#OregonUnderAttack: #VanillaISIS And What They Carried

It wasn’t but three days before the white supremacist, heavily armed insurrectionists looking to make a point about being oppressed by Big Gubmint (by holding hostage a nature preserve on federal land) decided they were low on supplies and needed reinforcements. And I don’t mean the $500,000 in Small Business Administration loans that some insurrectionists named Bundy have enjoyed.

They begged for “snacks” on Twitter.

To be sent care of the local (Big Gubmint) post office.

Because like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, it’s bare in there.

AHEM.

The Chinese people I know are sucking our teeth and rolling our eyes, muttering “amateurs” under our breath. Because when we road trip we have the Costco monster-size bags of chips, more cuttlefish jerky than you can shake a stick at, those weird sweet date-and-walnut bars wrapped in rice paper that no one really likes except your auntie, enough red haw flakes to pucker your mouth and move your bowels for a month, 3 kine wet beef jerky and 2 kine dry spicy, pistachios, crack seed, boiled eggs (tea, plain), pickled plums and olives, pre-washed green seedless and red seedless grapes, leftover Halloween candy (no matter what time of year it is), a flat of easy-to-peel tangerines, pork buns & assorted other dimsum pastries in a pink box, Pocky, gum, a separate cooler for drinks, and paper napkins nabbed from McDonald’s plus wet wipes to “shower” off 50 people.

And that’s just to drive a vanload of relatives age six months to ninety-one to Disneyland. Because GOD FORBID anyone should feel hungry on the way there. Nobody’s gonna starve around Chinese people. Plus we have more sense than to wave guns around thinking we own public park lands.

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Clearly a bunch of white men organized this:

It included a cardboard box of apples and oranges, a few dozen pots of instant ramen, 24 cans of chicken noodle soup, a similar number of cans of sweetcorn, peas, beans and chili, and 20 boxes of macaroni and cheese.

There were also three sacks of potatoes, one bag of flour, another of rolled oats, boxes of raisins, a single bag of pretzels and one granola bar.

Good luck with all that.

We make light of the provisions and planning of these gun extremists, knocking them down to size by mocking their crusade against Big Gubmint as a misguided camping trip — but recognize that they are serious about provoking the federal government into some kind of response and are intent on pushing their hateful views and encouraging others to adopt seditious and violent actions in support of them. They aren’t anomalous — what they believe and their use of guns to achieve it is at the ugly heart of frontier mythology and Manifest Destiny. What’s ultimately sad and horrible is how far they’ll go to prove themselves equal to bloody frontiersmen of yesterday.

With any luck they’ll be temporarily locked in the nineteenth century by the lack of electricity, heat, power for their cell phones, and food, and decide they want to be part of the twenty-first century after all.

Come on in, the future’s fine: it’s one in which the social contract is important and we affirm our interconnectedness as a hallmark of our civilization, and not a liability. Big Gubmint isn’t the enemy, it’s us, your postal worker and federal park forest ranger.