PAGE 4, KEIZERTIMES, JANUARY 2, 2015
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
New hand on the gavel
For a the fi rst time in 14 years a
new hand will be holding the gavel
at Keizer City Council meetings.
By most measures Cathy Clark is
the most prepared and most expe-
rienced person to ever take the oath
of that offi ce.
Clark and three councilors will
be sworn on Monday night’s meet-
ing. Of those three new counilors
Brandon Smith served once before
and Roland Herrera worked for the
city’s public works department for
many years. Amy Ripp will bring
her enthusiasm and years of com-
munity volunteering to the council.
The spotlight will be on May-
or Clark. She takes the helm of
the council after eight years as a
member, which includes serving as
council president. Two things will
become apparent quickly for inter-
ested and casual viewers—the new
mayor is whip smart and she loves
her community.
Though Clark earned a masters
degree at Kansas State University
she says she is a life-long learner.
She wants to know everything she
can regardless of the topic. Her
thirst for information and knowl-
edge should not prolong council
meetings, though. There is a time
to seek infomration and at times
quizzing a witness speaking before
the council is not that time. Clark
will be challenged maintaining her
job at the Oregon Education In-
vestment Board and being mayor.
Keizerites expect to see their mayor
at community events; they expect
their mayor to be conversant in all
things municpal. We have confi -
dence Clark is up to the challenge
and will attack it with gusto.
We have every hope that the
new mayor will be as successful as
her predecessor to build coalitions,
not only among the councilors but
also with a variety of community
groups and businesses. She can call
on her eight years of serving on the
council and 14 years of observing
Lore Christopher deftly handling
the job as guidance.
No two mayors are alike. The
Lore Christopher era is over and
it is now time for the Cathy Clark
era as she becomes the ctiy’s sixth
mayor in 32 years.
She’s experienced. She’s knowl-
edable and she’s ready. We can’t ask
much more from our mayor than
that.
—LAZ
KNOW thanks
Keizer
news worthy
situations, there
you will fi nd
this type of
people whip-
ping up frenzy
by mostly frus-
trated people
but sometimes just hoodlums. I
believe the blood of police offi cers
who are killed by deranged people
because of recent tragedies is on the
hands of racial radicals.
Not all protests are about race.
Sometimes protests are about injus-
tice like the actions of the fat cats
bankers and Wall Street people who
gain untold wealth by committing
fraud. It appears the wealthy get
away unpunished while police have
to attempt to arrest someone who
is selling cigarettes on a city street.
Bill Quinn
Keizer
To the Editor:
By now, the Christmas wrap-
pings have been discarded. By now,
almost 400 children in Keizer are
enjoying the warmth of their new
jackets, clothing and most impor-
tantly, are playing with their new
toys.
Thank you Keizer community
and swarms of volunteers who
made this happen. The Keizer Net-
work of Women (Keizer Chamber
of Commerce and Foundation) are
grateful for another year of the Gift
Basket Program, and we couldn’t
have done it without you. Thank
you.
Audrey Butler
Keizer
School thanks
support for drive
To the Editor:
The France School of Dance
would like to thank the community
and students for donating over 900
pounds of food and more than $400
in donations.
Our performance/food dreive
was held in December at North Sa-
lem High School. All the proceeds
will benefi t the Keizer Community
Food Bank.
Our next performance and food
drive will be in May.
Linda France Martin
Keizer
Protests
To the Editor:
I am very much in favor of a
protest provided it is non-violent.
Protest is just a way of showing
displeasure with certain actions by
government, industry and individu-
als. I certainly don’t support mobs
that create damage to persons or
property. Unfortunately, protests
are sometimes conducted by people
who ignore facts or have personal
prejudice.
Many times these prejudices
are fl amed by racial radicals like Al
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. When-
ever there are cameras and national
letters
A hearty food bank
salute
To the Editor:
On behalf of the Keizer Com-
munity Food Bank, I would like
to thank the many volunteers from
our cooperative churches, (Keizer
Clearlake UMC, Keizer Christian,
St. Edward Catholic, John Knox
Presbyterian and Faith Lutheran)
that supply the hands and feet of
our food ministry.
