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President Trump says that NATO is
obsolete.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
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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.)