West of the Rotunda

As we were having lunch at the park in Kamiah I noticed the voicemail. “Your vehicle has been tagged as abandoned and will be towed at your expense in 48 hours if you don’t move it.”

The polite lady answered when I called back. “Jeez, I took three loads to the dump in her  this week. She’s not abandoned.”

“Well, we received a complaint that it was abandoned so you’re going to have to move it.”

“She’s licensed, registered. I use her every couple a weeks.”

“It has to move.”

“So just pull it up a bit? Should I park it on the other side of the street?” Don’t get me started about all the traffic racing by our house this summer due to road construction. “And I won’t be back from the Selway ‘til Friday. I’m going fishing.”

She paused. “OK, we can give you until Monday, I’ll put that in the system.”

I love that old truck. I will admit I was a bit offended to hear her called abandoned. I found her abandoned in chest high grass next to a wheat field on Paradise Ridge. A bit of tinkering and she hauls tons to the dump. Dumps real nice too.

But this episode with our city government got me to thinking about our seniors in their assisted living or skilled care facilities in this Covid pandemic situation. I wonder if some of them feel abandoned. Lord knows the toll has been high on them, the sickness kills but so can the isolation.

I have heard many propose a strategy for dealing with this deadly infection that focuses on isolating the most vulnerable and turning the rest of us loose to save our economy, our freedoms. Of course, how we select the most vulnerable might be a problem, but heh, at least we’ll get back to full employment.

Covid death tolls are highest in the elderly. And we have all heard about how the disease has ripped through some facilities, even here in Idaho. While deaths and serious illness may affect the elderly residents, the staff is not immune; they get sick too.

A recent analysis showed 78% of Idaho’s 82 nursing homes have had either staff or residents test positive. Over half of Idaho’s Covid death toll can be attributed to folks in care facilities.

It took some doing to get the state to compile and release this information. There was data on the CDC website that suggested Idaho had outbreaks, but Idaho Department of Health and Welfare only agreed to release weekly reports under threat of lawsuit. Still, the state’s numbers and CDC don’t fully add up. I guess we all struggle to know what to count.

So please, think about it. When you pass that young mom in the grocery store, she may have a shift that night at a skilled facility. You might feel fine, but your cousin you went boating with at the lake might have had something. He was coughing; but he does smoke. How can you know? Now that young woman buying groceries will need to get to her low wage job taking care of folks who can’t go see their family, their friends, or their weekly shopping outing. She’s doing her best to make her charges not feel abandoned. We could do our best for her.

So, we got back from the Selway and I moved the truck off the street. She’s parked down at my work site. I’ve torn down an old garage that was about to fall over. Some things you do have to let go. But I saved every stick of lumber I could. I’ll use them to rebuild.

Before I went to medical school, I thought veterinary medicine might be a better calling to live in a small Idaho town. For that was my dream, a small town with a stable economy to raise our kids. I remember the long drives around Council Valley and beyond in Fred Stovner’s 1960 ¾ ton 4WD International pickup on calving calls. He was the local vet for Council.  We would talk a lot about animals and health and God. Then, when we got to the ranch, his language changed. There were more, “She don’t” and “ain’t” and other kinds of speech, different than we shared in the dark front seat. I asked him about this.

“Don’t they think you are talking down to them?”

He chuckled as the steering wheel shimmied over the ruts. “They don’t want to think you think you are better than them.”

Martha (my wife) to this day points out to me when I switch into talking “Ideho”. That’s her term.

There is a strong anti-intellectual feeling in this rural state.

It’s almost like you have a different skin color. If the regular folks I run into as a doctor or representative start to think I’m coming off as superior, the game is over. If I can’t explain to them in common sense language why they need to stop drinking or smoking or lose weight, or vote for me, then I’m just a know-it-all with no standing. We need to share a language.

I want to thank State Senator Steve Thain for pointing this out this week. He said in an interim committee meeting discussing the role of Public Health Districts, “Listening to experts is an elitist approach.” He went on: “I’m also fearful that it leads to totalitarianism, especially when you say well, we’re doing it for the public good. America was founded on the idea that people weighed their own risks, did what they thought was best for their own interests. … The role of experts should be to give us the best information they have, and we should weigh it. They should never set policy.”

He is so right. Having some Ivory Tower elitist telling me what to do with my life is a nightmare.

But, every day, people come to me with their fears, their struggles with their health. How should I convince them to change their behavior?

