Armed anti-mask protesters who dare to call themselves patriots again arrived outside Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo’s home in Idaho early Tuesday evening.
The 40-year-old Boise native was at her office, preparing to vote by Zoom on a mask mandate that would help defend this corner of America when we are facing the most deadly threat in our history. Her physician husband was at work and her recently widowed mother was out walking the dog.
So Lachiondo’s two boys, aged 12 and 8, were alone inside the tidy one-story house when their curving suburban street lawns filled with the sounds of people aggressively betraying our country during an unprecedented national emergency. The protesters had been there before to denounce as a threat to their liberty any requirement to take a proven precaution to save the lives of their fellow Americans. The gathering darkness filed with the sounds of their unreasoning fury.
“Yelling, banging, firing air horns, amplifying sound clips from Scarface, accusing me of tyranny and cowering inside,” Lachiondo later reported on Facebook.
At that moment, Lachiondo was in her office at the county courthouse, beginning a virtual meeting as a board member of the Central Health District (CDH), which covers Ada and three other counties. Ada and another county have a mask mandate, but the other two do not, and it was up to CDH to extend one to all four, absent meaningful action by Idaho Gov. Brad Little.
Lachiondo interrupted the roll call to say that she had just received a text from a neighbor.
“There are outside my house, I’m going to step out just a minute to call the police because my kids are there,” she said.
Diana Lachiondo
Ada CountyProtesters had been there before and Lachiondo looked concerned but not unduly alarmed as she ducked out of Zoom view. But then the 12-year-old called her in tears and she learned the boys were alone.
Lachiondo reappeared with her cellphone pressed to her ear and she had a fear-struck look such as would grab the heart of any mother. She was herself now in tears and she was fighting to keep her composure.
“Can I interrupt you for just a moment?” she asked. “My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now and there are protesters banging outside the door. I'm going to go home and make sure he's OK, so I will reconnect with you when I get there.”
The older boy must have been all the more upset because anti-mask protesters had also appeared outside the home on the night of Aug. 2, when the family happened to be celebrating his 12th birthday.
“They were unmasked, congregated on the public sidewalk, and did a fair amount of shouting about tyranny, communism, and the need to remove me from office,” Lachionda said in a Facebook post then. “They prayed that I would be released from Satan’s spell and see the error of my ways in requiring masks in public spaces.”
That Aug. 3 post remained remarkably reasonable as she continued, saying, “I don’t personally know any of the protesters, but I trust that they are scared, and that they are struggling right now in their own way.”
She noted that none of the protesters really knew anything about her. They did not know that she is a parent “doing my level best to keep our children emotionally whole and that I’m a terrible math teacher.”
She said the protesters were also unaware that her husband is a doctor who risks exposure to COVID from patients every day. They also did not know that her ailing father was precariously vulnerable to the virus.
“I’m a daughter who desperately wants to keep her dad safe as his health fails in the middle of a pandemic,” she said.
At the same time she was seeking to fulfill her duties as a duly elected county commissioner approaching the end of her first term.
“Just like nearly everyone in our community, I am juggling competing and difficult roles in the middle of extraordinary circumstances,” she continued. “And there is solace and beauty in that. Because, truly, we are not alone. The great struggles of humanity—birth, death, survival, sickness, heartbreak, and, yes, math homework—are universal and shared. We suffer great loss. We do hard things. We rise to the occasion. Or we don’t.”
She actually felt sorry for the protesters even though they had disrupted a family birthday already complicated by the pandemic.
“The protestors shouting accusations of ‘tyranny’ and ‘communism’ on my front lawn are missing some essential truths about what it means to be a member of a community and, on that score, my heart goes out to them,” she said.
But she was not about to be intimidated into backing off from proven public health measures.
“I will keep making the tough calls that give us the best chance to stay healthy, safe, and made whole as swiftly as possible,” she said. “And I will keep taking the heat when people don’t like those calls. It’s my job.”
She spoke as a true patriot.
“When I was sworn in just a year and half ago, I never expected a global pandemic would so powerfully intersect with a seat on the Ada County Commission,” she said. “But it did, and here we are… We will help one another in ways great and small, including the simple act of wearing a mask to slow the spread of a virus.”
She was a true mother as she added, “And Happy 12th Birthday to my good, brave, wonderful son. It’s not the birthday (or world) I would wish for you, but it’s the one we got, and I’m so grateful for that.”
Five days after the interrupted birthday, her 73-year-old father died, apparently of health problems predating the pandemic. David Lachiondo had grown up in the Basque enclave of Boise and had not spoken English until he began grammar school. He became a high school teacher and the principal and then director of Basque studies at Boise State. He had often played accordion at Basque gatherings, to the particular delight of the children.
“In what would be the last conversation we ever had—he reminded me to keep fighting the good fight, to stay the course, no matter what,” Diana Lachiondo said. “The good fight is why I ran for office in the first place.”
If part of that had the ring of a campaign speech, it was because she was running for re-election. She and President Trump both failed to win a second term, but she acknowledged defeat with a grace that continues to elude Trump.
“The good fight is always, always worth fighting, even when you come up short,” she said.
She recounted on Facebook what she had told her sons as she tucked them into bed the night of the election.
“It’s the same thing my own parents taught me: we do hard things, and we do them for the right reasons,” she said.
She made a pledge to her constituents such as Trump should have made to all of us.
“For the next two months, I will continue to serve the people of Ada County to the absolute best of my ability.”
She expressed the gratitude that should fill all elected officials of whatever rank, whether they win another term or not.
“I can’t thank you enough for the honor of holding this office, however briefly, and putting your faith in me.”
She continued to serve on the board to CDH, which convened on Tuesday to vote on extending the mask mandate. Some 500 protesters gathered outside the building. More appeared outside the homes of at least three board members, including Lachiondo. The last thing any of them should have been carrying was an American flag.
A sorry defeat in the fight against the virus came just 15 minutes after the proceedings commenced. The Boise police informed Mayor Lauren McClean that the protesters at the various locations were becoming too disorderly for the CDH meeting to continue. The mayor called CDH Director Russ Duke, who then moved that the meetings be adjourned proceeding.
"I got a call from the mayor, and it sounds like the police, and she is requesting that we stop the meeting at this time because of the intense level of protesters in the parking lot and concern for police safety and staff safety as well as the protesters that are at some of our board members' homes right now," Duke said.
Rather than vote on a measure that could have saved lives when the virus had reached record levels in its jurisdiction, CDH immediately and unanimously voted to stop the meeting in the name of safety.
Of course, none of this would have been necessary if Gov. Little had the backbone to institute a mask mandate rather than pass it off to local officials. And yet, Little spoke as if it were all none of his doing.
"The actions of protesters at the private residences of public officials is reprehensible. It is nothing more than a bullying tactic that seeks to silence,” he tweeted. “Our right to free speech should not be used to intimidate and scare others. There is no place for this behavior in Idaho.”
This reprehensibly weak appeaser then said, “I urge calm among Idahoans so we can get through the pandemic together, stronger."
A CDH spokesman said yesterday that no new vote on an extended mask mandate has been set, though there have been “conversations” and the board has a regular meeting next Tuesday.
And in a world that is not the one his mother wished for him is a 12-year-old boy whose birthday was disrupted and who then lost his grandfather not a week later and then had protesters terrorize him and his younger brother. He at least has a mother who is a true patriot in a time of preposterous imposters.
Lachiondo could not be reached for comment, but maybe she had already said all that needed saying.
