By Samuel Strait, Reporter at Large – September 15, 2021

While most of the County remains locked in Recall fever, and sundry
other life altering events, Sunday, September 12th, marked the effort by
our former Sheriff Dean Wilson to resurrect the County’s version of a
local Tea Party.  With a roused up fifty plus of Del Norte’s finest, and
one local agitator, the idea was to see just how much interest there was
within the County to restore some semblance of order in local government
and community back on the path of “love of Country” and return to
governance by the US Constitution.  For those in attendance this was
greeted with an abundance of approval.

What followed was a series of speakers centered around failure of local
education to educate, miss handling of the Covid Pandemic by local
officials, and a general agreement that local government had removed
themselves from engaging with the public.   Most notably pointing to
“Zoom Meetings” as a way for local representatives to ignore any and all
public input, censor input, and selectively fail to provide access for
those deemed unacceptable.   Attending the meeting was Crescent City’s
Mayor, Jason Greenough, who stated that if they had a problem with input
to local officials, “they needed to get involved”.  This clearly was not
well received by the group.  The general response was that they were
involved, local government boards and commissions were not listening. 
Mayor Greenough clearly was not happy with the message and clearly did
not understand that his contribution to the meeting was a clear example
of “government speaking, but not listening”.

There were two other hot topics discussed, one being failure at the
school district to address issues in the classroom, failure to deliver
education in lieu of political indoctrination, and once again failure by
the district’s administration to deal with Covid policies in a
meaningful way that allowed students to actually receive an education. 
Also discussed with in the educational frustrations, was opening up
pathways to alternative forms of educational delivery and abandoning
public schools in favor of less political and social indoctrination.

The remaining topic discussed was how Covid has been handled locally,
lack of confidence in our local hospital, and the effect public health’s
decisions have had on business, the local economy, and life in general. 
One key issue is the vaccine, and how local people are being made to
feel like they have no choice whether to be vaccinated or not.  The
general opinions being expressed were that the local medical
establishment, hospital, and public health had done little to explore
alternatives to vaccination and the therapeutics currently in use at the
hospital, which were viewed as clearly not working very well.  The idea
that individuals should have the right to assess and be involved in
their personal health without government mandates was a key issue.

While none of the issues that were discussed were in any way new to this
group, clearly, they felt that government at all levels had turned away
from them and pursued goals that did not solve any of their issues.  A
laundry list of issues both in the City and County have been placed
before boards for years without any attention.  Recent events, the
pandemic and response to it by those same local officials have revealed
a stark separation between what should be important for the group and
what isn’t. The general opinion being expressed, was that separation was
responsible for much of the poor decision making that has occurred for
years.  Representatives lecturing citizens as to what their agendas were
rather than LISTENING to those who are supposedly in CHARGE and
discovering what agenda they should be following.