Knowing Your Limit
Krayton Kerns
6.18.08
What is your limit? Everyone has the point at which they will take it no longer. Mine used to be seven but I am shortening it to three. Let me explain.
I was born and raised a horseback, chasing cows up the Big Horn Mountains. City folk tell me it was “good fortune” to be raised that way. After endless hours in the saddle in blistering heat, blizzards, and torrential rains, the “good fortune” part seemed elusive. Then, in 1994 we formed Double Rafter Cattle Drives and began charging city folk to join us for a week of “good fortune” as we trailed our cow herd to the top of the mountains. Knowing the cowboy riding next to me was paying to spend endless hours in the saddle in the blistering heat, blizzards and torrential rain helped me understand the “good fortune” thing.
In the early years we struggled to build a horse cavy that would provide clients a week-long western experience without killing them. (Dead people are bad for business.) In the off season we would hit the horse sales and buy a trailer load with the hope that a couple ponies may prove useable. That is how I acquired a red sorrel gelding from Miles City. I am not sure he came with a name and the one I gave him isn’t fit for a family newspaper, so let’s call him Red.
Red bucked only once….every day…every morning…the first time you swung on. He knew exactly what he was doing because your right foot would never hit the stirrup before he was on his third jump. Depending on your perspective, you were always half-on or half-off and it was a tough way to start the day.
I put seven hard days and a hundred hard miles on Red early one June. The last morning, something different happened; I rode him. When he quit bucking I was still mounted…if you consider “mounted” as hanging off the right side in the three-o-clock position with your left spur hung-up in your slicker and fencing pliers. Yeah, I rode him alright.
So there I hung in a real dilemma: Both Red and I were puffing hard trying to decide what to do next. If I dropped the last eighteen inches to the ground, the game was over and Red wins again. But, if I grab the horn and jerk myself back in the saddle, Red is going to explode and the game will start all over. I might not survive the re-ride.
I grabbed the horn and very, very, very slowly pulled myself back into the saddle. Nothing happened. I did it…I won…but I reached my limit. Red went to the next canner-horse sale and eventually ended up on some Frenchman’s dinner plate. (Knowing Red, the poor French guy probable choked on the first bite.)
So back to my point about limits; what is yours and when is enough…enough?
HB 287, A Bill to Deny Implementation of the Federal Real ID Act, was one bill that came through the 2007 Montana Legislature with unanimous approval. “Hell no”, was the phrase the Governor used when asked if Montana would cave to federal mandates and adopt data card Real IDs. Without those Montana citizens could not board planes, trains and federal buildings; that is too reminiscent of Nazi Germany for my satisfaction.
While Montanans were celebrating this denial of the Real ID mandate, another bill was discretely introduced to the House Judiciary Committee. HB 180 would have allowed the Motor Vehicle Division to “generally revise driver’s license laws” to create the use of new digitally enhanced data card driver’s licenses that were completely in compliance with the federal Real ID Act. Advocates for a bigger more intrusive government tried to slip HB 180 past us. House Judiciary Chairman Diane Rice (R-Harrison) astutely caught this bait-and-switch and she led the charge to kill that bill in committee. It died mostly along party lines.
Knowing that we killed the Real ID Act twice during the ’07 session, imagine my surprise to open the June 11th 2008 edition of the Billings Gazette and see that the Motor Vehicle Division is going ahead with a plan to “generally revise driver’s licenses” in a fashion that will coincidentally bring them into compliance with the federal Real ID Act. Somewhere in petty cash they found the $1.2 million dollars needed to charge ahead.
We have a state government so large it can completely ignore the statutory limitations of its citizen legislature and do as it pleases. Thomas Jefferson eloquently advised in the Declaration of Independence that governing only occurs with “consent of the governed”. We unanimously deny the federal Real ID Act and the Motor Vehicle Division implements it anyway. Have you reached your limit? I have. Our government is enormous and dangerously out of our control.