Also to the many donors that
help keep our pantry shelves viable
and checking account worthy: Up-
town Music, Tony’s Comics, Lew,
France School of Dance, Lakepoint
Community Church, Calvary Bap-
tist Church, Keizer Elks, Keizer
Lady Elks, Don Pancho’s, Marion
Polk Food Share and the many in-
dividual sustainers that regularly en-
hance our pocket book.
Special donations thank you to
Albertson’s for 80-plus turkey din-
ners over Thanksgiving and New
Years.
Because of the generosity of this
community, KCFB was able to serve
2,385 families in 2014.
Curt McCormack
Keizer
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Permanent Armageddon
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
Meg Greenfi eld, the late Washing-
ton Post editorial page editor, coun-
seled against writing in “High C” all
the time. By this she meant that an ed-
itorialist or columnist who expressed
equally noisy levels of indignation
about everything would lack credibil-
ity when something truly outrageous
came along that merited a well-craft-
ed high-pitched scream.
We now seem to be living in the
Age of High C, a period when every
fi ght is Armageddon, every foe is a
monster, and every issue is either the
key to national survival or the door-
way to ruin.
This habit seems especially pro-
nounced in the way President
Obama’s adversaries treat him. It’s
odd that so many continue to see
Obama as a radical and a socialist even
as the Dow hits record levels and the
wealthy continue to do very nicely. If
he is a socialist, he is surely the most
incompetent practitioner in the his-
tory of Marxism.
The reaction to Obama is part of a
larger diffi culty that involves pretend-
ing we are philosophically far more
divided than we are. In all of the well-
off democracies, even people who
actually call themselves socialists no
longer claim to have an alternative to
the market as the primary creator and
distributor of goods and services. The
boundaries on the left end of what’s
permissible in the public debate have
been pushed well toward the center.
This makes the hysteria and hyperbole
all the more incomprehensible.
But let’s dream a little and as-
sume that the American left signed
on to the proposals put forward by
Lane Kenworthy of the University of
California-San
Diego in his
challenging
(and, by the way,
very pro-mar-
ket) book Social
Democratic Amer-
ica, published
earlier this year.
Kenworthy’s argument is that we can
“successfully embrace both fl exibility
and security, both competition and so-
cial justice.”
His wish list is a straightforward
set of progressive initiatives. A few of
them: universal health insurance and
early education, extensive new help
on job searches and training, a year of
paid parental leave, an increased mini-
mum wage indexed to prices, expan-
sions of efforts that supplement wages
such as the Earned Income Tax Credit,
and the government as an employer of
last resort.
His program, he says, would cost
around 10 percent of our GDP. Now
that’s a lot of money and the debate
about whether we should spend it
would be anything but phony. Yet
would such a level of expenditure sig-
nal the death of our constitutional sys-
tem? Would it make us like, say, Cuba?
No, and no. It might make us a little
more like Germany, the Netherlands
or the Scandinavian countries. We can
argue if we want to do this, but these
market democracies happen to share
with us an affection for freedom and
enterprise.
And when it comes to High C,
there’s nothing quite like our culture
wars in which disagreements about
social issues are seen as battles between
libertines and bigots. When I look
around, I see a lot of liberals who live
other
views
quite traditional family lives and even
go regularly to churches, synagogues
and mosques. I see a lot of conserva-
tives who are feminists when it comes
to their daughters’ opportunities and
oppose bigotry against gays and lesbi-
ans.
The ideological resolution I’d sug-
gest for the new year is that all sides
stop fi ghting and pool their energies
to easing the marriage and family
crisis that is engulfi ng working-class
Americans.
This would require liberals to ac-
knowledge what the vast majority of
them already practice in their own
lives: that, all things being equal, kids
are better off with two loving and en-
gaged parents. It would require con-
servatives to acknowledge that many
of the pressures on families are eco-
nomic and that the decline of well-
paying blue-collar work is causing
huge disruptions in family formation.
