Every winter my brother Tom goes to a
muzzleloader shoot in central Oregon, where he camps out in a large
tent, dons his feathered hat and buckskin leggings and fringed
jacket, and shoots his black powder rifle at targets tucked away in
the junipers and sagebrush.
He usually calls me in Idaho
after he returns to tell me the news. This year, he said, he senses
there will be a shift in the Western political winds, because of
what happened to our friend Pete.
Tom describes
Pete’s politics as “my guns and your womb.”
A
National Rifle Association member long before he became a
born-again Christian, Pete sat sipping Irish coffee with Tom beside
a campfire during the weekend. He had, Tom said, “the most serious
look I’ve ever seen on his face. I ask him what’s going
on, and he says, ‘they stole my money.’ ”
It
turned out that the thieves were Oregon’s State Legislature,
which last year changed Oregon’s retirement system law so
that Pete, who had counted on being able to retire at age 55, now
cannot gain a pension until he is 58. In the meantime, money
contributed to the system by his employer is being diverted to the
equivalent of a 401(k) account, while his old account is frozen and
his future retirement benefits reduced. For workers hired after
1996, the system becomes still less attractive, and for the most
recent hires, it essentially ceases to exist.
Pete’s 25 years with a county road department, of which he
has been proud, have turned to ashes in his mouth. He sees his
retirement benefits dissolving before his eyes, because the system
is broken, the state of Oregon is broke and a national government
with a $500 billion deficit is in no mood to help.
“I
took some ribbing from my high school buddies when I went to work
for the county,” Pete says. “Logging and working at the lumber
mills were paying a lot more to start back then. But I told myself
that health insurance and a good retirement plan would make up for
that, and a year ago, there I was making $20 an hour and going to
retire in five years, and feeling good about it.
“But now
I know — I’m the last of a breed. The local contractors
are hiring heavy equipment operators for $10-$12 an hour.
They’re not paying any more than that, because they know they
don’t have to. It’s only a matter of time before the
county decides it’s cheaper to contract out my work.”
“What happens to you then?” Tom asked.
“Oh,
I’ll still have a job, somewhere, with the county. But there
won’t be any young kids coming up after me who’ll be
making $20 an hour someday. That’s over. There was a one-time
good deal for working people in this country. It started about
1945, and now it’s running out.”
Pete continued. “I
started voting Republican because I thought that was how I could
keep my guns. So now I’m thinking, how long before they take
our guns anyway?”
My brother said he told him, “Oh, until
a bunch of angry $10-an-hour guys take those guns and try to use
them to change things. The first time they march on the government
with their .30-.30s, saying no, you’re not going to send
those jobs overseas, and you’re not going to take away our
Social Security… well, after that nobody’ll have
.30-.30s any more.”
Lanterns glowed inside other tents
now, and around them more campfires threw light up on the dark
junipers. Pete waved his arm, taking it all in: the camp, the
weekend mountain men. “And what do you think they’d call guys
like us, if we all decided that things had to be different?
“They’d call us terrorists, and that’d be the
end of us,” said my brother.
“So how do you think
Pete’ll vote this year?” I asked Tom, after a pause, to take
in the idea of my brother as a rebel and Pete’s
disillusionment.
“Hard to say,” my brother said. “But the
amazing thing is, all these years Pete was perfectly willing to
vote on just guns and abortion, and now everything’s
changed.”
“Because?”
“Because they stole his
money. Now it’s different.”
Louise
Wagenknecht is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org).
She writes essays and books in Leadore,
Idaho.
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