A lot of people feed on fear

We hear all too often that if something is allowed to proceed, it will forever change life as we know it.

It’s rarely true, but a lot of folks feed on fear and nonsense.

Take the United Property Owners of Montana for instance. An organization supposedly put together to protect property rights, UPOM is on the fight with the American Prairie Reserve over that group’s plans to raise bison and change a few BLM grazing allotments.

UPOM apparently has no other concerns at the moment but to put an end to the APR.

And why not? According to Chuck Denowh, UPOM’s policy director, “there are thousands of Montanans who live in communities the APR wants to wipe off the map.”

“Save the Cowboy, Stop the APR” signs (available for $35 from UPOM) dot the landscape.

A meme circulating of Facebook says the APR seeks to end all grazing in Montana.

A state legislator even suggested that Amtrak’s consideration of a southern route across the state comes out of fear the APR’s bison plan will cause train wrecks.

“Trains and bison don’t mix.” he said recently on a broadcast of the right wing radio show Montana Talks where heaping portions of fear and nonsense are served daily.

Now perhaps all that is true, but I doubt it.

Denowh, who lives in Helena, objected to my last column about the APR, writing “If Heinlein bothered to spend any time in eastern Montana…”

Now I don’t have a dog in this fight, but for the last 16 years I’ve lived in Malta. If that’s not eastern Montana enough, I also have a cabin in Garfield County.

Denowh simply assumed I was from somewhere else.

He also accused me of writing some nonsense that I didn’t.

“How could anyone object, Heinlein wonders, to APR creating an “American Serengeti” in north-central Montana?”

Check the column Chuck. It’s in black and white. I never wrote that. You just wish I had.

A little journalism lesson here, Chuck: You only know what I say or do. As prescient as you may be, you’re not in my head. You have no idea what I wonder, nor do you want to.

A former executive director of the Republican Party in Montana, Denowh’s time would be better spent helping the GOP protect us from that looming threat of transsexuals than stopping the APR.

That earlier column was about stopping the APR. I didn’t understand what that entailed.

Denowh makes it very clear: “Our objective is to turn the tables and wipe the APR from the map.”

You said it, Chuck, not the APR.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]