PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, MARCH 25, 2016
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
It’ll be a lemony day
Imagine a Sunday
in the very near future.
Now imagine being able
to sample lemonade at
stands throughout Keizer
and Salem on that day.
Lemonade that is the
product of the creative
imagination
of
kids
throughout the region.
That Sunday, May 1, is Lemonade
Day, a national project that teaches
kids how to be little businesspeople.
The fi rst Lemonade Day in our
area was in 2014. Now under the
guidance of the Salem-Keizer
Education Foundation and the
support of dozens of sponsors, kids of
elementary- and middle-school age
will be able to make some money for
themselves.
Orignated in Texas, Lemonade
Day was devised to give kids an idea
of how a business is created including
planning, following through and
enjoying the profi ts.
Lemonade Day in Keizer and
Salem will be as creative and diverse
as the kids who register a stand. In
recent years some Lemonaders have
joined with siblings or friends to
create a lemonade recipe (often
with the help of parents), building a
stand and most importantly, deciding
where to locate their stand. Some
have erected their stands in front of
their houses; others have received
permission to put their stands at busy
retail locations.
Lemonade Day is a fun activity
including parents. Either individually
or with a team, each little company
gets to devise a name for their stand,
test different recipes to come up with
the ulitmate lemonade. By asking
for donations from grandparents,
parents or neighbors, each
team is able to purchase
the ingredients for the
lemonade and the stand.
Besides learning how to
build their own business
from the ground up,
Lemonaders learn how
to manage money. Each
registered stand agrees to split their
money in three piles: one third for
their education, one third to donate
to a charity of their choice and, best
of all, one third to use as mad money.
Getting involved with Lemonade
Day should be seen by parents and
kids as a worthwhile and fun project.
Parents can be the ultimate mentors
to their budding businesspeople,
steering them in the different aspects
from seeking money needed to create
the best lemonade stand and the most
delicious lemonade available.
On May 1 there will be stands
throughout the entire region. Some
stands will serve lemonade with fruit
additions and baked goods as an
upsale, some stands will be gathered
with other stands in a pod-formation
to attract the greatest number of
customers.
Lemonade Day is a fun project
in which the kids learn something:
teamwork, salesmanship, design and
more. With the helping hand of a
parent, guardian or family member,
our kids will be out in force that day,
proudly serving their hearts out. It
won’t matter if their stand is in The
Meadows or Gubser neighborhoods
or in front of a busy storefront. With
guidance they’ll have fun, help others
and add to their education fund.
Registration is open now at
salemkeizer.lemonadeday.org.
—LAZ
Can voters
really trust
Donald Trump?
might be more foolish
than they would have
us believe. Trump says
“our leaders are stupid,”
but his own record as a
businessman—his main
selling
point—should
raise a few questions about whether
he wouldn’t be yet another political
buffoon whose rhetoric proves to be,
in the end, nothing more than clever
campaign Kool-Aid.
A fi nal note on his fi nances: Self-
funding seems great, but to suggest
it’s indicative of his sincerity is to
ignore the common theme of his
life and career—his base instinct is
self-protection and interest. Some-
times those are good things, yet, as
fi ckle in his character and beliefs as
Trump has been, they make it diffi -
cult to truly discern between sensi-
bility and expediency. For my fellow
Republicans, it’s entirely possible his
conversion is true and full; I’m only
saying that those who support him
shouldn’t be surprised if “The Art of
the Deal” came back to bite America
in the end.
David Cheney
Keizer
editorial
letters
To the Editor:
Let’s admit it: Donald
Trump has an uncanny skill for
branding and marketing. How else
do you explain the personality cult
that has grown signifi cantly around
his campaign, except by looking at
his expertise as the CEO of a notable
company? He is, as are his support-
ers, under the impression that his
success in various business ventures
is proof of how he’s a winner who
makes great decisions with minimal
downside, yet anyone with an ob-
jective eye can see that he’s just as
capable of mistakes as the rest of the
imperfect human race.
Granting that not all bankruptcies
are the same, it is diffi cult to ignore
the fact that Mr. Trump has, as a
business executive, declared bank-
ruptcy multiple times over the years.
One on its own is easy enough to
explain away, but after two a per-
son has to wonder if perhaps the
executive(s) running the company
Empty promises of Trump and Sanders
By MICHAEL GERSON
In a time of brushfi re populism,
the problem is not the populace, it
is the populists who seek to lead
it. The two candidates who call
themselves revolutionaries—Bernie
Sanders and Donald Trump—are, in
fact, backward looking, intellectually
timid and unresponsive to the real
needs of the working and middle
classes.