Public Health in Idaho is distributed to districts. The public health commissioners in each district are mainly county commissioners, elected by us, and they then throw in a couple “health professionals”, a doctor or a nurse who live in the district. The “professionals” must be approved by the elected commissioners to serve. This body then studies the landscape and makes recommendations, from upgrading a local sewer district or shutting down a polluted restaurant. The recommendations from the legislative interim committees this last week went along the lines of Senator Thain’s comments. The vote, while not unanimous, was to remove Public Health districts from having authority to shut down a school or university in the face of this Covid pandemic. The committee would rather the authority to limit any activity rested on the shoulders of the elected school board members or State Board of Education.

Us “experts” felt a swift kick to the groin. We should. We are not speaking the language of risk.

Fred Stovner would sometimes be called to deliver a heifer who couldn’t get her first calf out. He would pose, “Well, we could do a c-section, and that will cost you $100, or I could try to pull her.”

“I done pulled.” The rancher would say.

Fred would reach in and check the heifer. “I could get the calf out, but it might kill the calf. It might kill the heifer. You want I should try?”

The rancher would kick dirt and decide. That’s the kind of decision making we need right now.

Since there are so many people walking around with masks on, it might be time to update your identifying documents. I sure had an adventure with this one. Not that a current ID will help at the recycling center when three people say “Hi” to you and you can’t recognize one of them. But a current ID helps for a lot of things.

For instance, I tried to sign up to get retirement payments this week. I could have done it a year ago, but I knew it would be tough, so I put it off.

Since we are limiting our contacts, I tried to do the application online. I did this about two weeks ago. The state retirement site told me clearly that I would need to call them to request my application, so I waited until regular business hours and called. It went as smooth as could be. She got my identifying numbers over the phone and said she would mail me the information I would need to apply. And she would email me the application forms, but don’t fill them out until I got her information. A week later, the envelope came.

The application for retirement said I would need both my wife’s and my birth certificates, notarized signatures and Social Security cards. My wife is very organized. She had all this up in a file in our desk. Except, that is, my social security card. I do not possess a card. I did at one time, but the flimsy cardboard thing melted in my wallet after some sweaty work and wading in the river. Why do you need a stinking pasteboard card that fades out? Heck, I could make a good-looking facsimile with a Sharpie. But my retirement application wants the card.

So, I think I could get a replacement card online. After all, I signed up for Medicare online. The first website that comes up when you Google “Social Security Card replacement” might look pretty official to you. It sure did to me. But I knew I was being scammed when they asked me if I wanted to pay with a credit card or PayPal. This was after I had given them all my identifying information.

Feeling my fingertips singed and my ego squashed for being an online dupe, I decided this technology stuff was beyond me. So, I called my local office. I’ll bet the nice lady on the phone was in Iowa, not Idaho. But she said she could get me a replacement card. I just needed to mail her my drivers’ license and passport. “Copies of them?” I asked.

“No, the originals.”

She’s asking a guy who just gave his address and phone number to an online Ukrainian scammer to send to her, through the US mail, two pieces of real ID? And I should trust both her and the US Postal Service? I stammered some hesitation.

“You could request one online sir.”

“I tried that but I got scammed.”

She chuckled. “Oh yes, there are a lot of those out there. Only trust SSA.gov.”

“Why don’t you guys take those sites down?”

She chuckled again, like “We could sir, but that wouldn’t make you any less a fool.” But instead she said, “I’m sure the inspector general is looking into that.” She probably winked to her desk mate.

I thank her for her polite demeanor. She didn’t thank me for sharing my internet pratfalls, but did wish me a good rest of my day. It was lunchtime. I took a break.

I found the SSA.gov site and only got a little peanut butter on the keyboard. It turns out my computer remembered my password, and I only had to click a couple places to say I really was me. Then they said it would come in the mail in a couple weeks.

I called the state retirement lady to tell her of my delay. “Social Security card?” she asked. “Oh, you must have gotten the old forms.”

I don’t get a reminder from the State of Idaho that I need to renew my drivers license. I guess they expect me to be mature and responsible and figure those things out on my own. Yeah, right.

Well, I did just renew my drivers license, since it’s due to expire in a few weeks. I forgot one time, and I showed up in their office with a really expired license. They made me take the test and get a new picture. That must have taught me the lesson, because I didn’t forget this time.

And guess what? I could renew my driver’s license ON LINE! It was pretty easy, really. I had to give them some identifying information and confirm I was indeed who I claimed to be, and click on a box that said if I was lying I could go to jail. Oh, yeah, they took my money too. But overall, it was pretty slick. Idaho must trust the process. I do.

 Now this process won’t work for the Star Card. That’s the Patriot Act universal identification the federal government passed after 9/11. Believe it or not the Idaho legislature voted unanimously (all Dems, all Repubs) to tell the federal government to stick it on that one. So now we have the option of giving the feds our information in person (like they don’t have it already); then we’d get the Star Card. We could use it to get on an airplane. If we get the regular old Idaho license TSA won’t recognize it. I went with the Idaho one.

