PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, JUNE 9, 2017
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Do no harm
To the Class of 2017:
The easy part is over. People will
say that if you can get through high
school, you’re set. Except for college.
Except for a job and a career.
Graduates in every genera-
tion say the same thing: “I’m
glad high school is over.”
Yet, many people say they
remember their high school
days fondly—the structure,
the friends, the sports, the
activities. All of that without
thinking much about how it is all
paid for.
If you paid attention to your stud-
ies you have exited high school with
a solid base of education that will
serve you well as you enter your col-
lege days. For those foregoing further
education in favor of the military or
directly into the job market, your
education will serve you well, also.
One of the key lessons you learned
through the past 12 years of school-
ing is how to treat people, how to so-
cialize with others. That’s important
because the world is full of people.
You will meet people at college, at
work, in the military, on a mission.
How you deal with other people
will have a huge impact on your suc-
cess. The Golden Rule may sound
trite but it has always been true:
when you treat others well, you will
be treated well in return. Be polite.
Don’t be nasty. Be helpful. Don’t be
selfi sh. You know the rules, practice
them out in the real world—the pay-
off will be amazing.
The world you entered at birth
is so much different than the world
you enter out of school. Everything
seemed to be so innocent back when
you were a baby. Ask your
parents and grandpar-
ents—they’ll agree.
You are a generation
that lives in a world in
which terrorist attacks
are common occurances.
Terrorism can hit home
(as the attack on Port-
land’s MAX train last month attests),
but for most of you terrorism is an
item in the news—if you pay atten-
tion to the news.
You are joinng millions of others
who are taking their fi rst steps into a
post-primary education life. That life
will include making good decisions
for yourself and others. Too many
bad decisons are fueled by alcohol
and the mob mentality. Just this week
Harvard University rescinded the ac-
ceptance of 10 incoming freshman
for exchanging obscene and racist
Facebook posts.
There is nothing so promising as a
high school graduating class that en-
ters the world. Everything is possible,
there are rules and boundaries to test
and stretch. The same ol’ doesn’t have
to continue to be the same ol’. It
is within your power to control the
destiny of the planet you will inherit.
And even if you are not going
into medical school take a lesson
from Hippocrates: Do no harm.
—LAZ
editorial
A razor and an iron
By LYNDON ZAITZ
I come from a customer service
background, primarily in food and
beverage. Restaurant companies are
serious when it comes to not only the
cleanliness of their shops but also a
clean, presentable staff.
Companies in the 1970s
and 1980s had dress and
grooming guidelines. If you
wanted a job you wore the
uniform or you cut your hair
or you covered your tattoos.
A number of high profi le
court cases put the scotch
on such rules. And it shows
these days.
Far from a crotchedy ol’ man, I fi nd
myself railing (in my mind) against
the standards so many businesses seem
to have adopted these days when it
comes to how they allow their em-
ployees to appear.
Back in the 1960s parents and older
people wanted to chase after and cut
the ‘hippie’ hair of kids. Meh...hair
styles come and go. I fi nd I want to
chase after employees with a razor. I
think to myself: commit to a beard
fully or drop the whole thing and
shave. The employee with a quarter
inch, spotty beard, is a not a paragon
of fashion or hipness in my book. Not
every person who can grow some
hair on their face should have a beard;
mostly it just looks unkempt and sends
a message that they don’t much care
about personal grooming.
I also fi nd myself
wanting to chase after
some of the employees I
see working in custom-
er service with a good
steam iron. Wrinkles
equal carelessness.
I understand an em-
ployee guidebook that
allows beards, but I don’t understand
where—in any employee manual—
that it is perfectly acceptable to look
like a slob. Wearing casual clothes
when one works at Google or Uber is
fi ne, wearing wrinkled clothes while
serving fast food or working in a deli
is quite another.
Can the managers of the world
tighten up their grooming standards?
Please?
on my
mind
(Lyndon Zaitz is publisher of the
Keizertimes.)
Backlash builds against Griffi n
By DEBRA SAUNDERS
By mid-week last week, comedian
Kathy Griffi n had apologized for pos-
ing for a photo with what looked like
the blood-soaked decapitated head of
President Donald Trump.
“I went too far,” she said in a con-
trite follow-up video. “I sincerely
apologize.”
But it was too late.
Squatty Potty CEO
Bobby Edwards announced
that it was suspending an ad
campaign featuring Griffi n
as the Utah-based bath-
room-stool company saw
the stunt as “deeply inap-
propriate” and “contrary to the core
values our company stands for.”
CNN also announced it was termi-
nating Griffi n’s appearance on its New
Year’s show, after earlier criticizing the
photos as “disgusting and offensive.”
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., still
planned to appear with Griffi n on
a tour to promote his new book, Al
Franken: Giant of the Senate. Franken
called the photo shoot “a horrible
mistake,” but said “she did the right
thing asking for forgiveness.”
The question is: What ever made
Griffi n and photographer Tyler
Shields think that it was acceptable,
or even funny, for Griffi n to pose as
an Islamic State terrorist would, hold-
ing what looked to be the hacked-off
head of a U.S. president?
It is clear that the photo—posted
earlier on TMZ—was not a sponta-
neous gaffe. Griffi n and Shields pro-
duced a video about the production
in which Griffi n joked, “We have to
go to Mexico. Because we’re going to
prison, federal prison.”
Radio talk show host Rush Lim-
baugh likened the video to “the po-
litical assassination of Donald Trump.”
Tweeting Wednesday
morn-
ing, Trump said Griffi n “should be
ashamed of herself ” for the photo.
“My children, especially my 11-year-
old son, Barron, are having a hard time
with this. Sick!”
