JANUARY 5, 2018, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
No crystal balls, no wishes
At the end of each year media
outlets use news space to predict
what will happen in the following
12 months or run a list of wished-
for headlines in the coming year.
In this space we don’t utilize
crystal balls or predictions—they
are nice parlor games—we prefer to
look forward by relying on trends
and the words of those who can af-
fect the future. We will
focus on what is hap-
pening rather than write
about hoped for events.
While we don’t do
predictions we are con-
fi dent in our desire to
hear words that can help
all live better lives—that
is the goal of most every
man and woman.
We want to hear the words com-
promise, moderation, solve and everyone.
Compromise is not a dirty or
treasonous word, though that is
what many in Congress have sug-
gested or acted on. Politics is the
art of compromise—shifting one’s
position slightly to achieve part of
one’s goals. In recent years politics
has meant stand fi rm in your posi-
tion and don’t give in...ever.
Just as extremism is no virtue,
moderation is no vice. Winners and
winning ideas live in the middle,
the space between the extremes of
the ideological spectrum. Former
conservative icon Ronald Rea-
gan certainly understood the art of
moderating some of his long-held
beliefs to achieve a score in the win
column.
Every problem that America,
Oregon and Keizer face has been
solved somewhere in the world. A
look to Europe and Asia will show
how countries on those continents
have managed their traffi c and
transportation issues. Travelers re-
turning from those places marvel
at the infrastructure that get people
from one place to another. Other
nations have also addressed hous-
ing and density issues that can be an
example.
Hippocrates said it best more than
2,000 years ago. In part, he wrote pri-
mum non nocere. Its trans-
lation is one of the most
well known sayings on
Earth: “fi rst, do no harm.”
It was part of the oath
that those who dispensed
medical service gave to
the gods.
Though modern day
doctors do not use the
oath, its premise is an important
guide. Everyone knows the Golden
Rule and some may even live by it.
Hippocrates rule, while originally
devised for doctors, would be a good
complement to the Golden Rule es-
pecially by those who have sway over
others: governments, employers, leg-
islators and business.
Doing no harm would mean pass-
ing laws that are friendly to our en-
vironment—the only one we have.
It would mean not imposing regula-
tions or doing away with regulations
that relate to the well-being of peo-
ple or their livelihoods. We should all
endeavor to do no harm to the world
on which we live or to harm those
who are different than us.
When we compromise, moderate
our positions we can fi nd solutions
that benefi t everyone. That’s a heck
of a plan, one to adopt and help oth-
ers, all without the services of a crys-
tal ball or made-up headlines.
We’ll do our part.
—LAZ
our
opinion
The mad rush to Waremart
The anticipation for the open-
ing of Waremart byWincoFoods at
Creekside Center is palpable. Thou-
sands of Keizer households are ready
to shop at the city’s second grocery
store. The city has had one grocery
for several years.
We would expect that once the
doors of Waremart are open for
business there will be quite the mad
rush to check it out and do some
shopping.
We would also expect that the
city of Keizer recognizes this and
will help with traffi c control. Creek-
side Center is notoriously hard to
exit onto River Road or Lockhav-
en Drive at certain times of the day.
With a crush of cars entering and
exiting the parking lot it would be
helpful to have police offi cers help-
ing direct traffi c during rush hour
for the fi rst few days of operation.
Eventually a rythym of traffi c
will be set and people may time
their trips to the new store accord-
ingly, but at the beginning the city
of Keizer’s police department can
do a wonderful service and help
residents get to a business that will
be pumping lots of tax dollars into
the city’s coffers.
That’s worth a few days of police
traffi c control.
—LAZ
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Where contempt and mockery meet
By MICHAEL GERSON
I, Tonya is a movie that is, in places,
very diffi cult to watch. But it is also
impossible to look away.
This biopic about the
briefl y famous, then in-
famous Tonya Harding
has offended some re-
viewers by putting child
abuse and domestic vio-
lence in close proximity
to comedy. But it would
be diffi cult to tell Hard-
ing’s story without both elements.
Harding’s mother, LaVona, (the way
the movie portrays it) motivated her
young daughter’s dedication to skat-
ing with beatings and demeaning cru-
elty and eventually threw a kitchen
knife into her daughter’s arm. LaVona
(played with vicious charisma by Al-
lison Janney) also excels at emotional
violence. At one point—after the at-
tack on Harding’s main skating rival,
Nancy Kerrigan —LaVona fi nally
tells her grateful, tearful daughter how
proud she is of her achievements on
the ice. But Harding discovers that her
mother is actually recording the con-
versation in a ploy to sell a confession
to the tabloids. Harding’s husband, Jeff
Gillooly, not to be outdone, smashes
his wife’s head into a wall and shoots
a gun at her. Nearly everyone who is
supposed to love Harding hurts and
betrays her.
But who could possibly invent a
stranger comic story than the conspir-
acy against Kerrigan’s knee? Gillooly
plots with self-described international
counterterrorism expert Shawn Eck-
hardt (actually a professional loser and
Star Trek nerd who lives with his par-
ents) to send death threats to Kerrigan.
This somehow morphs into the hiring
of two hit men (quite literally
in this case) to strike Kerrigan’s
leg with a retractable baton, in
an attempt to disable her be-
fore the 1994 Olympics. This
caper has all the hallmarks of
comic exaggeration; but none
of this was fi ction. Eckhardt,
in particular, is a reminder
that cartoon characters actually walk
among us.
