Navigating local and national tensions

This week will mark one year since I moved to the Flathead. My friends came up from Wyoming for Under the Big Sky; six people and three dogs packed into our two-bedroom house with no AC over the course of the festival.  

I’m sitting in kind of an odd spot, where I’m not from here originally but interact with locals as a big part of my job. I go to local government meetings and try to keep up on social issues. I hear, and more often read on Facebook, the hateful comments about tourists and out-of-staters. At the same time, I kind of am one, my friends and family definitely are.  

I also hear and see a lot of political hate for the opposing party out and about in the Flathead, from Democrats and Republicans. I don’t know how many times in my life I have heard that this is one of the most contentious points in American history, though I would debate that to some extent, we have held off from another civil war. 

As a weekly news source in rural Montana, the Eagle will not be the first place readers hear about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump this Saturday at a Butler, Pennsylvania campaign event. But I do think it can serve as a good place for community discussion.  

Of course, the pot immediately started stirring. I didn’t believe the assassination attempt immediately. The first I heard of it was when my friend, dressed in her festival garb, turned her phone to me to show a meme page with the soon-to-become iconic photo of Trump raising a fist with blood streaking his face as Secret Service agents worked to protect him. An AP photo of Trump after the shooting was digitally manipulated to show the Secret Service agents assisting him smiling, which circulated on the internet. We’re forced to think that everything might be a lie. It’s hard to know who to trust.  

I read a comment on an Instagram reel that said, “I love my country, I hate my government.” It had thousands of likes. That is where I think there is some sort of consensus at this point. 

The people I have met in Bigfork and Columbia Falls over the past year have been immediately kind and friendly. The stand-offish mentality I see sometimes seems to come from problems caused by our society and by extension, government, when infrastructure can’t support things like, say, a three-day music festival with 20,000 people in a rural Montana field. Or when property taxes for locals are raised by people from out of state buying properties above their value, a system begging for change. It comes from the government trying to force religious ideologies into law, spending and taxing more than it seems they should. It comes from conflict between the preservation of public lands and the desire for industry jobs. It comes from a massive wealth disparity, and inflation, and the things it seems all of us little people don’t have a lot of control over. It comes from misinformation about all of it.  

As of press time, no motive has been released for Trump’s attempted assassin, a 20-year-old registered Republican.  

It seems to me that people aren’t happy with the higher-ups, their options for the upcoming presidential election, how much money they’re spending and how much they’re making. All this discontent builds and boils over. If we don’t collectively decide to work together and find policies — regardless of party lines — that will support economic and social growth, improve infrastructure and protect the environment, I don’t see how this system can continue to work. There’s too much contention on every scale — local to global. And our ability to communicate it via the internet seems to be causing more disparity, rather than solutions.  

While there has been some blame on Democrats for labeling Trump as a threat to Democracy, both Trump and President Joe Biden’s responses to this incident seem to be a call for unity, against political violence. Both parties have expressed sympathy for bystanders killed and injured in the attack. We can only hope that Americans will continue to choose to love their country, and all their neighbors.  

As for my weekend at the festival, I have to say, I did have some minor road rage trying to get home. But I tried to keep it together even as people with plates from all over the country cut me off and tailgated me. They had just as much of a right to be there as I did, and they’re working with the same infrastructure.