I’d make a case that Kenworthy’s ideas
for a more social democratic America
would be good for families, but let’s
argue it out in the spirit of a shared
quest for remedies.
Maybe it’s asking too much, but
might social conservatives also con-
sider my friend Jonathan Rauch’s idea
that they abandon their campaign
against gay marriage in favor of a new
campaign on behalf of the value of
committed relationships for all of us?
Disagreement is one of the joys
of freedom, so I am all for boisterous
debate and tough political and philo-
sophical competition. It’s how I make
my living. But our democratic sys-
tem would be healthier if it followed
the Greenfi eld rule and reserved the
harshest invective for things that are
genuinely monstrous.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Building the American dream from within
Black-white race relations may
improve by way of succeeding gen-
erations of Americans but there ap-
pears little hope that’ll soon hap-
pen dramatically. The election of
Barack Obama gave those who think
positively about the prospect for im-
provements some measure of encour-
agement. However, events in Wash-
ington, D.C. and wider, exampled
by the presence of resolute naysayers
from the Southern states who deny
the president any support, have helped
to slide race relations backwards.
Meanwhile, there are conditions
of life among blacks in America that
could be vastly improved by their own
efforts, should they organize around
such relevant community objectives.
Reference here is to the fact that
blacks earn less money than whites,
graduate from college in fewer cases
and make up our prison population
in disproportionately higher numbers.
They are unemployed at rates over 11
percent, which is twice the national
average, and more than twice that of
the white population.
It’s recognized that more and more
blacks have been able to earn college
degrees and improve their prospects
but far too many blacks get left be-
hind to lead lives of desperate deprav-
ity. One of the central problems is
that in too many black neighborhoods
those folks living there are upward-
bound deprived and lead economical-
ly bankrupt existences. Mainly, their
prospects may be most accurately de-
scribed as slim and none.
Now, then, how could things
change for them? How about get-
ting together in collective efforts and
pulling together for the sake of every
family and individual in the neighbor-
hood? Pooling resources, however
limited, but large when everyone par-
ticipates, and investing in their best
and brightest
by requiring a
pledge to re-
turn as edu-
cated persons
to participate
back in their
home commu-
nities as police offi cers, fi refi ghters,
lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers
and in other city hall serving capaci-
ties would predictably help to pull
everyone up by their boot straps and
make each life there more viable and
livable.
U.S. history demonstrates what
every minority group has found to
be true, that is, that success and the
embrace of the American dream has
not been handed to them. They have
found that they must assert themselves
through education, training and ex-
perience at doing what needs to be
done to achieve better circumstances
and have had to do it for themselves
without any government interven-
tion. As it stands now, too many blacks
who “make it,” like outstanding ath-
letes, superlative musicians and the
Harvard-educated “move on.”
A critical factor in the reformation
of the na-
tion’s black
neighbor-
hoods is the
gang mem-
ber and the
extent
to
which he is
involved in
drug deal-
ing,
drug
addiction
and illicit ac-
tivity in gen-
eral. Show-
ing
these
youth before
gene h.
mcintyre
they enter lives of crime that they can
do good work in the neighborhood of
their birth is a way that promises at-
tractive change, life change that’s con-
tagious and effective because that
kind of change provides accomplish-
ment’s good-feelings through the per-
sonal pride and satisfaction generated
by community recognition.
A fi nal thought regarding this mat-
ter is that we are often admonished
by black activists and their white
sympathizers to discuss race relations.
However, personal experience points
out that whenever a column addresses
some aspect of race relations, unless it
parallels and represents the prevailing
opinion and conventional wisdom of
black activists and their white sym-
pathizers, he who ventures there is
labeled a racist. As long as this kind
of reaction is what greets whites who
write on the subject, progress will
never happen. Meeting on common
ground through compromise and the
sharing of viable ideas is more likely to
make race relations progress than re-
sorting to a dead-end by name-calling.
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap-
pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)