Idaho was a blue state when I was growing up here in the 70s and 80s. Frank Church and Cecil Andrus (among a great many others) did amazing things. Our ancestor

Idaho was a blue state when I was growing up here in the 70s and 80s. Frank Church and Cecil Andrus (among a great many others) did amazing things. Our ancestors were heavily involved in issues like women's suffrage and environmental protections. People forget that. Or more accurately, revisionist history is always trying! Common sense has always been a big thing here, as well as self-reliance. Politics here is mostly about resources. R's generally vote to extract all ranching/timber/mining resources possible, while D's generally oppose all of that. Now with the tech sector influx, D's are at least as likely to look the other way when it comes to stuff like the loss of farmland to urban sprawl as R's. Idaho will probably be the last state to legalize drugs, not because we care, but because people want to keep things the same. Many of us look at Oregon with concerns about homelessness after its recent legalization, but people are easily confused, so blame the drugs instead of the fundamental causes of exploitation and the existential crisis of living under the profit motive in a post-scarcity information age that should have been automated 20 years ago. We tell it how it is. Things are also changing. There's a huge influx right now of libertarian-minded folks who want to get away from central control. That's understandable, but growth and gentrification issues are heavy on everyone's mind. We're in a unique position of wanting everyone to be able to enjoy the natural heritage that we are grateful for, but having reservations about newcomers who don't practice our prime directive of leave no trace. For better or worse, politics here are beginning to flip. It's not enough now to be a stanch this-or-that. If we vote wrong, our housing costs double, a forest gets leveled, we gain or lose thousands of jobs on the whim of a company's decision to build a plant here to dodge taxes. An R quickly becomes a fan of NIMBY when a billionaire buys and gates off their hunting grounds because the timber industry didn't given the land back when they were done with it, to be used as public land. A D becomes one as well to block a wind farm or housing development in the foothills surrounding their town. This stuff is hard. Idaho stop? I had never heard that expression before, but sounds about right. We just ride our bikes through stops anyway, because trying to ticket everyone is unenforceable and ridiculous. But the older ones here know that the hard-won freedoms we take for granted require constant vigilance, or someone will take them away in the name of liberty or justice to divide us and make somebody rich at the expense of everyone else.