It has now been three days since Ammon Bundy and his little bunch of wingnuts occupied the Malheur County Refuge office complex, and so far, there has not been any presence of resistance to them at all. No National Guard, no State Police, no County Deputies, no FBI or DHS. Nothing. Nothing at all.
So what happens when no one comes to the big party you just threw? Its happened to almost all of us, sometime. You hang around for hours, get depressed, dump all the goodies that took hours to make, take all the decorations down, and go to bed. Or stay up all night drinking the flat champagne.
Ammon Bundy and his raggedy-assed followers all want one thing- confrontation. As much as possible.
The city of Burns closed the schools in alarm, a good thing for the Bundy Bunch, but the kids will be going back pretty soon. After all, Ammon Bundy has repeated over and over that his occupation is peaceful. That they will only defend themselves if attacked.
They all want to be the Good Guys, like the farmers who fought the British troops on the green. That’s their favorite trope; they all see themselves as the only citizens who are brave enough to die making a stand.
They want another Waco style standoff, where they all go down fighting. For a lot of them, a violent death in a righteous cause would be the best thing to happen in their miserable paranoid lives.
I suspect the FBI, the leading agency in this incident, has an entirely different strategy in mind. They won’t give them the Waco they want so much. If there is no one for them to oppose, the whole thing deflates like a balloon with a slow leak in it.
This may have been a lesson learned during the Bunkerville standoff in Nevada. It’s important to remember that the actual incident only lasted one day, and with only a few hours of tension in that single day, and no one died. No shots were taken except by cameras. It was all over by sundown. Everyone left the underpass area. Most of the militants just packed up all their fancy combat gear and drove back home, all disappointed and glum.
But the hoo-raws, the militant armed wingnuts, who stuck around moved onto the Bundy ranch, where they all proceeded to get drunk, give inflammatory speeches to each other until they were all bored, fell into bickering about who was the real deal and who was the poser, and all grew tired of patrolling nothing but ground empty of humanity except for themselves.
They got in the way of the Bundy family, who were trying to take care of their melon crop. The Bundy wives grew tired of feeding a bunch of hangabout bums. Cliven even got tired of speechifying to them and quit.
10 days later, they all left. Many had to bum money to get back home. And the Three Percenters, the term they use for themselves, fell into deep disarray that effectively splintered the nascent beginnings of what they were trying to form- a national movement with national organization.
Ever since, they “Threepers” have taken to bickering about who is legitimate and who is not. And since paranoia is the thing they all share in common, many are as paranoid about one of their own as they are about our government. Some have shown themselves to be con men, working the movement for their own purposes.
It has all been discouraging for them for them ever since. Many are beginning to realize that Armageddon, the day when the Shit Hits The Fan (their favorite term), may not be all over in 6 weeks. That a garden may be more valuable than a gun. That the expected hordes of starving city folks may never come over the hill. Many are afraid their social security checks won’t ever arrive again if STHF occurs. All of their violent fantasises haven’t left, but they are fading.
None of this cost the taxpayers a dime. Or a drop of blood. No heroes or villains emerged.
I think that if the FBI notifies the Bundy Bunch that they are all being surveilled closely, using all the most sophisticated means of identification available to them, and don’t provide them the confrontation they so desperately seek, this incident will soon disintegrate. This is the refuge’s off season. Giving the employees a couple of weeks of paid vacation is no big deal. But denying them a fight is.
The most any of them can be charged with now is trespass unless they trash the place, and then its vandalism, an added charge. It become a matter of money, not blood, and they all fear sudden expenses like lawyers and big fines.
I’ve watched these guys for a long time now; my home state, Idaho, is one of the states they would like to move to, and Idaho has always had problems with these types.
Typically, they arrive here with everything they own in a truck, broke, and with no particularly needed skills or abilities, to discover they are unwelcome competition for jobs. Our job situation here is not good, especially for those who only possess manual skills.
Most have no idea of what living in the boonies is really like, and they don’t get a warm reception here when they show up. Folks here are conservative, but they don’t want their little towns to get shot up, or develop the reputation for being lawless. It hurts the tourism, and tends to make the retirees look elsewhere for a place to build a retirement home.
They are all let down when they learn that gun ownership is no big deal here. And they find getting into Idaho’s welfare system isn’t easy.
So they scratch up enough money to go back home, and most do, sooner or later. Some drift over to Montana, or to E. Washington, or E. Oregon, all areas that are just the same as it is here, and find the same things there. For almost all of them, the lack of income becomes the major thing in their lives.
Charging them with a misdemeanor is an expense few can take easily, especially if they have a hefty fine to pay afterward. And they all know that once they’re in the system, they will be easier to find.
They won’t ever give up their guns or their surly attitudes, but they won’t go breaking the law either. At least most of them. There are always going to be a few who are so demented they just don’t give a damn, but those guys are everywhere these days.
Doing nothing may be the best way of all to end the standoff. I think keeping them at a distance from town is necessary, but allowing them to rot from within is the most effective way of all to let it all play out. Patience, after all, costs nothing, but can often create satisfactory outcomes. For us, not them.