Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Keizertimes. (Salem, Or.) 1979-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 20, 2017)
PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, JANUARY 20, 2017 KeizerOpinion KEIZERTIMES.COM With new president, think local As you read this the 45th president of the United States has been sworn into offi ce and we are now in unchar- tered waters. Some say that is a good thing and exactly what the nation needs; others say that life as we know it will change in fundamental ways. Both sides are right. The Electoral College gave a majority of votes to Republican Don- ald J. Trump (though he lost the the popular vote by almost 3 million). It is not hard to argue that Trump will be unlike any other president this country has had. If he was a pure ideo- logue it would be easier to predict what he might do once in offi ce. But Trump is not driven by ideology, he is driven by his own per- sonality, his own peeves, his self image. Donald Trump has broken the mold of how a president acts, speaks and leads. As his opponent said last fall he can be baited with a tweet. Twitter is his preferred form of com- munication, which drives presiden- tial scholars and academes—who are used to sober policy statements and speeches—crazy. Trump’s America First stance will reshape this country’s foreign policy that will look unfamil- iar to insiders but will be cheered by the Americans who voted to shake up the established order of things. When a person with no govern- mental experience at any level is elected to lead the nation people must realize things will be different. Presi- dent Trump enters offi ce with the lowest approval ratings of any mod- ern president. Many people decry his Cabinet choices. Many people like the timbre of his voice but not the indidivual notes. When columnists and political pundits go on about what Trump should do or how he should act are titling at windmills. They must real- ize that the president has no peers. He operates by his own rules—rules that no one else is playing by. It was axiomatic that presidents spoke about the importance of the NATO alliance and our nation’s support of Europe. President Trump says that NATO is obsolete. What was once thought to be impermeable can become quite fl uid in a Trump Administration. Thirty years ago most thought the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain were going to be around forever. Nothing lasts forever, that is one constant in history. There is much to be concerned about regarding the new administra- tion besides foreign policy (including the cozying up to Vladimir Putin) in- cluding easing of clear air and water regulations, expansion of vouchers and charter schools at the expense of public educa- tion, repeal of the Afford- able Care Act—the list goes on and on. Supporters of President Trump are excited about the changes they expect he will bring to their lives. They feel they have a champion in the White House who will bring jobs back to the United States, jobs he has said were sent over- seas. The fact that most job loss has been due to automatic and techno- logical advances doesn’t resonate— bring my job back is paramount. The president alone has few tools in his quiver other than the bully pul- pit. The move earlier this month by the majority Republicans in Congress to gut its own ethics watchdog was shelved after Trump and constitu- ents railed against the move. Whether they backtracked because of public and media outrage or Trump’s tweets is anyone’s guess, but it did show that the American people will push back. He must work with Congress to pass any of his programs. Former President Obama used the power of executive order to achieve what he could not get the opposition party to act on. Every president has issued ex- ecutive orders and there is no reason to think that Trump will be any dif- ferent. Supporters are exhilarated about what Trump can accomplish in the next four years. Opponents will stew and protest. But those who do not agree with the new president’s pro- posals and policies should be the loyal opposition but then look homeward. It has been said that all politics is lo- cal. That is true. What matters most to the average American is what happens where they live at the city and county council level as well as state legisla- tures. Changing the nation or the world begins at one’s own doorstep. Do good works there fi rst. —LAZ editorial History in the attic Every household contains a trea- sure trove of history. Unfortunately much of that history ends up in an incinerator or a land fi ll. The trea- sure trove are the thousands, if not millions, of photographs sitting in attics, basements and storage units of most Keizer families. When a person who has lived in one place for many years passes on it falls to their family to distribute and dispose of their homes—furniture, clothing and memoriabilia of their lives. Many times photographs and scrapbooks are disposed of because family members don’t know the people or places in the photo and thus has no value to them. The Keizer Heritage Museum wants to be part of the disposal pro- cess. It is the mission of the museum to collect and archive the history of Keizer, dating back to its earliest days in the 1880s and that includes any photos of Keizer landmarks. Many photos are of people lost to history, but those people may be posing in front of any number of Keizer sites—schools, businesses, homes—that would be signifi cant to the museum’s collection. The Keizer Heritage Museum will accept any number of photos (boxes of them, if that be the case), quickly check for historical impor- tance, then either return the photos or dispose of them for the donors. Keizer has three buldings that date to the late 1890s and early 1900s. The community must rely on photos to know what the city looked like in the early to mid-20th century. Just as important as photos are documents, posters, yearbooks, etc. that are Keizer-based. Before casually tossing photos and memoriabilia, consider donat- ing them to the Keizer Heritage Museum and help maintain the fad- ing history of the city. —LAZ Keizertimes Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303 phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com Lyndon A. Zaitz, Editor & Publisher POSTMASTER Send address changes to: SUBSCRIPTIONS One year: $25 in Marion County, $33 outside Marion County, $45 outside Oregon PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY Publication No: USPS 679-430 Keizertimes Circulation 142 Chemawa Road N. Keizer, OR 97303 Periodical postage paid at Salem, Oregon Attacking Rep. John Lewis By MICHAEL GERSON Who is John Lewis that Donald Trump should be mindful of him? Lewis, by one defi nition, is a 76-year-old, liberal politician with a disturbing habit of hyperbole. He questioned the valid- ity of George W. Bush’s presidential win. He once compared John McCain to George Wallace. Now he questions the legitima- cy of Trump’s presidential victory. By another defi nition, Lewis was a consequen- tial student leader of the civil rights movement. He led sit-ins to desegre- gate lunch counters; was one of the original Freedom Riders who inte- grated buses; experienced the hospi- tality of places like Mississippi’s Parch- man penitentiary; and carried away the memento of