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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 2019)
2 Wednesday, August 7, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N Domestic terrorism By Jim Cornelius Editor in Chief <&mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical.= 4 Christopher Hitchens It’s time for the 24th Annual Country Fair & Art Show! Sat., Aug. 10, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 68825 Brooks Camp Rd., Sisters PHOTO BY JERRY BALDOCK 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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: I sat through the town hall meeting on Monday held by Sen. Bentz and Rep. Bonham on HB 2020. First let me say it was good to see that people of different opinions can still be civil 3 unlike what we have seen from other town halls, in other cities. Kudos to Sisters Country people! We should all be thankful that our elected representatives have clearly studied the subject of cap and trade, and are well versed on the topic. Their level of knowledge was impres- sive, and their concern about doing something (the right thing) was evident. My suggestion is that we contact Speaker Kotek and Governor Brown and remind them of how history views major legislation that is rammed thru on party lines. LBJ knew he had to have bi-partisan support for Medicare for it to become a fixture in our society. Sadly, President Obama failed to learn that lesson and instead of passing bi-partisan healthcare reform, he rammed thru Obamacare on a party line vote and it is slowly being dismantled. Cap and Trade can work if done properly, and if it is done on a bi-partisan basis. This is an important step for Oregonians, and we will all be better off if we do it together. Carey Tosello s s s To the Editor: Monday, July 29, there was a Town Hall called by our State Representative D. Bonham See LETTERS on page 24 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny PM Thunderstorms Scattered T-storms Mostly Sunny 92/58 86/55 80/52 67/48 77/47 Monday Mostly Sunny 83/51 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 Newspaper9s 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. Anyone who attends a music festival in Sisters, or goes shopping in a big-box store in Bend, or maybe goes out for an evening downtown might pause in the wake of the past week9s events and consider that they might just be a target. Active shooters attacked crowds at a festival in Gilroy, California; shoppers in a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas; and downtown din- ers in Dayton, Ohio. It can happen anywhere, and any- one could be a target. That9s terrorism. The El Paso shooter appears to have been ideo- logically driven by hatred of immigrants. The motiva- tions of the other two are murkier. The Gilroy shooter may or may not have been driven by white supremacist ideology, but he reportedly imbibed the same spew of late-19th-century racialist bile that fueled fascism and National Socialism. He told a witness that he was <really angry.= The Dayton shooter reportedly kept a <rape list= and a <kill list= when he was in high school, and seems to have had extreme left lean- ings. Among the first he killed was his own sister. Ideology matters, but it is not a sufficient explana- tion for why mass shootings keep happening. Any mech- anistic explanation 4 it9s guns; it9s video games; it9s mental illness; it9s racism; it9s&. is bound to be reduc- tive and inadequate. History shows us that. The U.S. has experi- enced bouts of domestic ter- rorism before. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin bids us: <Think about one fact, one fact alone: 1,000 politi- cal bombings a year in 972, 973, 974. Almost inconceiv- able. That was what the world was like. Skyjackings were epidemic. You had an actual revolutionary move- ment in this country that, while never likely to suc- ceed, was disrupting the country, especially Northern California, in a way that9s& it9s just hard to believe.= Those bombings, it must be noted, were for the most part low- or no-casualty affairs, but there were other acts of intense criminal vio- lence purportedly support- ing leftist <revolution.= In the 1980s and 990s, there was a spate of right- wing terrorism, culminat- ing in the horrific bomb- ing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, an attack that took 168 lives. Explaining such acts as the products of warped ideology 4 or the belief that such mad acts must require a mad perpetrator 4 obscure a simple, hor- rifying truth: Some people just want to watch the world burn. Some people want to set it on fire. The end doesn9t justify the means 4 the means ARE the end. It9s all about the blaze of glory. And, as the philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in his brilliant treatise <The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements=: <Glory is largely a the- atrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audi- ence& The desire to escape or camouflage their unsat- isfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending 4 for making a show 4 and also a readi- ness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.= The spectacle itself drives these events. It9s no accident that they cluster; each terrible act feeds the next. The Internet is full of fever swamps where per- petrators of mass shootings are fetishized and glorified as heroes. As Hitchens says, <mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical.= That9s not mental illness; that9s evil. We have gone a long way down a dark path, with no easy fix to get us out. Tinkering with sys- tems won9t avail us much. As Patrick J. Deneen writes with a nod to Czech dis- sident Vaclav Havel, a bet- ter system won9t ensure us a better life 4 in fact, only creating a better life can build a better system. That, Deneen says, requires <the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order.= And a sense of honor and code wouldn9t hurt.