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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (June 5, 2019)
2 Wednesday, June 5, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O Jonah Goldberg WELCOME SISTERS RODEO PARTICIPANTS & PATRONS! Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer9s 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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 letter written by Elizabeth Burns last week is so disturbing that I just have to com- ment on it. It9s so wrong in so many ways. I9m a lifelong educator, as well 4 which I9m embarrassed to say after reading her letter. Her statement automatically pinning the blame on people because of their sex, color and age, is disgusting. <Like so much in this country old white men ....= So to follow her logic, young non-white women are auto- matically not ever at fault? What about older women then? What about non-white males? Or all white women? All equally disgusting assumptions. That9s exactly what we are try- ing to avoid in America. Aren9t we? That kind of knee-jerk statement and those assumptions? She decries <Cronyism and favoritism,= then turns right around and does exactly that herself. To paraphrase her: <Many of the children have been part of the community for years. The coaches have been here for mere months.= OMG! That9s rank cronyism and favoritism RIGHT THERE! Can9t you see? Automatically good people and bad people, based on how long they have lived in our town. That9s really how to rank people? Think about it. Virtually all of us were newcomers to Sisters at some point. That9s an awful, awful assumption. Dead wrong, too. Then to top it off: <Children are to be believed.= Well, OK, but believed just as much as the adults/others involved. No more, and no less. Fair is fair, right? Only an in depth inves- tigation or a court can actually determine who is telling the whole truth and who is not. Wait and see. Until then the accused are presumed innocent 4 unless that has changed in the last See LETTERS on page 35 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Partly Cloudy AM Clouds/PM Sun Partly Cloudy 78/48 59/37 53/38 N Saturday Sunday Monday Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny Partly Cloudy 62/38 75/46 82/51 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC 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 in Chief: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Graphic Design: Jess Draper Community Marketing Partners: Patti Jo Beal & Vicki Curlett Classifieds & Circulation: Lisa May Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Owner: J. Louis Mullen The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. Third-class postage: one year, $45; six months (or less), $25. First-class postage: one year, $85; six months, $55. Published Weekly. ©2019 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All advertising which appears in The Nugget is the property of The Nugget and may not be used without explicit permission. The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. assumes no liability or responsibility for information contained in advertisements, articles, stories, lists, calendar etc. within this publication. All submissions to The Nugget Newspaper will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyrighting purposes and subject to The Nugget Newspaper’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially, that all rights are currently available, and that the material in no way infringes upon the rights of any person. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return or safety of artwork, photos, or manuscripts. I9ve changed my mind (a little) about how we discuss generations. First, let me illustrate my longstanding gripe. <I am probably the big- gest fan of the millennials you9ll ever meet,= retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said in a recent CBS interview. <[Critics] talk about millennials being soft and pampered and entitled? Well, I9m quick to say that you9ve never seen them in a firefight in Afghanistan. ... This is a fabulous genera- tion, and anybody that wor- ries about the future of the United States, I don9t think you need to worry.= I can9t stand that kind of talk. Imagine that I said, <I am probably the biggest critic of millennials you9ll ever meet. Fans talk about millennials being brave and courageous. Well, I9m quick to say that you9ve never seen them mooching beer money in a 7-Eleven parking lot.= This might instantly strike you as unfair 4 and it is! That9s the point. There are some 83 mil- lion millennials, defined as Americans born between 1981 and 1996. It9s difficult to generalize about a group of people this large. I would leap at the oppor- tunity to buy beer for the millennials who raided bin Laden9s compound. But some random guy who was playing video games when bin Laden was taken out? He can buy his own beer. In other words, charac- teristics can be generalized, but character is formed by individual deeds. There is no transitive property to glory or blame. A hero in one generation isn9t less heroic because of the mis- deeds of someone else his age. Generational pride is the cheapest form of identity politics. On the other hand, it9s true that you can make some useful generalizations about various generations. Joseph Sternberg, an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, has a new book, <The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials9 Economic Future.= He casts a thought- ful, nuanced and important light on the plight of millen- nials. Crucially, Sternberg does it from a center- right, pro-market perspec- tive rather than from the more familiar center-left view that often gets mired in larger identity-politics formulations. Millennials entered the workforce in large num- bers around the time of the financial crisis of 2007- 2008 and the deep recession that followed it. That, along with policies in areas such as housing and education pushed by allegedly self- interested baby boomers, had dire consequences for a large swath of young people. Sternberg9s argument that millennials 4 whether they fought in Afghanistan or not 4 have legitimate complaints about how the system is failing them strikes me as a valuable and worthwhile form of gen- erational stereotyping. It9s rooted in empirical facts and figures. But Sternberg9s attempt to blame the boomers for the millennials9 travails strikes me as the wrong kind of generational stereotyp- ing. And I say that as a Gen Xer for whom bashing baby boomers is a birthright. I have no doubt that some of the policy missteps Sternberg lays at the feet of the boomers can be attrib- uted to certain generational attitudes. (They were the damn hippies, after all.) But many of those attitudes were inherited from the <Greatest Generation= or earlier. More to the point, the policies the boomers imple- mented were hotly debated among boomers them- selves, and virtually none of them expressly argued from a desire to self-deal for their own generation at the expense of others. Just as there are millennial socialists and millennial anarcho-capitalists, there are boomers in those catego- ries as well. If we9re going to assign blame 4 and why not? 4it9s more helpful to put it on those who were wrong rather than indicting an entire generation of some 75 million people. © 2019 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.