Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montana’s backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marion—a remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forest—runs a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing America’s public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer base—and his livelihood—vanish before his eyes.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. “You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forests” (1).
That is true, but it is also fair to point out that you are proposing solidarity with someone who voted for fully supporting these negative things happening to other people, even if there was only a vague sense of what that might mean, and is specifically upset now that it unexpectedly turned around on him and his circle. We have to stand with and support someone we might have to fully expect to continue doing the exact same thing as the opportunity arise.
It’s true his interests overlap our own, and raising everyone up is in our best interests, but just realize that we want to give liferafts to people who would prefer to poke holes in the liferafts of others. We want to save people who are acting like spoiled, entitled children and who we have no reason to believe will act any different after they’ve been saved. Just understand that afterwards we need a system that will survive this type of behavior.