick now days.
When I was a boy in the 1950s in California there were still places it was safe to drink the water right from a stream in Oregon, Washington and California but by the mid 1960s this started to no longer be true even though sometimes if you are at a high enough altitude you can drink snow melt or you can drink water from a spring coming up through the rocks in places like mt. Shasta without boiling it or treating it in some way.
So, I just think this is just a sign of the times and a time of less freedom for cattle ranchers to run cattle over government publicly owned land. Basically, it means if they don't own the land themselves or rent private land from people for their cattle to graze on their livelihoods these days are over most places.
It is neither good nor bad it is just that the times are changing. It is the rights of the many versus the rights of the few and just what happens when more people live in any land than used to anywhere on earth.