And fi rst lady Mela-
nia Trump issued a state-
ment in which she said,
“As a mother, a wife,
and a human being, that
photo is very disturb-
ing. When you consider
some of the atrocities
happening in the world
today, a photo opportunity like this is
simply wrong and makes you wonder
about the mental health of the person
who did it.”
Many conservatives believe left-
leaning Hollywood has two standards
one for Democrats who always are
victims, and another for conservatives
who get what’s coming to them.
“Clearly there is a history of the
Hollywood left feeling emboldened
to make outrageous statements about
conservatives,” former GOP strategist
Alice Stewart observed.
Stewart said she believes in free
speech, but she also believes in con-
sequences. She applauded Griffi n for
apologizing and “my employer CNN
for canceling her contract for New
Year’s Eve.”
When British fi lmmaker Gabriel
Range made a movie about the as-
sassination of George W. Bush during
a 2007 trip to Chicago, he won an
award. Then the fantasy of assassinat-
ing a president was art, as Griffi n de-
scribed her photo shoot.
But when Republicans target
other
views
Democrats in less direct fashion, they
can be accused of inciting violence.
Griffi n herself assailed former GOP
vice presidential candidate Sarah Pal-
in for releasing a map with targeted
congressional districts in crosshairs.
When a madman shot and critically
wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-
Ariz., whose district was in the map,
Griffi n tweeted, “Happy now Sarah?”
Democratic strategist Maria Car-
dona saw no need to condemn Grif-
fi n. “Frankly I don’t think she mat-
ters,” the CNN contributor wrote in
an email. “I think Trump made a mis-
take in responding to her because it
elevated her and her disgusting antic
to a level she doesn’t deserve. And sure,
hypocrisy abounds on both sides. Ted
Nugent threatened President Obama’s
life and Nugent was invited by Trump
to the White House.”
In 2012, Nugent, a gun-rights ac-
tivist, said Republicans “should ride
into that battlefi eld and chop (Demo-
crats’) heads off in November.”
Comedian Will Durst took time off
from working on Durst Case Scenario,
his one-man show about Trump, to
comment on the Griffi n controversy.
“You know Kathy Griffi n is taste-
less,” said Durst, who nonetheless re-
fused to condemn her. “The guy who
she is mocking and scoffi ng,” he said,
has “laid a base of attack and bluster
and baseless claims, so it’s a whole dif-
ferent playing fi eld.”
Former fi rst daughter Chelsea
Clinton was not as understanding.
“I hope we can at least agree that it’s
never funny to joke about violence
toward anyone, and particularly in this
politically charged moment, toward
our president,” she told “The View.”
(Creators Syndicate)
Exit from Paris climate accord is wrong
Give or take a year or two, the In-
dustrial Revolution began in earnest
in Great Britain during the last decade
of the 18th century. So, a mere 227
years ago on planet Earth, a relatively
small-sized but somewhat
unique, rocky world circling
a comparatively small star
at 4.5 billion years of age,
the human species started to
add signifi cantly to natural-
ly-occurring air, water and
soil contaminants, rendering
them often-dangerous to the
health, even survival, of many living
creatures.
Then, in the waning years of the
last century (mainly the 1980s), hu-
mankind began to notice that human
activity was causing so much pollu-
tion in every way that it was calculated
as inevitable that, should the waste
and wantonness continue, there’d be
no certainty the planet would, before
long, due to climate change and a mul-
titude of other threatening conditions,
allow its “smartest” species to survive,
homo sapiens dating back by fossil-
fi nds some 200,000 years.
Down close to the present time,
there have been fi ts and starts among
the nations of the world to try to bring
to a halt, or even, if possible, to re-
verse, the serious threat to the air, wa-
ter and soil for plants and animals on
the planet. This concern resulted in the
Paris climate agreement, co-signed and
adopted by 195 nations on Decem-
ber 12, 2015, to mitigate and control
greenhouse gasses, scheduled to offi -
cially get underway in 2020.
Now, President Trump has an-
nounced that the U.S. will with-
draw from the agreement, joining
Nicaragua and Syria, originally unable
to sign. However, the nuts and bolts
of the agreement, more accurately the
money and power behind its rejec-
tion here, have most to do with the
fact that America’s powerful corpora-
tions and super wealthy multi-national
business interests, who can make or
break Trump fi nancially,
are those to whom Trump
now bows. American bil-
lionaires like Carl Icahn
and the Koch Brothers
can’t wait for the Trump
administration to gut cli-
mate and pollution con-
trols at home and abandon
international sanctions abroad so they
can get back to drilling wherever they
please for crude oil and other fossil fu-
els currently restrained by some envi-
ronmental regulations.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters, his
“core base” of voters who seem always
to agree with him, commonly believe
he’s pulling out of the climate pact
because he believes climate science is
a Chinese hoax. These same folks, in-
cluding coal miners, oil-drilling rough-
necks and others in declining blue col-
lar American industries, view him as
working in their interest to place them
back to their
f o r m e r
jobs. What’s
going
on
here in em-
ployment
oppor tuni-
ties, however,
now and into
the
fore-
seeable fu-
ture,
look
to
disap-
point many
of
those
for whom
T r u m p
made prom-
guest
column
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ises. Meanwhile, serious persons seek-
ing real work futures are advised to
study U.S. labor market information
and thereby seek education and train-
ing in career-vocational-technical
schools and programs.
The sovereignty and cohesion of
America has been threatened mul-
tiple times but appear at present under
greater strain from within and outside
than ever before. Ripping up a global
climate agreement fulfi lls the aspira-
tions and determinations of the cor-
porate interests and wealthy entrepre-
neurs among us whose apparent need
to make more and more money trumps
all other considerations. In the mean
time, the masses want to protect their
loved ones from a planet gone totally-
exploited for the sake of big bucks,
with no care for the continuation of a
livable world.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)
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