In Juneau, a 59-year-old man pushed a 54-year-old man through a second-story window, killing him. In Sitka, a drunk school bus driver steered into the opposite lane, smashed into a car and drove up on a sidewalk, with 21 students aboard.
In Haines, large, pro-Russia placards were erected on Main Street, saying “Russia De-Nazify Ukraine” and “Disband Nato.” Then they mysteriously disappeared.
It’s March, the start of wacko season in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere in the North.
It’s when the 1993 and 2017 Haines Borough Assembly recalls – both baseless – were launched by the far-right. It’s when the entire police department rose up against their chief Gary Lowe, a bully, when the debate over the Windy Craggy mine reached a crescendo and when gun nuts last year started a campaign to make us a gun sanctuary, as though the town wasn’t already armed to the teeth.
There’s little logic at work in March and April. School boards and city councils start skirmishes with constituents over taxes, services and spending proposals. The state legislature bumbles its way into gridlock.
Former Haines park ranger Bill Zack described it as the season when cabin fever metastasizes into a full-blown epidemic of shack nasty.
People fight over any damn thing. During the 1993 assembly/school board recall, one citizen at a school board meeting accused board member and recall target Arlana Young of “looking at me.” People set up cameras outside the homes of assembly members.
Last year, the borough assembly announced in so many words that it wouldn’t abide by U.S. Supreme Court decisions on guns.
Hallelujah.
A good chunk of the people in this part of the world become break-away republics in March and April, breaking away from their jobs, their friends, their wives and their husbands, breaking away from sobriety, breaking away from their own good sense.
No one in the North should be allowed to make any decisions during the loopy season, March 1 to whenever the last snow falls. Instead, we make big ones.
Ironically, it’s the fault of what we claim to like most – the returning daylight – that we don’t remain in the pleasant torpor of hibernation that carries us from November through February. Like brown bears, we’re stirred awake in March only to find the world still cold and cruel and we respond in kind to those who annoy us.
It happens every year and we’re never ready for it. Whoever decided that we should make our biggest collective decisions – the budgets of our towns and state – at this time of year hadn’t spent much time in the North.
We are all down to just a few nerves, with none to spare.
It’s typical stuff, except for the weird appearance and disappearance of the pro-Russian placards. Someone spent some time making those. Now they’re most likely angry that their signs were removed or destroyed and they have a right to be.
The signs were posted on public property next to a sign and flags supporting Ukraine. As odious as those signs may have seemed to others, they had every right to be there as the ones espousing the opposite view.
It’s a shame we didn’t get a chance to learn who put those signs up and what else they think about the Russia-Ukraine war.
Every family has an Uncle Louie who says crazy things and weirds out the neighbors.
But it’s not good to send Louie to his room because God knows what trouble he would discover there. You keep crazy Louie out in the living room, where you can keep an eye on him.
We know that but it’s March, when we know what to do but we don’t do it anyway.