Are you heading to Bunkerville/To stand up and fight?
Are you heading to Bunkerville/For your freedom and rights?
Are you heading to Bunkerville/To stand up with me?
-- From the song “Are You Heading to Bunkerville?” by Wayne and Paula Carson
BUNKERVILLE, Nev. -- Susan DeLemus watched as her man headed to Bunkerville.
The Rochester, N.H., resident was trolling the computer earlier this month with her husband, Jerry, when she saw him stiffen with surprise and rage at what he saw on his own computer screen.
He turned to his wife: “You’ve got to see this.”
He showed her a YouTube video about the tense face-off between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government over grazing rights on hundreds of thousands of acres of land run by the Bureau of Land Management.
Following a two-decades-long court battle over Bundy‘s refusal to pay an estimated $1 million in grazing fees, BLM officials took action: Agents moved in to collect hundreds of Bundy’s cattle as the irate rancher looked on.
Immediately, supporters rallied to this small ranching town 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Some of the them brought guns -- self-proclaimed citizen soldiers who vowed the protect Bundy for what they called an overreaching federal government.
Jerry DeLemus saw a news report and asked his wife to find Bundy’s number. She came up with it after a quick Internet search. Within minutes, Jerry was on the phone with Bundy at his ranch.
What could he do, he asked.
“Please come,” Bundy implored.
Jerry DeLemus was headed to Bunkerville.
“I told him, ‘You ought to leave tomorrow -- don’t wait. It’s a long drive,’” Susan DeLemus recalled telling her husband. “I knew he needed to go. I believe in him and what he’s doing. I’m one of those wives who are just going to stand behind their man no matter what he does.”
Susan DeLemus said she couldn’t go because she had to take care of her ailing mother.
Along with his grown son and an old friend, the 59-year-old self-employed contractor, NRA member, Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider and grandfather drove 41 hours straight to reach the cattle ranch. He carried with him a yellow flag with a coiled snake that bore the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”
Jerry DeLemus said the three talked all the way about how they’d felt repressed by a federal government that no longer listened to them. They had to take a stand, they decided. After all, they hailed from a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.”
Jerry DeLemus called his wife from the road. Her words blew wind into his sails.
“I never second-guessed him,” she said. “Our government is in a mess and it’s lawless. Our Constitution has been gutted and trampled upon.”
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1lPYEkK
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