PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, JUNE 3 2016
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Persuade the community
Mayor Cathy Clark and
some city councilors say
they will hold community
conversation meetings this
year to get a sense of what
Keizer’s citizens want and
what they may be willing
to pay for.
Last month’s budget
committee meetings got heated
over the issue of adding one offi cer
to the police force. Witnesses and
some committee members expressed
frustration —and even anger—that
the city would not be able to fund
one new cop.
The Keizer Police Department has
operated with three fewer offi cers
than they say is necessary to do the
job. City Manager Chris Eppley has
said he doesn’t want to add person-
nel not backed with sustained fund-
ing. The 2016-17 budget should be
the last in which the city has to forgo
beefi ng up the police department.
The 2017-18 budget cycle will
benefi t from tax payments from new
development that is coming on line
this year. Tax revenue won’t start
coming into Keizer’s coffers until
November; revenues in November
2017 should be rosier.
Operating a city is expensive, es-
peically when some expenditures are
federally mandated. Add in ever-ris-
ing health care costs and PERS re-
quirements and the budget is quickly
allocated before a new cop or park
maintenance can be added.
Keizer’s tax rate has been frozen
at $2.08 per $1,000 valuation since
day one. Other selected Oregon cit-
ies of similar population have rates of
between $2.95 and $6.33
per $1,000.
When a tax rate in-
crease is not possible,
new city revenue must
come from fees. The gen-
eral fund is what Keizer
uses to pay for its opera-
tions. Separate sources of
money are used to pay for streets, wa-
ter and sewer expenses. Homeowners
are sensitive to any tax increases or
new fees.
A large portion of Keizer voters
think that the $2.08 tax rate is fi ne
and the city should live within its
means. In other words: no new taxes.
Those are words that the city’s elect-
ed offi cials should not forget as they
plan their conversations with Keizer.
If the need for new revenue is dire,
the mayor and councilors need to
convey that in a persuasive message
of why the need is dire and where
new money can come from. Increas-
ing the city’s tax base is a non-starter
for now, which means new revenue
will have to come from existing
sources (i.e., new fees) or creating
new sources (more commercial and
residential development).
The cost of city operations will
never go down. ‘Live within your
means’ sounds nice on a bumper
sticker but the reality is that it can re-
sult with cuts in services and possible
city staff layoffs.
Until tax payments from millions
of dollars of new development start
rolling in, the choices are stark; but,
a sunnier revenue day is on the hori-
zon. We have to be patient.
—LAZ
editorial
Hill’s emails: lying in plain sight
By DEBRA J.
SAUNDERS
Speaking in San Fran-
cisco last week, Hillary
Clinton told supporters
that Donald Trump is not
fi t to be president. “He
roots for himself,” the
former Secretary of State
proclaimed, “and that’s the type of
person who should not be president
of the United States.” By that stan-
dard, Clinton herself has no business
running to win the White House.
Recently the State Department’s
independent watchdog, the Offi ce
of the Inspector General, issued a
report on Clinton’s “email records
management.” The report includes
information that shows that practi-
cally everything Clinton has said
about her use of a private server is
false.
Last year, Clinton said that she
used the private server “for con-
venience.” She talked as if she had
not given the matter much thought.
That claim was unbelievable at the
time. Given the family’s extensive
history of being under investiga-
tion, she of all lawyers had to know
that government correspondence
belongs to the people, not the place
holders. As the Washington Post edi-
torialized, the new report shows
that Clinton’s decision “was not a
casual oversight.” The Secretary of
State was so busy trying to protect
her self-interest that she repeatedly
ignored warnings about cybersecu-
rity risks.
Even after the inspector general’s
report was released, Clinton contin-
ued to spin lies. She told ABC News
and CNN that her use of a private
server was “allowed.” It was not. In-
deed, the report found that her mo-
dus operandi presented “signifi cant
security risks.” State Department of-
fi cials warned of hacking attempts,
which she did not heed. In an email
she explained, “I don’t want any risk
of the personal being accessible.” So
she risked national security. Accord-
ing to the report, when staff spoke
up about those risks, a staffer was
told “never to speak of the
Secretary’s personal email
system again.”
Last week, the Associ-
ated Press reported that
Clinton claimed, “I have
provided all my work-re-
lated email.” Wrong again.
Clinton handed over some
30,00 emails —the rest she said were
personal. But the IG report found
that she handed over no emails re-
ceived in her fi rst two months in
offi ce and no “sent” messages for
the fi rst three months. In addition,
investigators discovered no copies
of 19 emails, provided by the De-
partment of Defense, exchanged be-
tween Clinton and then-Gen. David
Petraeus. What else is missing? It is
impossible to fathom.
