Emily Articulated: Big headlines, micro effects

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

“I had to get out of Commie-fornia,” he said, eyebrows wagging, all anticipation of landing a shared joke.

It didn’t land. I had just been standing in line for coffee, making small talk with the person in front of me to speed up the seconds between my brain and caffeine. Yet, somehow we transitioned from, “Oh nice, where’d you move from?” to a bad pun and off-color political commentary.

This was one of many similar jokes and throwaway comments of which I’ve been on the receiving end — feelers from strangers stretching out like octopus legs, so confident they’ll make contact with someone like-minded when they touch. Instead, they found me, too paralyzed by secondhand embarrassment and delayed anger to come up with a competent in-the-moment retort.

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

“Things were just getting insane with masks and the crime,” and, “More like, ‘Black Guns Matter,’ am I right?”

Just going by the headlines from the last few years, I probably shouldn’t be caught off guard by these quips. In fact, the latest two to hit national stands paint quite a convincing picture, with a piece in NBC News Today reading, “Racial slur was used against University of Utah women’s basketball team, Coeur d’Alene detectives say,” and Time Magazine reading, “Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Idaho’s Near-Total Abortion Ban.”

And of course, we can’t forget The Guardian from a few years ago, “Neo-Nazi activist behind racist robocalls linked to threats of Idaho newspaper.”

If I were reading these headlines, and moving to the area because they sounded attractive; a return to the good ol’ days or a refuge from progressivism, maybe I’d be confident that my political jokes would land, too. Especially if I was promised they would.

As The Oregonian reported in 2022, “Real estate companies are advertising themselves to people on the right, saying they can take them out of liberal bastions like Seattle and San Francisco and find them homes in places like rural Idaho.”

One such company’s marketing slogan described itself as “a real estate firm for the vigilant,” (thinly coded language to attract the American Redoubter and far-right political bastions).

With synergistic effect, these promises and our ever-growing laundry list of extreme headlines at the national level contribute to people, on the ground in our community, feeling comfortable giving voice to the things they used to keep at the dinner table (or more likely, the grime-encrusted comment section in an online chatroom). With the confidence of like-mindedness, they forego shame, generating a million micro-interactions with unintended consequences — zoom in to my *dead inside* face in line at Evans Brothers.

The growing perception of mono-thinking in Idaho makes challenging those beliefs, even in small ways, feel like acts of resistance. In another place, flying a pride flag might be benign, but in Sandpoint, it feels like necessary opposition to the inadvertent and explicit advertising hoping to make gay people feel unwelcome. Posting an “Abortion is Healthcare” sign in our yard is both a statement about reproductive rights and an overt denouncement of extreme legislation plaguing our state. And wearing a mask (back in the days of masks) was just as much a healthcare precaution as it was a challenge to the promise of “mandate refuge.”

Katie Adams, owner of the local Heart Bowls vegan cafe, has leaned into this explicit form of defying the North Idaho perception, literally writing, “We believe in equity and justice for all living beings” on her business’ windows. She described this choice as strategic.

“Sure, I get negative comments for it sometimes. But I don’t focus on them,” she said. “I focus on the people who read it and realize they’re welcome in my cafe and in Sandpoint. It’s important.”

By nature, I’m the kind of person more inclined to keep my politics to myself, especially upon first meeting people. This is mostly from an allergy to conflict, but it’s also from a longstanding belief in establishing relationships in the sturdy middle-ground of shared experiences before challenging them with the hurricane that is politics.

But lately, I’ve wondered if my propensity toward silence makes me (and people who think like me) invisible. And in our invisibility, complicit. If our community is only making headlines for the minority of people doing extreme things — thus inviting more people who are attracted to and thrive in extremity — how long will it be until people like me disappear entirely?

So, here’s my little act of explicitness, putting my small dog in the big fight to restore political normalcy to Sandpoint; a plight to Make Extremists Shameful Again.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.