So, since Idaho has entered the digital age in drivers licensing, I am puzzled why our governor believes collecting initiative signatures on line would be a problem.

I have collected a lot of initiative signatures, in the rain, the snow and the sun. I never checked someone’s identification. I always reminded them they needed to put down their address where they were registered to vote on the piece of paper. I also reminded them of the penalty for signing the petition multiple times. Kind of like the online license pages checked my address and information, and warned me about jail time.

Once the paper petitions are filled out, I had to get them notarized, then I had to turn them in to the local county clerk. This is where the signatures were validated.

Don’t get me started on the hurdles, the many different legislative districts required. But, I guess if the legislature wants to change those laws, they can. They have tried. I bet they’ll try again. But that’s fine, laws are made to be changed.

The way it is now, the Idaho Constitution says citizens have a fundamental right to pass and repeal laws. That can be changed too, but it’s a lot harder.

Why is there a need for online initiative signatures?

This problem came about because Reclaim Idaho started collecting signatures for their school funding initiative. They were chugging along, ahead of their pace for the Medicaid Expansion Initiative which they got on the ballot in 2018. But then there was that Governor Little “Stay at Home” order. Reclaim suspended their process and the timeline ran out. Reclaim argues, give us the time now to collect online signatures. Little says no. He wants to take it to the Supreme Court, now that a federal judge has told him to let Reclaim proceed.

If the state trusts me to renew my driver’s license on my laptop, why wouldn’t they trust me to sign an initiative petition?

Reclaim has begun collecting online signatures, even though the outcome is still up in the air. If you are interested, you can go to their website and read about it. Now, why this initiative makes sense is another story.

It will be ten years this summer since Vernon Baker died. His story deserves some retelling.

He entered the Army before the Second World War because he needed a job. He quit as a porter on the railroad because he didn’t want the job of a servant. He was living with his sister and brother-in-law in Wyoming. The first recruiter sent him away; “We don’t have no quarter for you people.” Vernon had heard that often looking for work around Cheyenne. But he persisted and the next recruiter wasn’t put off by the color of his skin.

He rose through the ranks by being responsible and doing the jobs asked of him, though he really wanted to be a supply sergeant. When Pearl Harbor brought war and the Army needed it, he was called on to lead men. In the segregated Army of the time, it was black men he led. Though younger than many he commanded, and smaller, he worked to earn their respect. Though he also took their resentful beatings.

He spent a short time early in the war posted at Fairchild Base outside Spokane and knew then he loved this Inland Northwest part of the states. But he got sent to invade Italy and make history.

Vernon told his life story to Idaho Public Television. The interview can be read online. In his words those brutal days (April 5-6, 1945), it sounded like he just did his job. But when 19 of the 25 men in your platoon are killed around you, and you keep your head and act with courage and discipline, it is remarkable. His actions drew attention from someone, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Maybe the story should stop there, after all, Vernon went on to be a paratrooper in Korea, then worked for the Red Cross at Fort Ord, California counselling needy families. He got his wish to hunt in this neck of our woods when he came to the Benewah, outside St. Marries Idaho in the late 1980’s.

But some people noticed some funny numbers and were making a fuss. There were 444 Medals of Honor awarded in WWII, and no black soldier had earned such award, despite over 1.3 million serving. In the early 1990’s, the Army listened and asked for a study. They could find no documents showing that race influenced the award, but “a climate of racism prevented recognition of heroic deeds”. The Army decided to award seven Medals of Honor to black servicemen from World War 2, and Vernon Baker was the only surviving one.

In 1997, when the award was fastened around his neck in the Oval Office, he shed a tear. He said he was thinking of all those men up on that hill. A reporter asked him how he felt about serving in a segregated unit. “I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do and we did it.”

And maybe the story should stop there, with a belated Medal of Honor. Vernon returned to the Benewah and hunted in his old but hearty age.

When he started slurring his words, and the brain tumor was found, he got shipped to Seattle for surgery. He recovered some, but the tumor had spread and Vernon died July 2010.

The bills started coming before he died; big ones, really big ones. Vernon had been a healthy spry man and didn’t need doctors much. He had failed to enroll in Medicare or apply for VA benefits. Brain surgery isn’t cheap. The medevac to Seattle alone was $20,000.

Neighbors kicked in, his widow made payments, and now, ten years later that debt has been paid.

Vernon Baker displayed heroism and courage; his “job to do”. May we all have such courage when faced with a job. We have some big ones before us.