a skull fracture from Selma. It must be said that the whole busi- ness of questioning a president’s right to hold offi ce is pernicious. It puts a hard stop on all civility and coop- eration. The worst instance, of course, was the claim that Barack Obama was Kenyan-born and disqualifi ed to be president—an argument based on partisan, conspiratorial and quasi- racist lies enthusiastically spread by Trump. When the president-elect calls out Lewis on this topic, it is a display of hypocrisy so large that it is visible from space. A conservative friend tells me I’m too concerned about Trump’s “man- ners.” Probably. (Though it strikes me as odd for any conservative to dismiss the gestures of mutual respect that make democracy and human society possible.) The problem, however, runs deep- er. Trump seems to have no feel for, no interest in, the American story he is about to enter. He will lead a nation that accommodated a cruel exception to its founding creed; that bled and nearly died to recover its ideals; and that was only fully redeemed by the courage and moral clarity of the very people it had oppressed. People like Martin Luther King Jr. Peo- ple like John Lewis. There are a lot of debunkers at work in American society. They point out that the priest is really a balding, middle-aged man with sweat stains at his armpits. They see the judge as an old woman who has the remnants of lunch caught between her teeth. They see John Lewis as just another career politician. But the priest holds the body of Christ, the judge embodies the rule of law and Lewis once carried the full weight of America’s promise across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Were John Lewis to call me every name in the book, I would still honor him. Trump often justifi es his attacks as counterpunching. Even a glancing blow seems to merit a nuclear re- sponse. But this is the exact opposite of the ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and of the principled nonviolence of the civil rights move- ment. In these systems of thought, the true victory comes in absorbing a blow with dignity, even with love. It is the substance of King’s message. It is the essence of a cruciform faith. other views This is not always easy to translate into politics. But a president-elect at- tacking a hero of the civil rights move- ment less than a week before he takes the oath of offi ce is not normal. There is some strange inversion of values at work. Because Vladimir Putin praises him, Trump defends him. Because Lewis criticizes him, Trump attacks him (as “All talk, talk, talk— no ac- tion or results”). The only organizing principle is the degree of deference to Trump himself. It is the essence of narcissism. A broader conception of the American story, a respect for the he- roes and ghosts of our history, is ab- sent in Trump’s public voice. He seems to be in the thrall of an eternal now. To some, the whole idea of a histori- cal imagination will sound nebulous. Abraham Lincoln called it the “mys- tic chords of memory.” He hung his hopes for unity on the existence of a shared national experience that tran- scended regional differences. Today our divisions are more along lines of class and culture, but we also need to hear our story as one people. Not every citizen shares this sense of history. It is a minority of Ameri- cans who visit Antietam and feel op- pressed by the immense weight of collective death; or go to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and feel sickened by the scale of such a loss; or walk across that bridge in Selma and hear the echoes of snarling dogs and night- sticks against bone. But we need a president who re- spects and evokes this story—or at least does not peevishly attack its he- roes. (Washington Post Writers Group) Losing jobs to automation How much longer will increas- ing numbers of Americans not fi nd work at jobs that pay by the hour, are salaried or paid work of any kind? With the number of ma- chines gone automatic, robots and computers re- placing people, inexpen- sive imported goods and the decline in routine fac- tory assembly and offi ce clerk work, along with the immediate cost and in- curred debt of profession- al training schools, many Americans have just given up. In the meantime, our population has increased exponentially; so, can it be any other than the present time that we recognize the numbers of Americans not employed or em- ployable. For hundreds of years we’ve believed that work and/or a job was the place where a person ac- quired discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance and, as bonus, character, too. Further, a job was a source of a person’s very survival; no job meant the inability to buy food, a roof overhead, a safe place to sleep, and family support. It’s been important also that, through work, “You make something of yourself.” But we’re going through a break-neck period of change where more and more of those among us choose, or more likely, forced, into being without a job. At present, that means those —who are home- less—become a class of outcasts, be- ing driven from one open space or empty building to another without permanency anywhere. Those per- sons in that condition have risen in number to a point where they cannot be ignored because they are threatening social order. Meanwhile, both liberals and conservatives make “full employ- ment” their mantra, when, in real- ity, as any American with wide- open eyes knows, no matter how repeatedly emphatic the promises made by those seeking offi ce and those who’ve won offi ce, job cre- ation to fi ll the need is no longer a realistic solution. That fact has become in- arguably true no matter how many corporations Donald Trump tries to strong arm into bringing back jobs or staying here. So it is rapidly becom- ing this year and next and thereafter that we will be forced to think a lot more about why we labor, demanding of us to develop new ways of fi nding meaning, char- acter, and means of support beyond our work day world of the past. Af- ter all, we do face an Aldous Hux- ley-like Brave New World of wholly mind-boggling change where the worst nightmare just may be Rich- ard Fleischer’s Soylent Green. Work has been civilization’s mainstay—its Gibraltor. The Indus- trial Revolution brought changes of great upheaval to modern human- gene h. mcintyre kind in the 1800s that we Ameri- cans, and in other nations, too, have been trying to cope with ever since. The battle goes on at present where everyone, according to the more conservative-minded among us, must pull his and her own weight, while liberal factions want mercy delivered to those who’ve not been granted measures of good fortune or been able to “make it.” A future with an ever larger population and fewer work oppor- tunities will demand a new social paradigm. One which no longer al- lows, for just one salient example, an American CEO to retire with a $180 million golden parachute and gobs more money from stock options while multitudes of other Americans die of exposure on the nation’s streets and byways while a whole of children can only get fed at schools, if fed at all. Will we be proactive or reactive, will it be re- form in time or revolution? (Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap- pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)
