2 Wednesday, January 20, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N 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 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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 10 a.m. Monday. 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. 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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.