Clinton misled the public when
she said that she would cooperate
fully with investigators. “I’m more
than ready to talk to anybody any-
time,” she said in May. But through
her lawyers, Clinton declined to be
interviewed by Inspector General
Steve Linick or his staff. Thus Cali-
fornians probably will vote in the
June 7 primary without the benefi t
of knowing what Clinton has to say
for herself on the legal record—and
with an FBI criminal investigation
pending. That’s how little regard she
has for Democratic primary voters.
Hillary Clinton roots for herself.
She clearly saw the State Depart-
ment as a private fi efdom, hence her
use of a private server. She put na-
tional security at risk. She lies even
when there is abundant evidence
that she is not telling the truth.
Confront her with contradictory
evidence, and she continues to make
fantastic assertions. She relies on
her supporters’ willful gullibility. In
many ways, Hillary Clinton is not all
that different from Donald Trump.
guest
opinion
(Creators Syndicate)
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Obama and Hiroshima’s moral lessons
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
Unless you are a pacifi st, you ac-
cept that evil acts—the destruction of
other human lives—can be justifi ed,
even necessary, in pursuit of good and
urgent ends.
But unless you are amoral, you also
acknowledge the human capacity for
self-delusion and selfi shness. People
are quite capable of justifying the ut-
terly unjustifi able by draping their im-
moral actions behind sweeping ethical
claims.
And if you are a responsible po-
litical leader, you must recognize both
sides of this moral equation and still
not allow yourself to be paralyzed.
As a student of Reinhold Niebuhr,
the great theologian who was at once
a liberal and a realist, President Obama
has spent many years pondering this
tension. He has sought out occasions
on which he could preach about the
ironies and uncertainties of human ac-
tion—and also our obligation to act in
the face of them.
This habit can annoy those who
prefer to see a world in which good
guys with few fl aws confront the bad
guys. Obama is constantly being criti-
cized for “apologizing” for the United
States when he is in fact attempting
to hold us to the very standards that
make the U.S. the “exceptional” na-
tion his critics extol. Judging ourselves
by our own standards is the best way
to prove that our commitment to
them is real.
It is thus not at all surprising that
Obama chose to be the fi rst president
of the United States to visit Hiroshima,
where the United States dropped the
fi rst nuclear bomb—where, as Obama
put it, “a fl ash of light and a wall of
fi re destroyed a city and demonstrated
that mankind
possessed the
means to de-
stroy itself.”
His speech
was
power-
ful
precisely
because of its
moral realism.
He made no apology for Harry Tru-
man’s decision to use the bomb and
instead put it into the context of all
the destruction wrought by World
War II: “Sixty million people would
die. ... Shot, beaten, marched, bombed,
jailed, starved, gassed to death.” In-
herent in these sentences, with their
reference to forced marches and the
death camps, was the explanation of
why the allies fought the war in the
fi rst place.
Obama got at both why wars are
inevitable (“We may not be able to
eliminate man’s capacity to do evil,
so nations and the alliances that we
form must possess the means to de-
fend ourselves”) and why we should
nonetheless strive mightily to avoid
them (“The irreducible worth of ev-
ery person, the insistence that every
life is precious, the radical and neces-
sary notion that we are part of a single
human family—that is the story that
we all must tell”).
And in good Niebuhrian fashion,
he urged that even those who believe
they are fi ghting for justice be wary
of “how easily we learn to justify vio-
lence in the name of some higher
cause.”
Remaining aware that even the
righteous can do both good and evil
is central to Niebuhr’s project. Back
in 2007, Obama greatly impressed my
friend and fellow columnist David
other
views
Brooks with this off-the-cuff state-
ment of what he had learned from
Niebuhr. It was remarkably true to the
theologian’s core insights:
“I take away the compelling idea
that there’s serious evil in the world,
and hardship and pain. And we should
be humble and modest in our belief
we can eliminate those things. But
we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for
cynicism and inaction. I take away ...
the sense we have to make these ef-
forts knowing they are hard, and not
swinging from naive idealism to bitter
realism.”
Obama’s critics typically see him
as setting too high a bar for Ameri-
can intervention or argue that he is
far more a realist than an idealist. The
simple truth is that moral realism is
hard because it means being hard on
ourselves and accepting tragedy. Ac-
tions undertaken in the name of le-
gitimate goals and actions avoided for
prudential reasons can both have ap-
palling outcomes.
