Wednesday, December 27, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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The Nugget will be closed
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Early deadlines for the
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Classifieds, Events, Announcements:
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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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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
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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.