This judgment emerges from
some basic economics (bear with
me). The last several decades have
seen both dramatic increases in
productivity and the fading of the
traditional, American, middle-class
dream. The globalization of labor
markets (creating competition with
skilled workers abroad) and new
technology and automation (hol-
lowing out whole categories of la-
bor at home) have placed downward
pressure on wages and put a relent-
less emphasis on acquiring new
skills.
If the global economy were your
boss, he or she would be demanding
harder work for less money while
making you go to school at night.
Unfortunately, this creep is actually
most people’s boss, ultimately.
The populists are right that im-
portant institutions have been woe-
fully unresponsive to these changes.
A recent Casey Foundation report
found that 82 percent of African-
American and 79 percent of Latino
fourth-graders are reading below
profi cient levels. How are they be-
ing prepared for the new economy?
Nearly 10.2 million young people
in America are not in school or in
the workplace. How did they fall
between the sidewalk cracks of
American life? Colleges and uni-
versities in America graduate only
about half the students who enter,
leaving many in debt and without a
diploma to show for it.
What
is
Sanders’ liberal
populist
an-
swer to these
challenges? He
wants to in-
crease
Social
Security ben-
efi ts for everyone, including the
wealthy; he wants free college edu-
cation for everyone, without a seri-
ous emphasis on quality; he wants to
break up the big banks; and he wants
a single-payer health care system.
“What kind of guts does it show
to promise people free things?” asks
Jonathan Cowan, President of Third
Way, a moderate Democratic think
tank. The centerpiece ideas of the
Sanders campaign could have been
proposed by Hubert Humphrey in
the 1960s. Sanders would massively
expand the commitments of 20th-
century liberalism, defi antly un-
updated for 21st-century challenges.
His campaign is progressive nostal-
gia in concentrated form.
Trump, the other self-described
revolutionary in the race, is running
a campaign entirely based on nostal-
gia. He proposes to return America
to greatness by personally reversing
globalization. “I’ll bring back our
jobs from China, from Mexico, from
Japan, from so many places,” he says.
But how? There is no real poli-
cy beneath the pledge. It is entire-
ly magical thinking. The parts of
Trump’s economic plan that can be
weighed and measured—the pro-
ductivity loss from expelling millions
of workers and the global recession
that might result from blowing up
the global trading order with tar-
iffs—are frightening. Where Trump
is not vacuous, he is dangerous.
Working-class people and their
challenges should transform the
Republican Party. But Trump’s wel-
come to these voters includes de-
other
views
ception, exploitation and crackpot
policies that make their eventual dis-
appointment and alienation assured.
“The populists,” says Cowan, “are
not the revolutionaries”—assum-
ing (for the sake of this argument)
that revolution involves an ambi-
tious, modern vision of economic
adaptation. And who might the real
revolutionaries be? Proposals by
Third Way to improve the quality
of higher education and encourage
savings and capital accumulation for
lower income people are practical
and promising. Reform conserva-
tive plans to increase the rewards for
work and encourage social mobility
fall into this same category.
Centrist Democrats and reform
conservatives disagree on many
things. But their arguments draw the
outlines of an actual 21st-century
politics, which puts the best instincts
of the left and right to work on real
contemporary problems, rather than
promising empty revolutions that
look mainly to the past.
And what politicians in our sys-
tem might carry on an adult con-
versation about the goal of ensur-
ing that all Americans are prepared
for the new economy? The answer,
surprising myself even as I write it,
would probably be President Hill-
ary Clinton working with House
Speaker Paul Ryan and an emerg-
ing Republican anti-poverty cau-
cus (think Sens. Tim Scott of South
Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah) in
the Senate.
There are many other reasons to
oppose Clinton for president (or, if
you are a Democrat, to want Ryan
deposed and the Senate retaken).
But if the goal is addressing work-
ing-class struggles, the real revolu-
tion might come from a divided
government.
