Despite legislator’s attack on governor’s appointees, there is no single set of “Wyoming values”

BY ROD MILLER

A Wyoming legislator who shall go unnamed here recently wrote to Gov. Mark Gordon. She complained that three of his gubernatorial appointments, who will also remain unnamed, were unfit for service because they didn’t represent “Wyoming values.”

The names of folks involved are unimportant, but that term – Wyoming values – deserves a good bit of discussion. At the very least, the term deserves definition.

What are “Wyoming values”? 

As a geologic and geographic entity, a place, it would seem that those values are wind, cold, mountains, huge

sky, rivers, antelope, sagebrush and the other physical attributes of our state that make it different from, say, Virginia. 

If the legislator was criticizing the appointees for not representing those values, she is absolutely right! No one among us can be an adequate representative of Wyoming under those terms.

Perhaps she meant Wyoming’s people and the beliefs, hopes, prejudices, experiences, doubts, faiths and all the other intangibles that make up our value system as humans and guide us in our lives as citizens. That makes more sense to me.

But I think the unhappy legislator operates under the false assumption that all Wyomingites share one homogeneous, universal set of values that are easily pigeon-holed. If so, she will be deeply disappointed now and in the future. 

Human beings and citizens just don’t behave that way, particularly in Wyoming. And, in truth, they never have.

Simply occupying the same geopolitical area, such as Wyoming, is no guarantee that people will share the same values and think and behave the same way. Crazy Horse and Capt. William Fetterman, and others before them and after, are ample proof.

My hunch is that the legislator was speaking of politics, and criticizing others for not sharing her particular brand of it. If so, she forgets that Wyoming has several political parties that all have different systems of political belief and continually beat each other over the head with them. 

Not one of them can claim to have a monopoly on the hearts and minds of Wyoming citizens —  or their values.

In fact, political parties in Wyoming don’t even enjoy universal belief within their ranks. And when they get into intramural shoving matches, one faction is always attacking another for not representing “Wyoming values.” That makes for good theater, though, watching them froth at the mouth in self-righteous indignation.

But it has nothing to do with Wyoming values. Truth be told, it’s all up to the individual to determine what his or her values are. Perhaps our home influences those choices because of our small population and relative isolation. Those factors make self-reliance, neighborliness, endurance and other common virtues important to us. It would be very difficult, indeed, to survive in Wyoming without them.

We can call them the values of Wyomingites and live proudly by them. We are free to make up our own lists of rules for life that work for us. And we can live in this great state and contribute to its well-being and that of our neighbors guided by those lists. 

And we can do all of this without some politician looking over our shoulders and telling us how to act.

In that sense, I’ll take the simple values of Wyomingites over politically imposed “Wyoming values” any day of the week

And twice on Sunday.

Rod Miller is a citizen, father and grandfather and a proud former Rawlins Outlaw living in Cheyenne.