PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, MARCH 4, 2016
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
The end of a parade
It was exciting in 2011
when the Festival of Lights
Holiday Parade migrated
from Salem to Keizer. We
have the Miracle of Christ-
mas lighting display in the
Gubser neighborhood. We
have the annual Keizer Iris
Festival parade.
Having the Lights parade come
to Keizer was a beautiful feather in
our civic cap. Unfortunately, nothing
lasts forever. Parade organizers an-
nounced this week that the Festival
of Lights Parade is no more. After 25
years the dedicated volunteer Cheryl
Mitchell decided it was time to step
back, enjoy life and travel the world
with her husband.
Organizing the parade (one of the
largest light parades in the United
States) is practically a full-time vol-
unteer endeavor. Once one year’s pa-
rade is fi nished, planning for the next
parade begins almost immediately.
Though there will be
no Festival of Lights Pa-
rade this December, we
hope to see a volunteer,
an organization or a com-
pany pick up the banner
and ressurect it for future
years.
A holiday parade such
as this should not go away without a
fi ght. It draws spectators from around
the region which makes it a good
marketing tool for the city and it is
good for businesses along the parade
route that work to take advantage of
the large crowds.
A lighted holiday parade is not
inexpensive nor easy to stage. Our
community has the experience and
knowledge to put on one of the
state’s largest parades (Iris Festival).
Who will step up to put their expe-
rience to work on a holiday parade?
—LAZ
editorial
A detrimental proposal
By KAYLI HANLEY
Agriculture. A way
of life that dates back to
America’s Founding Fa-
thers. It is not only a life-
style that allows people
to produce food, it is a
lifestyle that allows peo-
ple to care for the land
in such a way that the land is brought
to its fullest potential. In Eastern Or-
egon, some groups seek to designate
2.5 million acres of Oregon land into
a national monument. This is a move
that would be devastating to the
ranchers and community of Malheur
County.
Jerome Rosa, executive director
for Oregon Cattlemen’s Association,
elaborated on why this designation
would hurt Oregon ranchers.
“In essence, it could devastate the
local economy, their businesses, their
culture and their children’s future.
The designation would establish ad-
ditional restrictions that would affect
or eliminate their ability to ranch in
that area,” he said.
Ranchers who live in the area
aren’t fully sure what to expect, but
looking at other monument designa-
tions, things don’t look good.
“I don’t have a clue what will
happen,” said past OCA President
and current Malheur County ranch-
er Bob Skinner. “They tell you it’s
not going to affect ranching, but his-
torically (monument designations)
are a disaster.” Skinner said
he cannot fi nd anywhere
where a monument desig-
nation has been a success
story for ranching.
He said the designation
also brings concern for how
future wildfi re management
through the Range Land
Fire Protection Association (RFPA),
a group largely made up of local
citizens and ranchers, will occur. “We
are the front line for fi re suppression.
If history repeats itself, we suspect
RFPA’s won’t be able to access the
roads needed to fi ght wildfi res easily,”
Skinner said.
Several efforts are in progress to
try and stop the monument desig-
nation in Malheur County. “OCA is
working with local ranching groups,
a public relations group, and with
state and federal legislatures to pre-
vent the monument designation,”
Rosa said.
Meanwhile, those in Malheur
County brace themselves for the pos-
sibility of a designation that would
threaten their way of life. “Cattle is
the number one industry in Malheur
County,” Skinner said. “If we take a
bunch of cattle out of the county,
it’s going to devastate its economy. It
will have an impact on the state.”
Thank you,
Uptown Music
Music’s good will and
the generosity of the mu-
sic community, the food
bank received more than
$900 and 200 pounds of
food to put on the pan-
try shelves. That’s a song
worth singing!
Thanks Uptown for your sustain-
ing support of our food ministry and
the ongoing fi ght against hunger.
Curt McCormack, Director
Keizer Community Food Bank
guest
column
(Kayli Hanley is the communica-
tons director for the Oregon Cattle-
men’s Association.)
letters
To the Editor:
On behalf of the Keizer
Community Food Bank, I
want to wish Paul Elliott and the
Uptown Music staff a happy anni-
versary for 25 years of service to the
music community in Keizer and the
Salem area.
