“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.” – Ozzy Osbourne
In this universe, there exist a multitude of mysterious places where things vanish without a trace. Such places include black holes where entire galaxies are absorbed, the dryer where matching socks enter but never leave, and, oddly enough, behind your ear, where you rest your pencil, never to be seen again.
A great place of mystery from my youth was the Bermuda Triangle. I first learned about it on family television night. Every Wednesday night, we’d watch Unsolved Mysteries on NBC. The opening riff is unmistakable to generations and evokes excitement about the mysteries to come. Such mysteries included the Bermuda Triangle, an ambiguous region in the Western North Atlantic that has claimed an unusually high number of ships and planes that disappear without a trace.
Unexplained regions, such as the Bermuda Triangle, frustrate the human psyche because they create tension and fear of the unknown. We work toward understanding and resolution, but our inability to obtain it eludes us. Such is the frustration surrounding another nebulous region: the chairman’s desk of District 28 Senator Jim Guthrie.
It has long been understood that if you need to make legislation disappear, Senator Jim Guthrie’s desk is the place to do it. He’ll duct tape it, set its feet in concrete, and send it to Jimmy Hoffa’s graveyard for a very reasonable campaign contribution. In just this legislative session alone, Guthrie has been the recipient of four immigration-related bills that currently reside somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. The sad part is that many took the time to draft these bills, present them for printing, have them passed through committee, and then they were deliberated and passed by Guthrie’s peers in the Idaho House of Representatives.
It is not hard to see why an agriculture-heavy district legislator would choose to bury immigration-related bills. There is a bloc of Idaho agriculture that relies heavily on a migrant workforce to maximize profit in an industry with tight profit margins. Much of the public raises valid complaints that this safety-net-dependent labor class is merely shifting the cost of agricultural employment onto the public, while wages are being remitted abroad. There is a real cost to house, educate, and provide healthcare for the migrant class, and the impact is felt in classroom sizes, suppressed wages, housing prices, and increasing healthcare spending. This doesn’t begin to discuss the social cost of cultural clashes.
Perhaps we have reached the point where technological advancements render this labor class moot, and our agrarian society should keep pace with its industrialized counterparts. To date, the public hasn’t forced the issue because generations have devalued human labor and prioritized cushy desk jobs for their kids while falling below the population replacement rate. Now that artificial intelligence is threatening the cognitive labor class at a rate of 6,000 jobs a month, it appears the time for these discussions has arrived.
Unlike the Bermuda Triangle, the chairmen’s desk is a place where things disappear by choice. These discussions cannot be had so long as the chairman’s desk is a tool of censorship. It is the duty of legislators to represent their constituents with their vote and to advocate on their behalf. It is not the duty of committee chairs to unilaterally suppress the voice of their elected equals. This should not be ignored in the upcoming May primary.
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