A4
Opinion
wallowa.com
June 21, 2017
Wallowa County Chieftain
Brickbats
have replaced
bright ideas
hose of us of sound mind found last week’s
shooting at a gathering of politicians at a ball field
outside Washington, D.C., unacceptable.
No matter what your political party or persuasion,
killing people over it is inexcusable and not the act of a
sane individual.
Occasionally, the
political rhetoric in Wallowa
County becomes heated,
and folks don’t use their
Voice of the Chieftain
manners. Certain people
have buttons that are easily
pushed, and the result is gasoline thrown on smoldering
embers.
It’s sometimes difficult to determine what passes
as expressing strongly-held beliefs and what is purely
provocative. And are even the most crude utterances
protected speech?
Clearly there has to be a common commitment from
all sides of any issues to make an effort to understand
what others are saying. There is not –– and should not
be –– an insistence that one side is always correct and
another side is always wrong.
Society has been mourning the death of dialogue for
decades. Actual time of death came shortly after 7 a.m.
on June 14 at a baseball field in Alexandria, Va.
Situations such as these should grab supporters of
all sides by the lapels, but they should not stifle honest
debate. The tendency after this type of episode is to
suggest that everyone should simply keep his or her
opinion bottled up, and that way no one is offended. See
no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil.
Those who truly believe in freedom of speech have a
right and responsibility to keep speaking truth to power.
The problem is the manner of the speech and not
necessarily the content.
There isn’t an easy solution. Is “hate speech”
protected speech under the U.S. Constitution?
Is repeated loud and malicious harangue to be
discouraged? Does society as a whole need “safe
spaces,” such as those popular on certain college
campuses where students can shield themselves from
uncomfortable or dissenting viewpoints?
Who should shut up and listen and who should
speak out? And who should decide?
The discussion didn’t begin when Donald Trump was
elected either. You can go as far back as The Sedition
Act of 1798, which broadly made it a crime to criticize
the government.
One ingredient we find in far too short a supply in
2017 is respect. With social media particularly, it’s easy
to slice someone to ribbons and not think anything
about it. It’s harder to do that to someone sitting across
from you at the coffee shop.
The prevailing thought seems to be that some
opinions are simply not worthy of respect. That
line of thought questions the worthiness of the
individual, which can lead to far more serious societal
consequences.
Another ingredient is a willingness to hear all sides.
Your mother probably told you that you should have two
ears and one mouth, which means you should listen
twice as much as you talk. She was right.
Finally, there is a complete and total lack of a
sense of humor in public discourse. We have become
a society of hypersensitive inwardly focused mental
midgets and have lost the ability to see that life is
sometimes a comedy, not always a tragedy.
Sometime you aren’t even the most important person
in the room.
Can we find the road back to balance? We must if we
are to continue to survive and prosper as a democracy.
T
EDITORIAL
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Paul Wahl, editor@wallowa.com
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Volume 134
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Finding, and somehow
remembering, ‘comfort’
Several years ago, Stephanie Koontz,
history professor at Evergreen State
University, was at Fishtrap with her
then-new book, “The Way We Never
Were: American Families and the Nos-
talgia Trap.” It describes a world we
thought we had –– but one that never
really existed.
At the time, the idea of the “nuclear
family” was the rage; Koontz argued
that the notion was a mixture of altered
memories of the Victorian Age and
“Leave it to Beaver” television of the
‘50s, that the “extended” multigenera-
tional family and not the “nuclear” fam-
ily had been the traditional glue that held
people together. Nuclear families in the
‘80s became lost in angst, guilt and
faulty memories.
I’ve been thinking about that book
and title a lot these days, trying to under-
stand political angst and anger on both
sides and an election that brought a
political outsider like Donald Trump to
office.
Most of the people I know who voted
for Donald Trump are not struggling
because of lost coal mines or Obama
policies that promoted clean energy, not
struggling to make ends meet, to put fine
food on the table, or to put a boat, travel
trailer or RV in the driveway. They’re
living relatively comfortable lives.
It might be because they fear losing
this comfortable life and remember the
past with a nostalgia that highlights all
the warm and fuzzies and forgets the
troubles and traumas.
“Leave it to Beaver” was a TV show.
Mom the homemaker and dad the bread-
winner and two kids living on a nice
suburban street was an ideal. On my
‘50s street, mom worked, and among
my friends’ parents were alcoholics and
single moms, one a woman widowed
by Korea trying to hold things together
without relatives or extended family liv-
ing nearby.
My California high school had plenty
MAIN STREET
Rich Wandschneider
of Hispanics and a few African-Amer-
icans and Samoans, because we were
next to Camp Pendleton. But my street
was all-white; not Marine Corps hous-
ing, which really was integrated because
President Truman had recently inte-
grated the formerly all-segregated mil-
itary; or Posole Town, the unpaved
streets on which most of the Mexican
community lived.
Some of the Mexican families
had been there longer than California
statehood, long before my own Ger-
man and Norwegian grandparents and
great-grandparents made it to Ellis
Island. It did not count for much in a
‘50s California that was largely in white
hands.
