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Wednesday, July 17, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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P
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Jonah
Goldberg
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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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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
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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.