Last night, I was one of around 250 people who witnessed the Pahrump Town Board vote 3-2 to enact the “English Language and Patriot Reaffirmation Ordinance”. It was a hostile angry mob environment and – much to the liking of most of the Pahrump residents at the meeting, I’m sure – I left town soon after it passed sorry that I had to spend $10 on gas in town to get the car over the mountain pass back to Las Vegas.

The passed resolution is similar to the original one proposed with a few of the more grossly unconstitutional items removed. There are several ins-and-outs to the resolution, but let me state the two major issues discussed at the meeting:

1. The resolution requires all government business to be conducted in English, and denies town “benefits” (of which none currently exist, since they informally declared emergency services not a “benefit”) to be given to illegal immigrants.
2. The resolution denies private residences and businesses the right to fly alone the flag of a nation other than the United States.

When the resolution was announced by one of the town board members, the mostly white and elderly crowd cheered and hollered. Soon afterwards they opened the floor to public comment. Lee was one of the first in line, and as soon as she introduced herself as a staff attorney of the Nevada ACLU, the crowd booed and shouted her down. This was a medium-sized room packed to the rim with very hostile people, mostly not interested in civil discourse. If it wasn’t for the five to seven cops in the room, I would not have felt safe.

Lee’s three minutes of time were constantly interrupted with boos and insults, but here’s what she got through: 1) If the resolution was strictly an English-language resolution, the ACLU might not have even been there [cheers], but then there’s this section about flags. Is it really in the spirit of the First Amendment to prevent an American citizen from celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with an Irish flag, or an Italian restaurant advertising with an Italian flag, or even a former Southerner from putting up a Confederate flag? 2) Since the flag section is blatantly unconstitutional, Pahrump will be fiscally responsible for any legal fees when the lawsuit is inevitably successful, costing the town hundreds of thousands of dollars [“Extortion!”] for the sake of a symbolic gesture.

But the crowd would have none of it. After several members of the board aggressively told Lee that her time was up, despite the fact a large chunk of her time was taken up by shouts from the mob, several more people went up to comment, some for, some against. Those that spoke for the resolution did not seem to realize that it mostly affects government business, which already is conducted in English. They spoke about frustrations with having to choose a language at the Wal-Mart checkout counter, about the wars they had fought in and how it pains them to hear Spanish spoken in their daily lives, about the jobs the low-wage Mexican workers are taking from them. Perhaps they realized that the resolution did not speak to these problems, but still they supported the symbolic fuck-you.

Those that spoke against it brought up the First Amendment. They spoke about our veterans who fought in other countries to defend our rights, and the melting pot history of America. One woman, a member of the Cherokee Nation, mourned that she wouldn’t be able to put up the flag of her heritage. The crowd was more respectful to these speakers than they were to the ACLU, but still the arguments fell on deaf ears.

And here’s where I want to make clear that I don’t think the Pahrump citizens supporting this amendment are necessarily bad people. (Although I might want to say that about the board members who spearheaded the resolution.) They are frustrated with the global economy, scared to see their culture fading away, and are generally doing what humans tend to do: clinging to their past, wallowing in their comforts. I’m not upset with them to some degree because, even though this resolution passed and they won the battle, they know they are losing the war. Many of them will soon die, and they will then be remembered mostly in Jerry Bruckheimer films and books by Tom Brokaw. Their culture is indeed fading away, as all generational cultures do. The real tragedy is what they can do in their final, desperate years by reacting to their fears and forgetting the moral basis of their great country.

It was clear during the course of the night that the crowd wasn’t there to speak for the resolution as it was written, but to merely voice their displeasure of the changing world. One of the board members against the resolution said most of the illegal activity can be reduced by better enforcing extant laws – it didn’t matter, the Spanish-speakers must go. And so they cheered and hollered on a resolution that probably wouldn’t have been out of place in Castro’s Cuba or Franco’s Spain, putting the mob flame to the Bill of Rights. The resolution will be overturned by the courts, if the next Pahrump town board doesn’t repeal it first, but still the racial intimidation will live on. By the way, if hearing the above angers you, and you’re wondering what you can do, perhaps now is not a bad time to give the minimum of $20 it takes to become a member of the ACLU.

A final thought: while I’ve said that I don’t entirely blame the populace of Pahrump for passing such an initiative, I can’t help wishing that they are in some form punished for the unethical behavior of the town board. They may feel the fiscal pain of losing their day in court, or the economic slump of threatened immigrant residents leaving the town, but let’s be honest: Pahrump is a quickly growing town, and construction money is pouring in (even if in small, low-wage packets to people who don’t speak fluent English).

So here is my Pahrump curse: may they experience continual massive growth; may people whose ways are unfamiliar to theirs pour in, buying cookie-cutter houses by the thousands; may the sprawling developments replicate virally over their desert landscape, exponentially increasing until that one inevitable day arrives, that day where their population ticker flips up to that magical 400,000 where state law kicks in and their brothels have to close shop; and on that day may they look around and not see that unique Pahrump that they grew up in, but a Pahrump that’s merely a satellite development of Las Vegas, a characterless suburban sprawl indistinguishable from, say, Centennial; a Pahrump that is Pahrump no more, clutching only to their history. And then the permanent oil supply decline will begin…