A clue to the voter angst that helped
bring on the current political drama
came with a recent radio interview from
Coeur d’Alene, where a woman said
that she had moved there after retiring
in California because things “felt like”
California in the ‘70s.
I immediately thought about the Viet-
nam War that dominated young lives
and politics in the ‘70s. What Califor-
nia street did she remember! And then I
remembered my California streets of the
‘50s and Stephanie Koontz’s book.
There were some great things about
California and the ‘50s: Be-bop, the
Drifters, Penguins and “American Band-
stand” on TV; high school sports and
after-game dances –– the sports part was
totally integrated; cool cars –– my own
’52 Ford not holding a candle to the ’55
and ’56 Chevies, which ruled the roads;
and male teachers –– my first men in the
classroom happened in high school, and
they were all WW II vets who had gone
to school on the G.I. Bill.
That bill was truly one of the great
things about the ‘50s –– a stroke of leg-
islation that gave millions doors to edu-
cation and home ownership, a bill that
many believe created the middle class in
the country.
My guess is that WW II and the G.I.
Bill are also what made white Ameri-
cans comfortable with each other. The
East Coast especially was made up of
ethnic neighborhoods, and some parts of
the country were predictably German or
Scandinavian or Irish. The War put Ital-
ian-Americans next to German, Polish,
Irish and Scottish Americans, and the
G.I Bill put them in the same schools
and suburbs.
White suburbs, builders and edu-
cators prospered in the ‘50s. And
while ethnic divisions among Europe-
an-Americans declined and white power
broadened –– we were comfortable
enough to elect German-American Ike
Eisenhower President in 1952 –– inner
cities declined.
The ‘60s and ‘70s brought
Irish-American Catholic JFK to the
White House, and Civil Rights acts, the
Indian Freedom of Religion Act, envi-
ronmental legislation, urban riots, Medi-
care, Medicaid, Vietnam, and Nixon.
The ‘50s started looking comfortable.
And for many, another Irish-Ameri-
can President, Ronald Reagan –– reach-
ing back to a TV and movie-screen past
–– seemed to make things comfortable
again.
But then it was Clinton and Bushes
1 and 2, the Internet, 9/11 and Afghani-
stan, Iraq, Syria and an African-Ameri-
can President.
And once again the ‘50s –– and mak-
ing America Great Again –– sounds like
comfort food.
Rich Wandschneider lives in Joseph
and writes a monthly column for the
Chieftain.
Changing how we ‘do community’
George Burns recorded a song some
years back called “I Wish I Was 18
Again.” Ray Price released it in 2015 as
well.
Never mind to be grammatically cor-
rect is needs to be “were” instead of
“was.”
It’s a lament, of sorts, about growing
old. All of us who reach a certain age can
identify with the lyrics.
Now time turns the pages and, oh, life
goes so fast;
The years turn the black hair all gray.
There are two basic responses to the
inevitable experience of growing old. Roll
over and give up or stand up straight and
spit in Father Time’s eye.
Sixty is the new 50, which is the new
40, which is the new 30. You get the idea.
One discussion regarding age is going
on across Wallowa County and much of
the country. How do you engage young
people in clubs, groups, churches and
organizations? If you attend almost any
public gathering, the amount of gray hair
is overwhelming. If gray hair is a sign of
wisdom, we’re in high cotton.
But where will we find leaders once the
current generation shuffles off this mortal
coil along with good old Hamlet himself?
What is being done to develop the next
Rotary Club presidents, the next county
commissioners, the next cemetery district
volunteers?
WAHL TO WALL
Paul Wahl
If you spend time around today’s
younger folks, you discover quickly they
are intelligent, bright and enjoy serving
their community. Unfortunately, most of
them are not “joiners,” unless it involves
clicking on an icon.
That’s not a criticism. The upcom-
ing generation chooses to do things
differently.
This phenomenon was addressed
in Robert D. Putnam’s book “Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Amer-
ican Community,” published in 2000.
His premise was that while bowl-
ing remains popular, bowling leagues are
nearly extinct. Television, social media,
two-career families and generational
changes in values results in fewer younger
members of Rotary or Lions, fewer city
council candidates and others.
In Putnam’s view, that social capital
deficit threatens educational performance,
safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collec-
tion, democratic responsiveness, every-
day honesty and even our health and
happiness.
People were meant to live in commu-
nity. The younger generation as a whole
believes this, but they find community in
social media networks and online, rather
than at a weekly face-to-face gathering.
If you want to test that hypothesis,
put out a plea for help with a community
project on Facebook and watch the vol-
unteers pour in.
Honestly, I believe today’s younger
generation is more interested in commu-
nity than we were at the same phase in our
lives, they simply go about it in a different
way. Technology has changed the interac-
tive process forever.
Perhaps we need to stream Rotary
Club meetings using Facebook live video.
Without young people, the future
of community institutions in Wallowa
County to a great extent depends on an
ever-increasing supply of old folks. Fortu-
nately, we must have built it, because they
continue to come.
That doesn’t mean we can stop
attempting to drag young folks out from
behind their smart phones.
Who knows how many of them
might find having a conversation across
a cup of coffee interesting and even
adventuresome.
Paul Wahl is editor of The Chieftain
and has one of those birthday’s ending
with a zero coming up soon.