Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 2007)
PAGE 3 NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, JABRUARY & MARPRIL 2007 tin cans on a string perhaps? Or smoke signals? Maybe not even that. With all the bombing and fires, smoke signals might be hard to notice among all the other smoke and dust. The only thing you actually can rely on in the way of news is what you see with your own two eyes. No Internet certainly. No video games. I-pods? Maybe. At least as long as they use alkaline batteries until they run down. A game of catch then for the kids as long as you're stuck at home? Okay, but are there landmines in the field? Don't forget the snipers. It is no longer “Home Sweet Home" anymore is it? Come to think of it, do you still have a home? Your cute little ranch or Victorian might end up demolished to clear for a “field of fire" or just be unlucky enough to be in a “free fire zone?” Perhaps your home ends up used for mortar practice. Now that sales ad about a great price for a “fixer upper” is actually accurate. Of course, it is not always bad guys with bad intentions who wipe out your homeowner tax deduction. Did the person doing the targeting of something else twitch at the wrong moment? Did he do his math right in calculating the ballistics and fire a “short round?" Nothing is more unfriendly than so- called “friendly fire" accidents. Maybe your house is mistaken for harboring a suspected terrorist. Maybe the house next door is suspected of harboring a terrorist. The blast radius of bombs is pretty substantial. Either way, do you end up living in a tent in the winter as a refugee to escape the bombing? Once you thought all you had to fear was being bitten by a mosquito with the West Nile Virus. What a fond memory. No matter where you live, you need money to live. But it is downright dangerous to go to work. That crate marked ‘Coors’ laying at the side of the road? Is it empty cardboard or conceal ing lEDs? The used tire dumped by the stop sign? Empty or not? That freshly turned dirt in the pothole in the pavement? Make you nervous? There is little to fill the car tank anyway. And if you drive, you can get shot even by the soldiers in sandbagged bunkers placed at intersections to “protect" you. Perhaps you don’t notice the nervous troopers signaling you to stop or don’t do it fast enough. A steel-jacketed slug through the windshield works pretty well at accomplishing that. Oops. Maybe they don’t know you’re a patriot. You’re not safe even if you do make it to downtown Tigard or Baker or Cannon Beach (another nicely ironic name, by the way). If you are a judge or a lawyer or a policeman or a fireman, your very occupation could target you for elimination, let alone if you are a politician or even an ordinary supporter of a particular party or religion someone doesn’t like. Being a business owner doesn’t make you immune. Perhaps you help or hurt someone by your mere existence. What a handy way to eliminate competition or someone not liked. Does anyone carry a grudge against you? Even if you are not singled out, there is always the possibility of a spreading fire from a deliberate bombing or a “short round” artillery shell nearby which wipes you out. Accidents happen even in war zones. It probably is a moot point anyway. Do you have any workers left or any inventory or anyone with any money to spend on it if you happen to finish production of something? Being a lowly laborer instead of a rich boss does not make you immune from danger going to work. Do you have the right skin coloration? The right clothing? Wearing jeans or shorts walking down Commercial in Astoria or Broadway in Seaside might get you murdered by someone who doesn’t think his or her particular God wants you to wear them. Even if you dressed innocuously, do you have the right Bible? The right ID in your pocket? Maybe you better carry more than one version and hope you remember the right pocket when you are asked to produce it. You could still end up seized at random, thrown on a bus, have your hands tied behind your back and get a bullet in the head or tortured first. Worse, you could end up on camera for your family to watch in horror as you are slaughtered like a cow. Staying home 24/7 doesn’t necessarily protect you. A knock on the door could be a signal you are about to be executed. The fact that those outside the door are wearing police uniforms is no assurance. Anyone can buy or steal them. It doesn’t have to be a terrorist hit squad. The uniforms might be government issued to employees on the government payroll. It could be the government itself doing the seizing, the torturing, the jailing, the execution, all on mere suspicion or an injudicious comment against the Prez or the mere falsely reported slander of the Prez by a jealous neighbor. You might be able to barricade or ami yourself to defend against individual attackers for a while at least. But once the bombs or rockets start falling, you might as well be at a crap table shooting dice. These instruments of massive destruction being used these days aren’t very smart for the most part. And even if they were, the guys steering them might not be smart enough to know where they should be steered. Besides, a little terror among the populace might be deemed a “good" thing by those in charge of directing the high explosives. You think things were bad in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina? Imagine if there was not even “heck-of-a-job Brownie" at FEMA. Imagine aid workers, rescuers and firemen fearful to enter. Helicopters to rescue you? Targets! In other words, you might not be able to get to a hospital if you are hurt by a bomb or a rocket. You might not make it even if you are merely sick on an ordinary day without actual bombing. Highway 101 or a key bridge is likely to have been bombed long before even if the hospital itself wasn't. As recent news reports reveal, there is reason to fear the ambulance marked with the huge red cross on top delivering you may be strafed as many have in Lebanon. Think not? Ask the Israelis about their public warnings they would do exactly that. Ask the second Sunni or Shiite suicide bomber who is waiting after the first one exploded for the medical help to arrive on the scene. Once you make it to Providence Memorial or whatever is closest, you may find there are no medical supplies or not enough beds because of the large volume of killing and maiming. Kidney dialysis or organ transplant or MRI or other fancy stuff? Good luck in getting an aspirin. Imagine tanks and uniformed troops everywhere. Imagine, too, lots of “civilians," or at least men not in uniform but still brandishing automatic weapons. Imagine them being pretty careless about firing off those weapons. And any bullet that goes up has to come down somewhere. Hope you are not standing in the air