(Washington
Group)
Post
Writers
Time to stop clock-changing madness
Keizertimes
Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303
phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS
NEWS EDITOR
Craig Murphy
editor@keizertimes.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Eric A. Howald
news@keizertimes.com
One year:
$25 in Marion County,
$33 outside Marion County,
$45 outside Oregon
PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY
ADVERTISING
Publication No: USPS 679-430
Paula Moseley
advertising@keizertimes.com POSTMASTER
Send address changes to:
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Andrew Jackson
Keizertimes
Circulation
graphics@keizertimes.com
142 Chemawa Road N.
LEGAL NOTICES
Keizer, OR 97303
legals@keizertimes.com
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Lyndon Zaitz
publisher@keizertimes.com
BUSINESS MANAGER
Laurie Painter
billing@keizertimes.com
Periodical postage paid at
Salem, Oregon
RECEPTION
Lori Beyeler
facebook.com/keizertimes
twitter.com/keizertimes
A couple of weeks have passed
since we were put upon again by
this mindless moving of our clocks
ahead in spring and back in the fall.
Everyone who survived can forget
about it for awhile. Rather than resign
to daylight saving time, I argue, the best
response to this matter is to ask: Why
do we continue this truly unnecessary
interruption among so many other
interruptions that we must put up
with in modern times, when most of
us would prefer our lives to be more
simplifi ed?
My effort? A request of Senator
Kim Thatcher that she ask for a bill
to end the abomination of daylight
saving time in the legislature’s hopper
two sessions past. It got a hearing,
although, the only legislator who
showed up for it was Thatcher, the
room for it otherwise serving to
represent zero interest in something
that every Oregonian with whom
I’ve discussed the subject has wished
this imposition would be sent to
the dustbin of history. Before the
recent session, I asked the new guy,
Representative Bill Post, if he’d help
me during the short session. But this
matter, he reported, was not among
his priorities. Silly me, I thought
representatives represent.
Is this just another good news,
bad news story? Daylight saving time
adds an hour of light when the days
get longer, as though people in huge
numbers become agriculturalists in the
mid-March downpours and, no matter
the soggy soil and muddy climes, head
outside with trowel in hand to make
certain that an added hour of daylight
is used to plant fl owers and, even
possibly, put a crop in the ground.
To others, who must put up with
this
silliness
and lack of
consideration,
they lose an
hour’s
sleep
that
impacts
their
ability
to function in
wakefulness
mode for about two weeks after the
onset of new time. Actually, based on
what medical science knows about the
circadian rhythm, that set of internal
body controls that can keep us healthy
or not, this factor can cause sickness
and even death when thrown out of
whack. We are advised not to take
the circadian rhythm consideration
lightly while this threat-to-all could
be lessened if we got rid of daylight
saving time. If every Oregonian
became knowledgeable about the
importance of life balance as related to
the workings of the circadian rhythm,
it’s surmised that there would be a
groundswell of support for keeping
Pacifi c Standard Time year-round but
too many ignore it to their demise.
Other states have gotten in touch
with enlightenment, those include
Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico,
the Virgin Islands, American Samoa,
Guam and the Northern Mariana
Islands. Meanwhile, California has a
bill (not unlike the one that I tried
here with help from Thatcher in 2015)
that would ask voters to abolish the
practice of changing clocks twice a
year. Legislators in Alaska and nearly a
dozen other states are debating similar
measures. Then, too, those patriots in
New England want to secede from the
Eastern time zone, adding themselves
to Nova Scotia and Puerto Rico
in the Atlantic time zone as New
gene h.
mcintyre
England sticks out into the Atlantic
Ocean farther east than anywhere else,
forcing it to 3:45 p.m. sunsets in places
in Maine’s December, causing them to
experience a borderline to the Arctic
Circle.
There’s been report after report
that, due to the time changes, traffi c
accident increase as do heart attacks
and strokes when we change time.
Further, the argument that electricity
is saved has not proven true under
the scrutiny of study and analysis.
Perhaps, as with other matters, the only
way change can occur with something
like this is if a legislator has a personal
or family disaster over the time change
and then becomes a zealot for no
time adjustments. Otherwise, those
folks like to argue with each other
into infi nity most of which results in
more impositions that severely test
one’s soul and sanity while nothing to
satisfy the average beleaguered person,
much comes of this futility.
In keeping up with the times and
what Americans want, a Hello Inc.
survey conducted on 1,018 citizens
between Feb. 23 and 29, and reported
on March 14, found that 59 percent
of Americans consider daylight saving
time a waste of time. Another third
have decided that daylight saving time
is “outdated.” “Hello!” Is anyone
besides Thatcher awake and willing to
be responsive in that wedding cake-
shaped building in Salem?
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column
appears weekly in the Keizertimes.)
Share your opinion
Email letters to the editor (300 words)
by noon Tuesday. Email to:
publisher@keizertimes.com