APRIL 19, 2019, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
Opinion
Let your passion lead you
There seem to be two schools of
thought on the role of schools in
the lives of our children: some think
that schools should do most of the
raising of our kids; others think that
education in school should be cou-
pled with life education
in the home.
Contemporary edu-
cation movements have
put much currency in
public education as a
tool to get our children
ready for life—training
for a trade, for example.
For
decades, the
American Dream entailed becom-
ing whatever one wanted to be
regardless of their beginnings. The
poorest child in the worst ghet-
to, via hard work in schools, could
become a world-class doctor or an
attorney on the ranks of Supreme
Court justice.
Some students today certainly
harbor a desire to attend a four-year
university and earn a doctorate in
medicine or law. It seems we don’t
want to produce doctors and law-
yers as much as we want to produce
workers for the trades.
With that background, voters will
be faced with two distinctly differ-
ent candidates for Position 6 for the
Salem-Keizer School Board elec-
tion in May. Incumbent Chuck Lee
has served for three terms (12 years);
his opponent, Danielle Bethell, is a
businesswoman with three children
in Keizer’s public schools and expe-
rience with Individual Education
Plans—a written statement of the
education program for a child who
is eligible for special education.
Lee has a strong resume including
leadership of Blanchet High School
and president of the public-private
Career and Technical Education
Center (CTEC).
Bethell is passionate about what
schools should be and what they
should not be. As a mother she
wants to be sure all children are get-
ting the education they deserve.
It is no surprise that Lee thinks
that career and technical education
is a key to a successful high school
education. While Bethell supports
CTEC, she believes that it is not the
only game in town and it should be
a part of high school education, not
the be all and end all.
Our students are not cut from
the same cloth. Students here in the
state’s second largest school district
come from diverse backgrounds
(economically, racially, national-
ly, linguistcally, etc.). The time has
come to stop trying to ram all of
our kids into the same
classrooms and curricu-
lums.
Our schools need to
be centers of learning.
Bethell is frustrated by
the cuffs that bind teach-
ers’ hands when it comes
to dealing with disrup-
tive students. That does
nothing for the kids who are ready
to learn.
Class disruption is but one small
part of the education system that
needs to be addressed.
Lee says that the school board has
one employee and one employee
only: the district’s superintendent.
That means that what happens in
the classroom is not in the board’s
wheelhouse. What happens in the
classroom is the responsibility of
Superintendent Christy Perry, her
cabinet of nine administrators and
those that serve under them.
The school board is where the
buck stops. Though many want
to lay responsibility for what hap-
pens in Salem-Keizer classrooms
at the feet of the state education
department or the legislature, pol-
icy is what the school board does.
You may not know if you attend a
school board meeting—it’s all about
the budget, money and grants. Nary
a word about curriculum.
We would like to see the Sa-
lem-Keizer School Board be more
involved with the setting of cur-
riculum at all levels of education in
our schools.
Regarding the election for Po-
sition 6, if you think that career
and vocational education is the fu-
ture for our high schools, vote for
Chuck Lee.
If you believe that teachers need
to have more say in how their
students behave including conse-
quences for class distrupters and a
well-balanced curriculum is im-
portant, vote for Danielle Bethell.
Both candidates are equally pas-
sionate about our schools. Let your
passion be your guide in choosing.
—LAZ
The scourge of
fentanyl
Fentanyl was rarely
ever prescribed as a
“take-home” medi-
cine for chronic pain
or painful disorders
and never used outside
of a hospital. Not only
is fentanyl available on
nearly every street corner nation-
wide, it’s also being widely distrib-
uted throughout the country after
being imported from China. In order
to fi nally get a grip on the growing
opiate epidemic, doctors need to stop
over-prescribing opiates so as to not
create new addicts and effective drug
rehab needs to be made available
to anyone who needs it. Addiction
doesn’t care who you are, how you
were raised, or where you’re from;
it can affect anyone. Another person
becoming an unfortunate statistic is
one too many.
Jason Good
Clearwater, FL
editorial
letters
To the Editor:
Fentanyl is the strongest
opiate on the streets right
now and it’s estimated to be
100 times more potent than mor-
phine and 50 times stronger than
heroin.
Not only is fentanyl sold on the
streets “as is,” but it’s also mixed into
other drugs by dealers who have no
regard for human life; all they care
about is taking the addict’s money.
Fentanyl has recently been found not
only in heroin supplies, but it’s also
been found in other illicit drugs like
cocaine and marijuana.
Unsuspecting addicts consume
the drug in the amounts they’re used
to, completely oblivious to the fact
that they are about to ingest a lethal
dose of fentanyl. Fentanyl affects the
opiate receptors of the brain and
crosses through the blood-brain bar-
rier and creates an intense euphoria
and addiction in the user much like
heroin. Fentanyl was originally only
supposed to be indicated for cancer
patients and for “end-of-life” pain.
