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Wednesday, February 14, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Editorial…
Moments of magic
Faring thee well now
Let your life proceed by its own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine*
The world lost a couple of unsung giants
last week — men who were outside the spot-
light but who contributed mightily to the rich
tapestry of American music.
John Perry Barlow was a cattle rancher and
a “cyberlibertarian” activist — but most of all,
a visionary and a poet; one of the two lyricists
for the Grateful Dead. He died on February 7,
at the age of 70 after a long illness.
Tom Wheeler was a Rolling Stone writer,
editor-in-chief of Guitar Player Magazine, the
author of several magnificent books on gui-
tars and, most recently, a beloved professor
of journalism at the University of Oregon. He
died on Saturday, also at the age of 70.
My daughter made a magical connection
with Wheeler just days before his sudden
passing. They connected across the gulf of a
couple of generations through a mutual love
for music, musicians, and the written word.
Music does that. As columnist Jim Williams
notes in these pages this week, music is never
“just music.” For many of us, it is as much a
part of who we are as our blood and our bones.
And it brings people together. We see it here
in Sisters all the time. There’s nothing finer
than friends gathering to make and to listen
to some homemade music with friends at one
of Sisters’ welcoming venues. And our com-
munity is blessed to have artists of extraordi-
nary talent and power come to town regularly,
where we can all bask in the profound joy of
handmade art performed with passion and con-
summate skill.
In those moments, it doesn’t matter where
we come from, what our politics may or may
not be, what we do for a living. All that matters
is that magic is happening at that very moment
in our town, in our lives, in our souls.
Music is the greatest builder of bridges we
know of. And when the bridge-builders put
down their tools and depart, we feel the loss
keenly. It’s left for us to pick up the tools and
keep building those bridges as we bid the mae-
stros well on their journey back to wherever it
is that the magic comes from.
Wheel to the storm and fly.
Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
* “Cassidy,” by John Perry Barlow
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:
The 2017 wildfire season across the West
was unprecedented in terms of dollars spent,
acres burned, and the increased duration of
wildfires. Even now, months later, we’re still
feeling the impacts from these fires, on our
landscapes and our funding.
As wildfires across the nation grow more
severe — and costly — the USDA Forest
Service is challenged to adequately fund
other important work that will benefit our
forests and communities because of increas-
ing firefighting costs.
In Central Oregon, the Deschutes National
Forest is fortunate to have the support of
local elected officials, communities, part-
ners, volunteers, and employees who are all
working together to make our forests health-
ier and more fire-resilient. Partnerships like
the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project,
Community Wildfire Protection groups, and
Project Wildfire are making our communi-
ties safer and reducing the potential of cata-
strophic wildfires on the landscape.
See LETTERS on page 22
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Robert C.
Koehler
When you have a country
to govern and you have no
idea what to do — and, even
more to the core of the mat-
ter, you also have a crony-
agenda you want to push
quietly past the populace —
there’s a time-proven tech-
nique that generally works.
Govern by scapegoat!
This usually means go to
war, but sometimes that’s
not enough. Here in the
USA, there’s been so much
antiwar sentiment since the
disastrous quagmires of the
last half-century we’ve had
to make war simply part of
the background noise. The
military cash-bleed contin-
ues, but the public lacks an
international enemy to rally
against and blame for its
insecurity.
Creating a scapegoat
enemy domestically has
also gotten complicated.
Thugs and punks — preda-
tory (minority) teenagers
— shoulder much of the
responsibility for keeping
the country distracted, but
in this era of political cor-
rectness, politicians have to
be careful. Thus the Trump
administration has turned to
the immigrants. Not all of
them, of course—only the
ones from Latin America,
the Middle East and Africa.
In particular, it has turned to
. . . the illegals!
Why is America so
violent?
“It’s pure evil,” runs
the newly released Trump
campaign ad. “President
Trump is right: Build the
wall, deport criminals, stop
illegal immigration now.
Democrats who stand in
our way will be complicit
in every murder commit-
ted by illegal immigrants.
President Trump will fix our
border and keep our fami-
lies safe.”
Governing by scapegoat
is more than just a stupid
appeal to the base. Its cruel
consequences are manifold.
Here’s one look at the
humanity of DACA: “It
meant we did not fear that
today — any day — was
going to be the last day we
could hug our children, par-
ents or siblings,” Dreamer
Reyna Montoya writes at
Truthout. “It allowed us to
have inner peace, know-
ing that we were not going
to be thrown to a country
we no longer know. DACA
provided safety, and that is
now being ripped away.”
Leaving hundreds of
thousands of lives “hanging
by a thread,” as Montoya
put it, strikes me as contrib-
uting to the problem, not
the solution. Trump’s claim
that “illegals” contribute in
a serious way to American
violence is totally without
factual basis, but because
violence has become a
plague in this country,
explaining its cause with
scapegoat propaganda has
a feel-good resonance for a
lot of people. It’s so much
easier to blame some des-
ignated “other” than to look
within.
But consider . . .
“The governor and
several people in Benton
(Kentucky) said they
couldn’t believe a mass
shooting would hap-
pen in their small, close-
knit town. But many such
shootings across the nation
have happened in rural
communities.”
Ye a h , a n o t h e r o n e ,
at a high school in rural
Kentucky. Two students
killed, as many as 20
injured, a 15-year-old boy
arrested. He fired a handgun
into a crowded atrium at the
school until he ran out of
bullets. This is now minor
news in America: ho hum,
another mass murder.
The agenda that Trump
and his cohorts are focused
on moving forward is not
the one that addresses
American misery, but the
one that slashes corporate
taxes and privatizes as much
of the social infrastructure
as possible. For instance,
four months after Hurricane
Maria, 30 percent of Puerto
Rico remains without elec-
tric power. Government
relief efforts didn’t go much
beyond the presidential toss-
ing of paper towels — a rac-
ist gesture if ever there was
one — but now the Puerto
Rican governor has a plan to
privatize the island’s power
utility. Appalled critics are
calling this a blatant exam-
ple of disaster capitalism:
the use of tragedy to further
a corporate agenda.
Let the rich grow richer.
When that causes trouble,
blame the ones who have
the least.
© 2018 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.