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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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P
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N I
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The power to shame
and silence
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer9s name, address and
phone number. Letters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions
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To the Editor:
I love the irony of the right invoking the
name of Abraham Lincoln over and over
and then bringing Confederate flags into
the Capitol. The right loves to point out
that Lincoln was a Republican and that the
Democrats were slave holders. This is true.
What they seem to forget is, as any middle
school student who didn9t get an <F= in his-
tory knows, the <Southern Democrats= flipped
over to the Republican party in the 1960s right
after Lyndon Johnson9s (another Southern
Democrat) civil rights laws passed. Why
would they do that unless the Republican party
was friendly to their cause?
Since the Civil War, the Republican
Party became the party for big business and
was controlled by rich white men. Still is.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party catered
more to the workers, the poor, minorities, and
people with a more liberal leaning. Since there
were more of these people, the Demos would
win more elections and the Republicans fig-
ured they needed to add more to their base to
win elections. They went after the rural vote
and the people that didn9t want their chil-
dren bussed to school for integration or have
black folks moving into their neighborhoods.
Now we have the Trumpist party and the old
Republican Party is practically extinct.
See LETTERS on page 23
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When I was a young man
in college way too many
years ago, a small group of
students petitioned to have
me removed from a his-
tory class. My vigorous
pushback on the orthodoxy
prevalent at the University
of California, Santa Cruz,
upset them. The adminis-
tration in 1986 was having
none of this nonsense and
cast aside their petition with
great force. The outcome
might well have been differ-
ent in 2021.
The push to silence and
remove dissenting voices
is nowadays referred to as
<cancel culture.= It9s often
portrayed as a phenomenon
of the left, but it9s not con-
fined there. Just ask The
Dixie Chicks (now The
Chicks) about the pleasures
of being caught in a right-
wing cancel culture feeding
frenzy.
The impulse to silence,
to <cancel,= things that
frighten, anger and upset us,
is natural enough. And we
all have the right and pre-
rogative to eliminate things
from our own lives that we
don9t like. Dislike a corpo-
ration9s stance on an issue?
Don9t buy their products.
Offended by NFL play-
ers taking a knee? Give up
watching the NFL.
Bans, boycotts, and cam-
paigns of personal destruc-
tion are a fraught business.
There9s a wide gulf between
refusing to read an author9s
works and demanding that
they be removed from book-
store and library shelves.
Who becomes the arbiter of
what is and is not accept-
able? And who holds the
arbiter to account? That9s a
quandary being played out
on a massive, global scale in
the world of Big Tech social
media right now.
It bears keeping in mind
that virtual mobs and cul-
tures of erasure are volatile,
and, like revolutions, they
can gain their own momen-
tum and consume those who
create them.
The impulse to shame,
condemn and cancel gets
especially dangerous when
we invoke the power of gov-
ernment to do it.
Last week, a pair of
local social justice activ-
ists submitted a letter to the
Sisters City Council seek-
ing <a formal condemna-
tion= of Sisters-area resi-
dent Richard Esterman9s
actions in attending Donald
Trump9s <Save America=
rally in Washington, D.C. on
January 6. Esterman, who
served on the Sisters City
Council, appeared on Z21
TV portraying rally-goers
as <friendly= and saying that
he had gone to his hotel after
the rally and did not person-
ally witness any violence.
There are serious prob-
lems with seeking such
condemnation. Esterman
did not stand for re-election
in November and his last
meeting as a Sisters City
Councilor was in December.
There is no indication that he
represented himself as a pub-
lic official in any capacity
during the rally or his depic-
tion of it. While his term
did not officially end until a
new council was sworn in on
January 13, he9s no longer a
councilor, so any condemna-
tion would be aimed at him
as a private citizen.
More importantly, no
matter what one thinks of the
Save America rally, there is
no indication that Esterman
committed any wrongdo-
ing by attending it. As far
as can be determined, he did
not participate in the unlaw-
ful storming of the Capitol
Building, or incite anyone to
do so.
The activists are asking
the City Council to formally
condemn a citizen for attend-
ing a lawful, permitted rally,
which is clearly a protected
First Amendment right. They
say that <in doing so, this
will send a message that the
City does not condone insur-
rection or assault on democ-
racy by either its elected
officials or its citizens.=
It would be well to pause
for a moment and consider
the implications of invoking
the authority of the govern-
ment of the City of Sisters
to condemn the actions of
a citizen who has not been
accused of any kind of
wrongdoing. Do we want to
live in a community where
it is the business of the City
Council to shame and con-
demn its citizens? Power that
can be turned on one citizen
can be turned on any citizen.
This is the kind of tense,
unstable, and danger-
ous time William Butler
Yeats described in his
famous poem, <The Second
Coming=:
Turning and turning in
the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear
the falconer;
Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold&
If we are to keep our
bearings as <mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world,= we
must have a care that in our
zeal to defend our Republic
we do not do irreparable
damage to the principles that
lie at its foundations.