America is wracked with discord, dissent

“Collegiate, collegiate, yes, we are collegiate...”

Beautiful Bonner County, along with most of America, is wracked with dissent, discord, division. For this we can thank our demented role model in chief. As one who remembers the 1960’s and 70’s well (I was in my 30’s and 40’s) I think we are emotionally (and certainly politically) more disjointed today than then. Scarred as those years were by Viet Nam, bloody Civil Rights marches and murders, the assassinations of Rev. King and the Kennedy brothers, cities burning from Watts in L.A. to Washington, D.C., and hippies blaming everything on everybody older than themselves, today is darker. That’s because we’ve never had a misanthbrope as role model in chief.

This county’s minority of scowling, maskless local citizens who continue, unexplainably, to cheer for the misanthrope despite the human wreckage he has caused and is causing, will scoff at this proposal as a violation of their constitutional liberties -- or whatever. But here it is: Sandpoint needs a college! Not another fraudulent Trump University scam, but an authentic, accredited liberal arts college. History, Languages, Humanities, Natural Sciences, Civic Responsibililty. A place to grow up ethically and intellectually. A place for the angry and unlettered to get a needed new start.

Local residents who have attended college have opined that ours is a college town without a college. If we had a college maybe the good yet gullible folks who watch Fox News (today’s version of Joseph Goebbels’ Third Reich propaganda of the 1930’s and early 40’s) would have an opportunity in the drugstore or liquor store or at a soccer game to bump into bright, educated educators employed by our new college. They might even be moved to take a class rather than obsess over their need for loaded guns at festivals and grocery stores and libraries. Sometimes, as we all know, chance encounters lead to bigger and better opportunities. Carp Diem! Seize the day!

Let’s say a grinning, overstuffed and blatantly provincial county official were to somehow find himself in conversation with, say, someone like Timothy Egan of Seattle. Timothy grew up in Spokane and graduated from the plebian University of Washington. No fancypants Ivy League credentials, just folks. But with nine successful, scholarly books to his credit and as a columnist for The New York Times, Egan is the kind of guy colleges like to lure to their faculties. North Idaho College, Whitworth and Gonzaga are too distant for their professors to hang out at our drugstore, liquor stores or soccer games and maybe inspire our less enlightened citizens to better themselves. But if Sandpoint had a college!

Colorful but unlearned locals, influenced by the new Timothy Egans among us, would discover among other things that his employer, the New York Times, is not a sissified, pinko outfit. Not an “enemy of the people” as the Fox News-watching misanthrope insists, but the world’s best antidote for their insularity, distrust, fear and failures. Higher education, with or without The New York Times, is the answer. Right here at home.

TIM HENNEY

Sandpoint