Wishing the 495th Godspeed
As we head into the holiday season, we should keep in our hearts and our prayers a contingent of our neighbors that will be far from home.
On Tuesday, about 60 soldiers with the Montana Army National Guard’s 495th unit left the Flathead for a year’s deployment.
They will spend six weeks training in Texas before deploying to Afghanistan.
That means that these citizen soldiers likely will be halfway around the world during the Christmas season.
That also means we owe a special debt of appreciation for the men and women of the Guard who will be far from their families protecting our freedom.
WHILE HE HAS a life rich in contributions to the Flathead Valley, local farmer Robin Street deserved the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce’s Great Chief Award for his latest contribution alone.
Street is the creator of the Pine Grove Fishing Pond off of Rose Crossing that is managed by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. On his own initiative, Street generously had the pond excavated with the revenue from gravel sales for a fund to develop the pit into a pond for family fishing. Street donated 13 acres worth at least $200,000 for the park-like parcel with gravel paths, a dock, shelters and restroom facilities.
The Pine Grove Fishing Pond is a jaw-dropper, especially when a person sees a kid reel in one of the lunker trout that are stocked in the pond every year. It is the kind of value-added public resource that makes the Flathead shine, and it’s all to the credit of Kalispell’s newest Great Chief!
YOU MIGHT say it takes a village to conduct an election.
The Flathead County Election Department conducted an orderly, well-orchestrated process despite record numbers of late voter registrations and absentee-ballot requests. Several election officials worked all night and well into the day on Wednesday to tabulate the final results, and should be commended for their service.
Kudos also go to the dozens and dozens of volunteer election workers who fanned out to the county’s many polling places to help conduct the election. They, too, worked long hours to get the job done.
Many other people contributed in many ways, from helping an elderly neighbor get to the polls to dropping off snacks for weary election judges. This kind of camaraderie is a wonderful snapshot of American life.
BY THE WAY, thanks to those of you who correctly pointed out that there is a constitutional right to vote, at least since passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. In a previous editorial about the mess of last-minute voter registration, we called voting a privilege. We should have been more specific about why that is so.
To be clear, we consider any right that is granted by government to be a privilege, which may well be lost under other circumstances, and as we look around the world at the many places where voting is denied to the citizenry, we are mindful to be grateful for this particular privilege, and hope it to be a long-lived one — and one that is respected by those who have been granted it.