The moral core of I, Tonya is clear
enough. Harding is a diffi cult, occa-
sionally obnoxious person, for whom
we end up rooting without reserva-
tion. She emerges from a crucible of
dysfunction and abuse as a remark-
able fi gure—at one point, the best in
her fi eld. In a world where the judges
wanted a princess, she was an athlete.
Their preference for “artistry” was re-
vealed as snobbery. Harding’s work-
ing-class background and hand-sewn
costumes were noted at the time—
now (amazingly to me) 25 years ago.
But the real story was how a fl awed,
vulnerable young woman managed
to show such strength and excellence
even while surrounded by abusive
fools.
The fools eventually brought her
down. There is little evidence that
Harding participated in planning the
plot against Kerrigan. There is plenty
of evidence that she trusted the wrong
people.
But I, Tonya is ambitious beyond
other
voices
these details. The movie points to the
danger of imposing a simple narrative
on events. I vividly recall the Harding/
Kerrigan scandal and Olympic show-
down, which occupied the country
for months. Before I saw the movie, I
honestly could not remember if Hard-
ing was innocent or guilty. Yet in the
back of my mind, I thought she ex-
emplifi ed guiltiness. The country had
created a drama with a villain and a
victim. There was no room for hu-
manizing complexity. It is possible,
it turns out, for a story to have two
victims.
In the cause of our narratives, it is
our tendency to draw massive con-
clusions based on scant evidence. The
movie indicts tabloid television —
which was a rising force at the time—
as particularly prone to this destructive
form of simplifi cation. But Harding
eventually turns to the camera and ac-
cuses the audience sitting in the the-
ater of the same thing. When she says,
“You’re all my attackers, too,” it is a
moment of genuine discomfort.
Elsewhere in the movie, Hard-
ing argues, “There is no such thing as
truth. Everyone has their own truth.”
It is facile and destructive to claim that
truth itself is relative. But all of us see
truth from our own angle, and there is
wisdom in recognizing that our view
can be skewed. As I, Tonya demon-
strates, the world is often more com-
plex—and more interesting—than
our narratives.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Seniors need to head off budget cuts
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By GENE H. McINTYRE
“Seniors”
includes guys like
me. We Americans, who grew up
during the years I grew up, most of-
ten completed high school while also
holding
part-time
jobs
that
were full-time on Saturdays and dur-
ing summers. Subject knowledge
leads me to say that we made serious
contributions to the American econo-
my, raised families, and served in wars
since 1945. We worked throughout
our lives and earned a re-
spectable retirement. That
appears threatened now.
At this moment, for
seniors, the Republi-
can tax package is not
only widely unpopular
but already recognized
as mainly benefi cial to
the “One Percent” of
Americans who got wealthy through
our labor and consumer buying. These
wealthy Americans are nowadays sin-
gularly served by what should also be
our representatives in the U.S. Con-
gress. Meanwhile, the D.C. Capitol
crowd lies to us in propagandizing that
the tax package is a win for all Ameri-
cans.
As 2018 dawns, these GOP rep-
resentatives are concerned about a
backlash by their constituents back
home and plan to double-down in an
aggressive public relations effort, try-
ing to make a silk purse out of a sow’s
ear. At the same time, President Don-
ald Trump is busy, by talk and tweets,
promising that he “will work with the
Democrats to rebuild the nation’s road
and bridges” after one of the greatest
giveaways ever to the U.S. rich.
So, let’s get real. With the tax cuts
alone, not including an infrastructure
package that would require more bil-
lions in defi cit spending, it means the
nation will go more seriously and
outrageously deeper into black hole
debt that will adversely effect a lot of
us us and our descendants. But, hold
your horses! Let’s be wise to what’s
really a coup de grace that will be
peddled to the contrary as making all
here good and wonderful: the greatest
of pipe dreams that our nation’s cor-
porations and wealthy will use their
recklessly generous windfall to invest
in all ways possible to improve and en-
hance American lives in general.
Americans who’ve been around for
a while should know what’s about
to happen. The same rep-
resentatives in Washington,
who’ve given us the new
tax package are eyeball-
ing seniors for budget sav-
ings, and those savings will
be advocated by drastic cuts,
even termination of, Medi-
care, Medicaid, and what
was the sacred “third rail in
politics,” Social Security. Again, pre-
dictably, those clever folks who are
supposed to be looking after all of
us, those who worked for a better
America, will predictably soon be in-
formed that things must be tidied up
through “entitlement reform.” Trans-
guest
column
lated, that means seniors must pay for
those tax breaks.
If seniors, and those Ameri-
cans about to become seniors, want
to save themselves, it appears time-
ly for them to become activists. At
least look into what’s about to be laid
upon us and be motivated thereby to
vote. Then, too, regarding the entitle-
ments issue, it’s not only that Social Se-
curity will take a dive by reforms, but
it’s Medicare that keeps most of us af-
ter age 65 from poverty and home-
lessness when surgical procedures and
cancer-abating drugs become our fi -
nancial companions.
A fi ght by millions upon millions of
older Americans must be joined to let
those in Congress know that their days
“representing” us are over if they vote
for signifi cant damage to our govern-
ment lifelines. In fact, although it may
be pie-in-the-sky thinking at this time,
the best course of action for the Amer-
ican majority is for the tax package to
be reversed as soon as possible and our
current “representatives” become real
representatives again.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)