Also extended kudos for making
their celebration party a fund raiser
for the KCFB. Because of Uptown
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Trump’s destructive nationalism
By MICHAEL GERSON
The main focus of Donald Trump’s
media coverage has been his populist
disdain for elites. But his main focus
has often been a strident version of
American nationalism.
Trump has offered this explanation
of his own ambitions: “The reason
I’m thinking about [running for of-
fi ce],” he told the Conservative Po-
litical Action Conference (CPAC) in
2011, “is that the United States has
become a whipping post for the rest
of the world. ... I deal with people
from China, I deal with people from
Mexico. They cannot believe what
they’re getting away with.”
It is diffi cult to discern a foreign
policy in Trump’s oeuvre of rambling,
extemporaneous speechmaking and
Twitter pronouncements. He usually
communicates without a hint of ac-
tual argument. But there is some con-
sistency to his various statements.
Trump believes that American al-
lies in Europe and Asia have become
free riders that should defend them-
selves and pay their own way. He calls
the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty unfair.
In exchange for the protection of
South Korea, he argues, “we get prac-
tically nothing.” Mexico is “ripping us
off ” and purposely sending us crimi-
nals. It must be compelled to pay for a
continent-wide wall. Trump proposes
to “tax China for each bad act” and
has raised the possibility of a 45 per-
cent tariff. Vladimir Putin, in contrast,
should be given a free hand in the
Middle East to go after Sunni radicals
and other opponents of the Syrian re-
gime. And America should focus on
killing terrorists as well as targeting
their families for murder, apparently
on the theory that war crimes are a
demonstration of super-duper tough-
ness.
As Trump’s
political pros-
pects have im-
proved, we are
required to give
these
foreign
policy
views
more
serious
analysis, which is more than Trump
himself has done. When pressed on
such issues in debates and interviews,
he is utterly incoherent. A man who
confuses the Kurds with the Quds
(Iran’s expeditionary military force)
hasn’t the slightest familiarity with
current events in the Middle East. And
it feels like we have, so far, explored
only the fringes of his ignorance.
But it is the theory behind Trump’s
threats that is particularly dangerous.
He is not an isolationist, in the Rand
Paul sense. He is more of a Jacksonian
(in Walter Russell Mead’s typology)
—preferring a strong America that is
occasionally roused to kill its enemies
but then returns home and avoids en-
tangling international commitments.
America, in this view, should vigor-
ously pursue narrow national inter-
ests and seek to be feared rather than
loved.
This conception of America’s in-
ternational role was common, before
America had a serious international
role. A Gallup poll from 1937 showed
that 70 percent of Americans thought
their intervention in World War I had
been a mistake. In early 1940, as Ger-
man intentions of conquest were clear,
less than 10 percent thought America
should send its military abroad.
But this view of America is as rel-
evant to current affairs as political
events in ancient Rome. “The great
need today isn’t to ‘beat’ core al-
lies such as Mexico and Japan, while
working with Vladimir Putin,” George
other
views
Mason University’s Colin Dueck ex-
plains diplomatically. “On the con-
trary, the urgent need is to constrain
aggressors such as Putin while sup-
porting core U.S. allies like Mexico
and Japan.”
Less gently put, Trump would be a
president who could not reliably tell
America’s enemies from its friends.
He contemplates actions like weak-
ening American security assurances
to South Korea that might invite war
(recall the outcome in 1950 of Sec-
retary of State Dean Acheson’s impli-
cation that South Korea was outside
America’s “defensive perimeter”).
Trump promises actions—like forcing
the Mexican government to fund the
great wall of Trump—that are, in the
formal language of international rela-
tions, loony, unhinged, bonkers. His
move to impose massive tariffs against
China would earn derisive laughter at
the World Trade Organization; if he
persisted anyway, it might blow up the
global trading order and dramatically
increase tensions in Asia.
A Jacksonian role for America is
positively dangerous in a world where
many threats—terrorism, pandemic
disease, refugee fl ows, drug cartels—
emerge in failed states and hopeless
places. It has never been more evident
that the success of America depends
on an expanding system of free trade,
free markets, democratic governance
and strong alliances—upheld, in Asia,
Europe and elsewhere, by American
security guarantees.
