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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (July 17, 2019)
2 Wednesday, July 17, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N Jonah Goldberg Welcome, Sisters Glory Daze Car Show Participants and Patrons! Sisters Glory Daze Car Show | Sat., July 20, 2019, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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: Motoring through downtown Sisters on Cascade Avenue is somewhat frustrating. Traffic moves slowly with frequent stops due to pedestrians crossing the roadway. With fur- ther population growth in Sisters, the drive through downtown would be a nightmare. One solution is to build a highway around the Sisters downtown area. I know the truckers and the motoring population to destinations beyond Sisters would be delighted. However, highway construction would be costly and the local vendors would be dismayed by the potential drop in revenue. An alternative to this dilemma is to build three or four pedestrian bridgeways over Cascade Avenue. I suspect the local vendors would be pleased and the motoring public with a special interest in Sisters would be satisfied. The cost would be somewhat modest relative to building a new highway. Scott Hawke ó ó To the Editor: My June letter missed The Nugget, so let9s get caught up. The Board adopted a budget for next year, they approved the new staff that we are hiring and we celebrated some student success. We had several state champions to cel- ebrate. In track, Skyler Larson won the high jump and Brody Anderson placed first in the 400-meter. Our equestrian, or <OHSET,= team had a great year that concluded with Savanna Salisbury, Bailey Knirk, and Sidney Sillers taking first in Team Penning. And last, but not least, our Jazz Band were named state champs after a great performance at the 4A Festival. I would also like to remind families that we are moving our start time for school back by 30 minutes. This move more closely matches the sleep patterns of teens and has been seen to have a positive impact on their physical and mental health. Our high school students ó See LETTERS on page 20 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy Sunny Sunny Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny 78/53 77/44 79/46 83/50 89/54 88/54 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: Vicki Curlett & Patti Jo Beal 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. Conservatives talk a lot about how we don9t like identity politics. But it9s not always clear what people mean by it. Academics and intellectuals tend to mean one thing, while politicians and activists often have something slightly different in mind. Democratic politicians who engage in identity politics often mean some- thing like <ethnic poli- tics,= by which members of a community organize in their collective interest. Conservatives sometimes use <identity politics= to describe simple ethnic poli- tics, but only when it9s eth- nic politics they don9t like. What they leave out is that this form of political engage- ment is as old as the country itself, because it9s as old as politics itself. From the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were actually Germans) to the Irish of Boston and New York, to the Scandinavians of the Midwest, various European ethnic groups engaged in politics in much the same way later waves of Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Arabs and Hispanics have, never mind the most obvious example of African Americans. One doesn9t have to sup- port everything done in the name of identity politics to understand that it9s not the grave threat to democracy and <e pluribus unum= that some make it out to be. My core problem with identity politics has little to do with this sort of thing. So rather than use the term and have to deal with the baggage that comes with it, let9s use something else. My problem is with categorical politics, or reductionist poli- tics. What I mean by that is the tendency to talk about blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, women, etc., as if they9re all interchange- able and reducible simply to the color of their skin or their sex or their sexual orientation. The notion that all you need to know about a per- son is the color of their skin still strikes me as close to the definition of rac- ism, whether you9re talk- ing about black people or white people or people of some other hue. If you think you know what a woman is going to say before she says a word simply because you believe all women think a certain way, you9re a sexist. There are other problems with this kind of categori- cal thinking. The two most important: It9s not true, and it9s lazy. The Democrats running for president talk about abortion as if all women are in lockstep agreement on the issue, even though histori- cally, men have tended to be slightly more pro-choice than women. Are pro-life women not women? The laziness of this kind of rhetoric is a sign of the dumbness of our politics these days. Politicians have forgotten how to make argu- ments, perhaps because vot- ers are dismayingly impa- tient with things that run counter to what they already believe. Also, political con- sultants have figured out that on certain issues, if you speak categorically about groups, you can garner a majority of support from those groups even if signifi- cant minorities within those groups disagree. Republican sound bites on Israel often make it sound as if all Jews think alike on the subject. They don9t. Democratic sound bites on affirmative action imply African Americans are monolithic on the topic. They aren9t. Not all Hispanics, even recent immigrants, want to decrim- inalize illegal immigration. Identity politics always ends up being an appeal to a kind of group loyalty. <Real= blacks or women or Jews or gays believe X, and if you don9t believe X, you9re some kind of traitor to your tribe. One of the worst pos- sible consequences of this kind of thinking isn9t that members of the group will be browbeaten into toeing the party line, but that other groups will buy into it. And that does make the country more bigoted, because the message is that individual members of various groups or categories can9t think for themselves. © 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.