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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 27, 2015)
LET TERS LOST EUGENE TRADITION Well, I waved goodbye to one more Eugene tradition today. How I’ve loved the annual Eugene Celebration in the past, the crowds, the hoop-la. So Eugene we were! So unique! We were so us. Today (Aug. 22) I was one of the 20 or so people who attended the “sidewalk” Eugene parade. Maybe there were 35 people walking on the sidewalk led by the SLUG Queen, few in costume. Oh, it was sad to see a long-held tradition gone by the wayside. A last gasp at trying to save something uniquely Eugene. Thanks to those who made the effort. I loved our parades of the past — the annual three-day Eugene Celebration, the Memorial Day parade, the great crowds of enthusiastic folks enjoying our time together, waving flags, laughing and sharing the moments. Everyone turned out. I loved the big fountain on Willamette where we all met on weekends and sang and laughed and listened to the Bible guy preaching to us all. I loved being in Kesey Square, which had no name back then but drew us all every weekend to watch the juggler or the hacky-sack guys, the street musicians and the many shoppers all over the place, from Woolworth’s to The Bon Marché. We were so alive with Eugene-ness. Remember those days? I waved goodbye today. Patrice Dotson Eugene FESTIVAL IS FOR PROFIT I read with interest your Festival of Eugene article Aug. 20. Last year I helped organize the festival. As planning began in the fall for this year’s festival, I encouraged the festival organizer to convert the festival’s legal status to a nonprofit corporation and offered to assist in doing so. Subsequently in an email to me the festival organizer stated that she was not going to form a nonprofit. That decision, along with a decision to continue to not pay bands, resulted in me ending my involvement with the festival last November. Although your article quotes her as stating that the festival is “not for profit,” in reality the “Festival of Eugene” is her assumed business name registered with the Oregon Corporation Division. While it may be true the organizer does not expect to make a profit this year, the festival is organized as a for-profit entity. If and when the festival organizer is willing to convert to a nonprofit corporation, I will again offer my assistance. Converting to a nonprofit will bring financial transparency and result in a truly community-based festival with an accountable board of directors. Jon Silvermoon Vipertoons Productions Eugene 4 CALL TO ACTION How can it be business as usual after witnessing the destruction caused by this year’s fires? This year’s fire season saw the blazes grow in leaps and bounds at an alarming rate, burn damp areas along with land adjacent to water, and take the lives of brave individuals enlisted to fight them. Such has been the nature of this year’s fires, unparalleled in size and number. There is an unspoken sense of grief in the air from the recent death of untold scores of wildlife, firefighters, loss of homes and of course the charred landscapes in our mountains where there were once thriving ecosystems. And yet, I do not count on the major news sources’ attention span to truly engage what is at stake here and the necessary and swift transformations that need to take place. Frankly, I sense the potential for these catastrophic fires to be spun in a way that gives a green light to extractive industries and speculative practices. This is a call for every single person to reach deep inside themselves and summon the energy of a mama bear. Every person who loves to hike in the outdoors knows about what happens when you get in between a mama bear and her cub. Well, we have to do something similar. There are numerous indications that our current system is bereft of structure, responsiveness to the current calamities and responsibility to life itself. The system is not going to change without our collective energies, as it does A ugust 27, 2015 • eugeneweekly.com not know how. Even with these raging fires that feel eerily prophetic of some of the most dire global warming predictions, applications for new systems of pipelines, new mining claims, etc., continue to proliferate. This is in addition to practices such as clear-cutting, aerial spraying of forestland adjacent to local farms, cancer- causing pesticides that threaten public health, and the list goes on and on. Please get to know the activism that is out there and get involved. We are seeing the current problems escalate to catastrophic levels. The response from our country’s mainstream media and politics will not do these events and lost life justice. It is easy to feel like a deer caught in headlights with the onslaught of so many things bombarding us; however, these are the challenges of our time of having to adapt to current matters while working so very hard to change them. May we all rise to the challenges in front of us right now. Kerstin Britz Cottage Grove SLOPPY ASSESSMENT The online third grade Smarter Balanced practice test is riddled with errors. That’s fact, not ideology. It was thrown together in only 10 months and not corrected in the intervening five years. For example: Questions 2, 11, 13, 27: This particular Part A/Part B format is confusing even for adults, let alone third graders. Should it assess test-taking ability or knowledge? Question 10: Correct punctuation requires quotation marks around “placed one on top of another.” Question 16 has a typographical error: “Move the groups of sentences so that the group that makes the bestbeginning (sic) comes first.” Oh, my. Meanwhile, even English majors don’t agree on the best sequence for the story. Question 12: “What inference can be made about why the author includes the backpack in the passage?” Most 8 year olds do not know how to “infer,” because they don’t yet understand abstract concepts. It shows that no early childhood expert helped write this test. Question 21 is too wordy for third graders: “Which of the following sentences has an error in grammar usage?” Why not, “Which sentence uses incorrect grammar?” Question 23: You can’t even get adults to agree why the author spoke about the International Space Station. This standardized test is sloppily written and not age-appropriate. Taxpayers have a right to expect more for their billions and students have a right to expect more from us, the adults. So let’s work together on a better assessment system for Oregon’s students. Rachel Rich Eugene SMASH CAPITALISM It has been interesting to follow the plurality of perspectives in response to the July 16 cover story, “Radical Predictions.” However, these responses lack a cogent social analysis and, thus, fail to provide a tenable way forward. Population overshoot, industrialism, spiritual alienation, uncontrollable econom- ic growth and a culture of domination are all secondary or tertiary problems. “Solutions” that address these problems — population control, attacks on infrastructure, individual spiritual practices, living off the grid and wallowing in alienation — will never be ef- fective on their own. If we want to cut ecocide at the root, we must address capitalism. It is capitalism that is the dominant mode of production on the planet and the undeniable cause of ecological devastation. The transformation of the natural world into commodities through the work of labor power is at the core of capitalism. Even those of us not directly involved in production are coerced to buy these commodities and sell our labor power just to survive. It is only by ending this relationship between labor and capital that we will be able to end the abusive relationship between humans and nature. If you want to organize with this premise in mind, contact me at kelleyvincent@gmail.com. Vincent Kelley Eugene
