OpinionAugust 18, 1993

Ultimately, the two kinds of people are not environmentalists and loggers. In the world of human decency, the two kinds of people are the violent people on the one hand and the people on the other hand who advance their arguments through the many civilized avenues available in our system of government.

Thus those environmental elitists who endanger their fellow human beings by spiking trees and those crude hillbillies who pounded an environmentalist near Dixie the other day are on one side. And all the rest of us environmentalists and loggers alike who reject such weakness, are on the other side.

Indeed, any civilized person welcomes the conviction of tree spikers. And any civilized person will welcome the conviction of those who substituted bare knuckles for rational debate in that beating near Dixie.

There is an added embarrassment for the natives in the latter incident. A little mob of loggers out beating up on visiting environmentalists smacks of all the movies you've ever seen of some little knot of inbred southern hicks beating up on civil rights workers in some backwash of Mississippi. These people have not only rejected the American legal and political system, which provides a better way, but they tend to shame Idaho by painting it as a place where slobbering goons imagine they don't make matters worse by doing this.

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The authorities the Idaho authorities have pledged to find, arrest and prosecute all the violent people, both the savage tree spikers and those knuckle draggers who pound people.

Good for the authorities. The human race has come all the way from the time when human differences were settled by clubs to this time in which we use elections and legislatures and courts to do the same thing. The civilized system doesn't work flawlessly every time but it is far more reliable year in and year out than clubs, spikes and knuckles.

Whether it's an Earth Firster pounding in spikes or a tilted logger pounding in faces, throw the swine in jail. B.H.

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