inside My Turn: Bully tactics, or free speech?

I have no quarrel with Tom Hearn and past school board members’ clarion call for civility when referencing the recent “yelling, anger and alleged threats” at District 271 public meetings. This is not an endorsement of any particular candidate for the board. I am not anti-vax or mask, even though I think the mask issue is largely a matter of optics.

But let’s put things in perspective. Since the onset of the COVID pandemic there have been, at all levels of government, executive orders, mandates, school shutdowns, business shutdowns, arbitrary declarations of essential and non-essential businesses, etc. All of those decrees have impacted the entire population one way or another, and some have proven to be reactionary and unwise.

So, for over a year there was no anger, yelling and alleged threats by the local citizenry in the exercise of their free speech, but we saw an entire summer of crime and terror across the country where there were homicides, burning, looting and long-term occupation of portions of cities. It was astonishing to see how the various levels of government sat on their collective hands as if paralyzed and watched this extensive violence.

This widespread violence was not merely yelling, anger and alleged threats to which anybody who watched the nightly news could attest. This was organized anarchy, driven by Marxist groups like Antifa and BLM. Liberal politicians used terms like “summer of love” and referred to Antifa as an idea, not people.

I’ve read with keen interest the letters to the editor, the My Turn columns, and other comments on social media, by some of the same people who were mute during our summer of insurrection, and again the call for civility is completely appropriate. So why have normally peaceful citizens become so riled at the notion of more mandates and decrees?

Well, one reason might be that although there are 69,000+ people vaccinated in Kootenai County and more and more people wearing masks, COVID is spreading at a faster rate than it was a year ago. The idea of a vaccine for school-aged children is not new. It’s the law in virtually every state. So, the legislature ought to pass a law, rather than school board volunteers issuing edicts based on the science du jour. Every decree or directive the government has issued during this pandemic has changed with the mutation of the virus. There is no settled science. How many times has Dr. Fauci changed his stance about the virus?

So the weight of the federal government, under the auspices of the Department of Justice, has now been launched to investigate citizens exercising their right to protest peacefully. They were never dispatched to investigate actual widespread violence, insurrection, or anarchy.

Nobody at the local school board meetings was hurt, there was no vandalism, there was no occupation of government buildings or city streets and the “threats” have been correctly described as “alleged”. People carrying signs and raising their voices because they are fed up with arbitrary and capricious orders, are now being labeled, in some of the mainstream media, as domestic terrorists.

Juxtapose that with the insurgence and uprising in cities across the nation last summer while elected politicians tinkered obliviously.

So yeah, let’s be civil. Let’s be respectful. But let’s stop demonizing citizens exercising their rights!

Chris Sullivan is a Coeur d'Alene resident.