WALLACE--
Another electronic letter from the United Snakes Environmental Protection Agency - State of Idaho Department of Environmental Quality monolith arrived in the inbox on Monday.
Saith the email: “Idaho Department of Environmental Quality would like your comments on a 'Community Fill Plan' developed with the Environmental Protection Agency and Panhandle Health District. The plan gives you (as citizens and contractors) criteria for filling low areas with contaminated material/soil, while maintaining the requirements of the Institutional Controls Program (ICP). Use the link below to read the 4-page Plan and the Fact Sheet. Then, use the same link to send your comments directly to Rob Hanson at DEQ by September 3rd.”
Why are we going through these motions anymore? To give the Millistines a shot at another technical assistance grant? Neither EPA nor DEQ cares a flying fig through a rolling doughnut-hole as to what we say or think, so why waste a stamp (or internet bandwidth)?
Oh, they toss out a straw man once in every great while. One recalls a few years ago their imbecilic proposal to route the South Fork through a culvert, or re-route it, or rip up the creek-bed and line it with plastic, or whatever. Boy, did we rail against that asininity, and the EPA/DEQ monolith smugly retreated from that “alternative.”
The People Have Spoken, they said in phony retreat from something they had neither the intention nor the budget to bring off. We could all go back to our beer and NASCAR, feeling victorious.
Being an on-again, off-again denizen of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District for the past 40 years, we've been witness to what appears at first and last blush to be an experiment in social engineering by the EPA and its puppet DEQ.
EPA's experiments in mass behaviour are not without precedent. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the federal highway department and its marionettes at the Idaho Transportation Department were endeavouring to flatten Wallace with a freeway, public opinion here was divided but slightly in favour of saving the town from the bulldozers.
Sensing trouble, the state hired an outfit out of Denver to divide and conquer. Whereas the real choice was binary — build the cockeyed thing or don't build it — the social engineers from Denver split the crowd into enough factions to establish a Dutch dynasty. (Two Dutchmen, one church; three Dutchmen, two churches, as the impolitic used to say . . .).
EPA-DEQ uses the same tactic. Rather than say Yes or No to something, we are asked to respond to various “Alternatives.” Alternative One is the do-nothing, let nature take its course, alternative. Then you have all these other alternatives, buried amongst which is the one the EPA-DEQ cabal is going to follow, anyway.
I am convinced that somebody at EPA wants to find out just how far and how hard a community can be pushed. Lord knows, the Federales are testing our limits in other regions of its jurisdiction. Take, for example, the humiliating process of getting on to an airplane these days. Airline passengers, one supposes, have a lower tolerance for bull than, say, bus riders.
If one can bully the MBAs who board airliners into taking off their shoes and submitting to strip-searches, what do you suppose you could get bus passengers to part with? Showin' my age here, but there was a time when the only thing you needed to part with to get on an airliner was a Ben Franklin. Your dignity was intact.
So send the DEQ your comments on moving buried Shoshone County dirt from one place to another, then back again, then burying it again. Whatever. Gotta love all that extra diesel smoke.