Niebuhr himself was deeply am-
bivalent about the bomb, initially
signing a Federal Council of Church-
es statement declaring that the attacks
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been
“morally indefensible,” but later con-
cluding that he and his colleagues
were perhaps too harsh on “statesmen
... driven by historic forces more pow-
erful than any human decision.”
It’s not hard to identify with
Niebuhr’s moral reticence. A humble
ambivalence may be the proper re-
sponse to a horrifi cally destructive act
undertaken in the name of avoiding
even more destruction.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Art should refl ect the good of society
Anyone who has lived in these
United States can be excused if they
agree that there has been a general
deterioration in American morals
and related behaviors. There are, ar-
guably, many reasons for the decline
in our ability to enjoy our lives free
of bullets fl ying everywhere, rampant
drug addiction, the inability to trust
anyone save those who have proven
they are honorable people. There is
also a lack of consideration for the
property and safety of our fellow citi-
zens due to the willingness of others
who choose to steal rather than work.
One can believe that a chief con-
tributor to these negative changes
in American society is due to what
all of us who view television and
see movies have as infl uences. Al-
most everything possible human be-
havior is nowadays presented on the
screen with evermore sex, drugs, vio-
lence and murder. An individual can
escape the personal effects of these
matters by avoiding theatre of all
kinds but is never safe any longer from
what his neighbor, the couple down
the street, the unsupervised children
raising themselves and the wandering
legions of persons doped up or un-
willing to be responsible citizens who
live to take from someone else.
An old argument reads ‘life imi-
tates art,’ with its counter argument
that ‘art imitates life.’ There’s very
little to debate when it comes to how
much infl uence art has had on Ameri-
can life in our time. People see movies
and TV shows that display behaviors
not in their personal experience and
make decisions as to whether what
they see is a fi t for them. With the
number of children and youth these
days without guidance, it can add up
to terrible consequences for all with
whom they im-
pose their will
in what’s appar-
ently become
the new order
of things.
Over more
than 200 years
our forefathers and mothers from early
American times viewed the theatrical
profession without respect for it. Af-
ter the Revolutionary War, some states
went so far as to ban theatrical perfor-
mances while those who wrote plays
most often used pen names to avoid
shame to the family name. Puritans in
the newly-formed nation rose up and
closed theaters while church leaders
looked upon theaters as competition
with their teachings.
At that time laws were passed
in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and
Rhode Island banning the perfor-
mance of plays. Preachers spoke of
theaters as “the Devil’s Synagogues,”
places where fabricated human emo-
tions were on display. This level of
contempt continued well into the
1800s, a time when many religious
leaders forbade dancing in public
while acting was considered a vile
form of expression and one step down
from public drunkenness.
Then, too, acting was not helped by
Abraham Lincoln’s murder. After all,
Lincoln was shot by an actor. Mean-
while, and even long thereafter, min-
strel shows, burlesque and vaudeville
were considered the lowest forms of
entertainment and viewed by clergy
and their congregations as “hotbeds of
hedonism.” When a theatre in Brook-
lyn burned down in 1873 with the
fi ery death of 300 patrons, a preacher
proclaimed it as evidence that “God
punished them for being in an evil
gene h.
mcintyre
place” where actors were con men
and actresses were prostitutes.
I believe that modern theatre
has signifi cantly contributed to many
forms of waywardness and criminal-
ity that threaten life, limb and prop-
erty. The whole matter however is
like Pandora’s Box, once opened, the
damage has spread far and wide. The
steadfast acceptable behaviors of yes-
teryear have been replaced by much
that many of us regret while so much
money and fame is now granted the
makers of modern art through fi lms
and presentations of all kinds that, like
what’s become of sports and most all
“entertainment,” amateur and profes-
sional, it would seem accurate to pre-
dict, though it’s wished it were oth-
erwise, that corruptions by money,
money, and more money will only get
worse.
A total reversal of these trends is
unrealistic while much theatre is up-
lifting and positively instructional
and moderating infl uences could pre-
vail in this country. If the U.S. stopped
sending billions of dollars to rebuild
Afghanistan, Iraq and other dead
end “investments” overseas, we could
build summer and school year pro-
grams for our children throughout
the country, including, perhaps, most
importantly, the neighborhoods in our
inner cities, where young and old fi nd
it more “fun” now to join gangs and
shoot up neighborhoods. There are
countless ways we could do better at
raising our young, just one is to es-
tablish ethics-building summer camps
and after-school winter activities that
build bodies and minds for mental
health above and beyond being voy-
eurs, smoking pot and shedding blood.
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap-
pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)