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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 27, 2017)
Wednesday, December 27, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 2 O P I N I O The Nugget will be closed on Monday, January 1 Early deadlines for the issue of January 3 are... Display Ads: Thursday at 5 p.m. Classifieds, Events, Announcements: Friday at 12 p.m. Letters to the Editor: Friday at 5 p.m. Happy New Year! Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let- ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor. The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday. To the Editor: As a complement to monthly school board meetings, superintendent coffees, newsletters and open office hours, I plan to pen Letters to the Editor in the hopes of being even more communicative with the entire Sisters community. We have much to celebrate coming out of our December 13 School Board Meeting: • We celebrated that our Volleyball Team are the 2017 State Champions! • Enrollment increased 11 students this past month. • 2017 state testing results and graduation rate prove, again, that Sisters School District is the best district in Central Oregon. Additionally, we had an outstanding pre- sentation from students from Mrs. Givot’s biology classes. They conducted field stud- ies in the Trout Creek Conservation Area, a 161-acre parcel owned by the School District that sits between the High School and the Tollgate community. They discussed how they collected their data, the data collected on different plant and animal life observed, and discussed environmental issues related to the TCCA. I am very happy with the overall imple- mentation of the 2017 general obligation bond funds. The District, the school board, and the Bond Oversight Committee are committed to delivering on all of the promises captured in the $10.7 capital investment. Due to favor- able interest rates and the matching grant, we have been able to strategically fund addi- tional improvements in every building, cre- ating a better environment for students and staff In light of a number of factors, we have decided to “pump the brakes” and focus 100 percent of our bond energy into finishing the original $10.7 million scope. Concurrently, See LETTERS on page 29 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Chance Rain/ Freezing Rain Chance Rain Chance Rain Chance Showers Partly Sunny Slight Chance Rain 40/24 41/31 44/29 41/24 40/24 38/26 The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. Website: www.nuggetnews.com 442 E. Main Ave., P.O. Box 698, Sisters, Oregon 97759 Tel: 541-549-9941 | Fax: 541-549-9940 | editor@nuggetnews.com Postmaster: Send address changes to The Nugget Newspaper, P.O. Box 698, Sisters, OR 97759. Third Class Postage Paid at Sisters, Oregon. Editor: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Classifieds & Circulation: Teresa Mahnken Advertising: Karen Kassy Graphic Design: Jess Draper Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Accounting: Erin Bordonaro Owner: J. Louis Mullen The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. 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N Jonah Goldberg It’s a puzzle. Over the last decade, Venezuela has supplanted Cuba as the Shangri-La of the American left. Not long ago, self- declared socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders insisted that the American dream was more achievable in the Bolivarian Republic than in America. A string of Hollywood lumi- naries made the pilgrimage to visit the socialist Mecca to say ponderous and stupid things. Today, the praise is more muted, because events have illuminated that stupidity. The government recently advised its citizens to eat their pet rabbits. Inflation in Venezuela is reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Roughly 85 percent of Venezuelan companies have stopped production to one extent or another, in the most oil-rich country in the world. And yet, socialism is arguably more popular in theory than at any time in American history, particu- larly among young people. A Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll last November found that 42 percent of young people support capitalism, but 44 percent prefer socialism for a socioeconomic system. Why the disconnect? For conservatives of my ilk, the most obvious answer is that, for the left, socialism itself is never to blame. One of my favorite guilty plea- sures is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Twitter feed, which insists daily that the socialist ideal has never been tarnished by real-world socialists. A tweet perma- nently affixed to the top of their page reads: “Are you about to tell us ‘Socialism was tried in Russia’ or ‘Look at Venezuela’ etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism!” Even mainstream liber- als don’t like to concede any points in socialism’s disfa- vor. The late Chilean dicta- tor Augusto Pinochet was a murderer and a tyrant. So was the late Cuban commu- nist Fidel Castro. Pinochet helped his country transition to democracy. Castro, who killed more people, left his country as a police state. But while Pinochet is a demonic figure in the liberal imagi- nation, Castro’s status is far more complicated. He is still a hero to many. For the last decade, the New York Times has cov- ered the socialism of both Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, with the same sophisticated nuance it long applied to Cuba. Over the weekend, it ran a heart-wrenching story on how Venezuela’s poor chil- dren are dying from starva- tion. But the culpability of Chavism, Venezuela’s brand of socialism, is something the reader has to bring to the page. The disconnect between socialism’s record and its invincible appeal also stems from leftists’ denial of what it really entails. Thus, Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Great Britain, dragged the Labor Party away from its official social- ist dogma about the need for the “common ownership of the means of production.” “Socialism for me,” Blair said, “was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in cooperation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone.” That’s why he rejected socialism in favor of what he called “social-ism.” Similarly, Bernie bros focus on social solidar- ity rather than political economy. But even this watered- down spirit of “we’re all in it together” can do enormous damage. It is very hard to reconcile with democracy and the rule of law, unless there’s a dire national crisis, and even then it may cause grave damage. I don’t want America to be Denmark. But at least Denmark recognizes that social democracy requires democracy, free speech and the rule of law to keep it from turning into Venezuela on the Baltic. I wouldn’t be so concerned about the rising support for socialism among young people in the United States, save for the fact that it’s been accompanied by a modest decline in support for democracy, too. 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.