Trump’s version of American na-
tionalism without reference to Ameri-
can principles is Putinism by another
name. And it is just one more way that
Trump would sully the spirit of the
nation he seeks to lead.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Will we see more citizen militias?
One supposes that Oregonians sleep
more peacefully these nights knowing
that not only have the occupiers of
the wildlife refuge in Harney Coun-
ty given up the site, most of them are
in jail and under indictment over their
41-day siege. Nevertheless, it’d be a
whole lot more reassuring if we knew
that the present moment brought us
to a place where the militia movement
had been stopped; unfortunately there
are many more militias out there to
threaten our security and safety than
there are members of ISIS and other
external organizations that seek to do
us no good.
Citizen militias are just the young-
est of the major right-wing anti-
government movements in the U.S.,
although it arguably has seared itself
into the American consciousness as
few if any other a so-called fringe
movement has. Militia was incor-
rectly linked to the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995 but thereby became
a household name. However, if those
folks were not linked to Oklahoma
City, they have been associated with
other bombing plots, conspiracies and
serious violations of the law. Their ex-
treme anti-government ideology, de-
votion to conspiracy theories without
factual connections, and fi xation with
and purchase of excessive weaponry
and paramilitary organization, lead
them to behave in ways that arouse
concerns on the part of public offi -
cials, law enforcement and the public
at large.
The extreme right has long held
a special fascination with paramili-
tary groups. They existed before the
second World War while the militia
movement now has ties with Posse
Comitatus which developed a grand
conspiratorial view of American his-
tory and government, one that stood
with the idea that the legitimate gov-
ernment had
been
taken
over by con-
spirators and
replaced with
a
illegiti-
mate, tyran-
nical govern-
ment. Hence,
Posse members believed that the
people had the power and responsibil-
ity to “take back” the government by
force, using arms to do so.
What turned their idea of what’s
good and right into reality in the
early 1990s were several events that
made angry people on the extreme
right out of them, suffi ciently large
enough to start a new movement. The
events that angered them included the
election of Bill Clinton, the Rod-
ney King riots, Ruby Ridge (1992),
Waco (1993) and the North Ameri-
can Free Trade Agreement. Critical to
what’s happened since, to the extreme
right these were examples of a gov-
ernment run amok and one willing to
stop at nothing to destroy those peo-
ple who refused to conform. These
matters provided a rebirth to several
extremeist movements, from Christian
Identity activists to sovereign citizens
and the militia movement organized
to prevent another Ruby Ridge.
Many militia members and leaders
are gun-rights activists who fear immi-
nent gun confi scation as well as those
who maintain a fascination with gov-
ernment conspiracies. The combina-
tion of anger at the government, fear
of gun confi scation and susceptibility
to great conspiracy theories is what
has formed the core of the militia
movement’s ideology. Criminal activ-
ity remains more or less constant with
militia members getting themselves in
trouble with the law on a fairly regu-
lar basis. The occupiers and the laws
gene h.
mcintyre
they broke when they gathered and
took over the federal refuge in Harney
County is what one might refer to as
“par for the course” with these folks.
The U.S. Constitution was designed
in an effort to establish and maintain
a democracy. It works reasonably well
and most Americans prefer its contin-
uation versus a bunch of ill-informed
and easy-to-bamboozle hoodlums,
the likes of which the militia move-
ment represents. Apparently there’s no
turning these people into responsible,
law-abiding citizens because of their
belief in guns for everyone, no matter
their lack of sanity, and that the U.S.
government is owned and operated
only by those persons who want to
take all freedoms away and incarcerate
accordingly.
It might be helpful to show them
how good they’ve got it compared to
living in most other countries on our
planet. Yet, whatever rant and rave is
appropriate, such effort to reform
them will not change the mindlessness
and ignorance of these people. Law
enforcement did not head directly
into them, like was done at Waco and
Ruby Ridge, because it would only
reinforce their hatred of our govern-
ment and their acting out as has been
proven in Harney County. So, the
only way found in these United States
to deal effectively with this kind of
government-hater is to hit them in
the pocketbook real hard (the report-
ed costs related to the 41-day occu-
pation in Harney County are at least
$3.3 million) and incarcerate them
for long periods in hopes that, given
time to refl ect on their foolishness,
(although I’m not counting on it) a
measure of better sense will occur.
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap-
pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)