space where they do. Imagine some bad guys over whom you have no control deciding they want to use your neighborhood for a missile launch site. Imagine what happens when they do the missile trail points back to your neighborhood and guys on the other side with even bigger missiles might hold you responsible. Imagine curfews. When was the last time you were subject to a curfew? Imagine martial law being imposed. Imagine curfew violations being enforced with steel-jacketed slugs. Imagine those same tanks and troops, but now imagine they are not your friends and neighbors Imagine they are, say DRAWINGS BY ROGER HAYES a Chinese army occupying the state and our own troops are disbanded or in hiding. Imagine that those foreign troops can break down your door with impunity and point their rifle barrels at you and your children while they search your house. Be care ful of what you do and when you do it, since locks no longer mean anything. Maybe you were glad when they first arrived. Probably not unless you also wanted the current rulers removed from office and brought to trial. But either way, imagine they have been there for months or years. Still want them around? What would you do in such circumstances? How can you possibly make conclusions without going through the thought process? Why bring up such unpleasant thoughts? It “can’t” happen here after all. Right? After all, we have those super spooks at the CIA and the NSA and their expensive high-tech toys to ferret out all the bad guys before they ever get here. Right? After all, we have the ever vigilant and no doubt super- competent Homeland Security to find all the bombs hidden in shoes. After all, we are building a 42-foot wall along several hundred miles of our many thousand miles borders, and the Border Patrol or the Minute Men won’t let any bad guys in. Right? Surely the wily skills of our wise wizards and ambas sadors will make friends rather than enemies abroad Right? And it’s not as if we would ever have lunatic fringe groups already here to start revolutions or insurgencies for their own purposes. Black Panthers? White Supremacists? Squeaky Fromme? Right to Life abortion clinic bombers? Americans would never kill fellow Americans or indulge in ethnic cleansing like those other, uncivilized countries, would they? The Civil War, lynching, and the near eradication of Native Americans were surely just anomalies, weren't they? And just because NeoCons have called dissenters “traitors" and wished them executed merely for disagreeing with the Republican administration, does not mean they would really kill or jail dissenters if the opportunity presented itself and they thought they could get away with it. Right? Right! Okay. Unlikely for the immediate future at least, but still worth contemplating. While our Far West is not the Middle East, we cannot be sanguine that our good fortune will continue forever. Do we need to be reminded by history that every single smug civilization that ever existed imagined it was incapable of being destroyed? Ask the members of the Third Reich that was TIMES EAGLE WORD SEARCH supposed to last 1000 years. Ask even the Romans? They too thought their particular gods or military might would protect them in perpetuity. The verdict of history is that it can happen here. It will happen here if we do not consider all the possibilities and act intelligently. More importantly and of current day relevance, we should remember the excuses of all those in charge of our country at the time of 9/11 who repeatedly alleged that driving airplanes into buildings was utterly impossible to foresee and could not have been contemplated. Perhaps if they had period ically indulged in a similar thought process to that set forth above, they might have seen some possibilities and taken steps to prevent them. Is that lack of foresight happening again in our present policies concerning the Middle East? In any event, you cannot know a problem unless you give it some serious thought and put yourself in the shoes of others. How can you possibly understand how others will react if you cannot understand what they are going through? We might read in the paper about how we are supposedly “at war," but we are certainly not acting like it today. Since we are not experien cing it first hand, we need to devote at least some time to imagin ing what could happen in some detail We need to do so before accepting at face value any facile solutions offered by any slackjawed politicians or pundits which can be summed up in a ten second “soundbite." We need to do so early on because we ultimately are responsible for what our elected leaders and allies they choose are doing or create, even if unintended or unwanted. There are consequences. Evidence suggests 9/11 may have been a consequence of some of our policies. Perhaps we would not change the policies, but why aren’t we recognizing and discussing what could happen? Whether 9/11 was a consequence or not, and whether you see yourself as God fearing or Jesus loving, we must go through such thought puzzles because we need to do some cost/benefit analysis of possible consequences to others, if not to ourselves. Some of you after doing so might conclude our part in the Middle East is wrong Others might go through the same analysis and conclude we need to fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here That's fair. Disagreement and competing points of view are what democracy is all about The point, though, is that informed decisions should not — cannot — be properly made without careful consideration, especially about something that is alien to our present personal experience as what is going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Somalia. The future activities of someone who is forced to live where 9/11 if 24/7 cannot be predicted or even intelligently debated unless we try to understand the atmosphere that such daily fear, frustration and derivation breeds Start thinking. Then express your opinion to those who have power and put new ones in charge if they do not seem to listen or show they have not done similar thought processes themselves. Charles Hillestad is an attorney living in Cannon Beach. He is a Vietnam veteran. Roger Hayes is an artist and member of Astoria Visual Arts. He lives in Astoria D O M D M I R E E A M T A V G A T B R A P I A S R E H L E C H N K R INSTRUCTIONS - CIRCLE EACH HIDDEN WORD, FOUND BELOW, IN THE G R ID ABOVE. WORDS MAY BE HORIZONTAL, VERTICAL OR DIAGONAL, FORWARD OR BACKWARDS. USE UNCIRCLED LETTERS - IN ORDER - TO REVEAL A MESSAGE MEANT JUST FOR OUR READERS. A V A gallery A S TO R IA VISU AL ARTS DEVELOPMENT b : ockage MO I EL RESTAURANT PRIVATE RIVERFRONT PUBLIC TOURISM HISTORY M IA M I BcACH EYESORE ACCESS RIVERWALK CANNERY HERITAGE CONDO GREED TROLLEY NAUTICAL CALIFORNIA DOWNSTAIRS AT THE ELKS IN ASTORIA 453 11TH STREET