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The cathedral and the path to renewal
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
The burning of Notre Dame Ca-
thedral, a monument to human cre-
ativity and divine inspiration, invites
fi rst a mournful silence and then a
search for meaning. This often in-
volves efforts to understand the inex-
plicable by reference to metaphor.
That this ancient place of worship
burned during Holy Week
invites, perhaps paradox-
ically, hope. A time when
Christians remember suf-
fering and death and then
celebrate resurrection speaks
to the yearning for deliver-
ance and renewal. Because
Notre Dame was not com-
pletely destroyed by this tragedy—or
by centuries of neglect, or by political
threats—it can be reborn.
And the possibility of revival in-
structs us about tradition and its en-
durance. We are learning from experts
in restoration and repair that a recon-
structed building is never the same
as it was before. We are also learning
that when structures are hundreds of
years old, they are not the product of
a single time or a single culture. They
are the creations of many tastes, many
insights and many minds.
Traditions are built that way, too.
They survive because those who
honor them work mightily to pro-
tect them—but also because living
traditions never fear adapting when
change demands it.
In a stirring piece of journalism,
The Financial Times’ Edwin Heathcote
reminds us that great structures come
to be hallowed for more than their
magnifi cence. We appreciate them
as well because they have embedded
themselves in the lives of individuals
and communities. He notes that ar-
chitecture is often “revered as an art
object or an artefactm(sic) rather than
a working component of everyday
life.”
And he asks of Notre Dame: “But
how much of that fabric is actually
medieval? Cathedrals took centuries
to build and they are always works
in progress, accretions
of layers from across the
ages. The urgent ques-
tions then are: where do
you start and what, ex-
actly, do you rebuild?”
Which invites the
other, more disturbing
metaphor that has been
invoked often in recent days: Notre
Dame burned at a time when the
Roman Catholic Church, to which it
owes its life, is also burning in a dif-
ferent way.
Perhaps this is too easy a leap to
make, but who can question that there
is a deep crisis in the church, brought
about by the failure of its leadership
to protect its most vulnerable mem-
bers? Who can miss the debilitating
divisions in the church, refl ected most
recently by Pope Emeritus Benedict’s
letter that was widely interpreted (I
think accurately) as a challenge to
Pope Francis’ worldview and his han-
dling of the crisis?
Notre Dame’s near destruction
brought home why this crisis has, of
late, left me close to silent. As a strug-
gling, run-of-the-mill believer who is
neither particularly holy nor doctrin-
ally pure, I have—like many Catho-
lics, I suspect—found it impossible
to break with an institution that has
been profoundly, at times wickedly,
fl awed yet still kindles acts of mercy,
other
voices
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The anxiety of living in the U.S. today
The lengthy life for this writer is
attributable, in part, to birth in the
United States. In fact, there have been
only two periods during my life when
serious wonder arose by “the end” ap-
pearing imminent. The two periods
were characterized by protracted mi-
graine-like headaches, resulting from
intense feelings of helplessness due to
fear-engulfi ng stress and bone-chilling
dread.
The fi rst period occurred during
my youth and was known as the Cu-
ban Missile Crisis. It was
when, for 13 agonizing
days of uncertainty, the
world anxiously awaited on
whether the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. (Russia) would
enter a nuclear war initiat-
ed by the U.S. discovery of
short-range Soviet ballistic
missiles being deployed in
Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a Rus-
sian ally.
By the end of World War II, the
world knew from the 1945 atomic
bomb detonations over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki that nuclear weapons had hu-
man life-ending power. Furthermore,
we knew that America had the more
powerful hydrogen bomb and aware
that the Soviet Union also had the hy-
drogen bomb in their arsenal. One of
those Americans who knew the facts
and contracted a monumentally-big
headache thereby was yours truly.
The second period is currently un-
derway. It has arrived by way of Wash-
ington, D.C., where our current presi-
dent, Donald J. Trump, ignores rule by
law, undermining and emasculating the
U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
and apparently is seeking autocrat-
ic status. Examples abound: Attorney
General William Barr appears to work
for Donald Trump and not the Amer-
ican people. Evidence of his patronage
role can be witnessed in his unwilling-
ness to fully release the 26-months-in-
the-making Mueller Report and his
recent announcement charging (with-
out evidence) his Department of Jus-
tice employees, FBI agents, used FISA
(Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act),
electronic surveillance approved by
federal judges, to “spy” on the Trump
campaign. If Barr’s charge were true,
it would mean our FBI operates like
government investigators do in China,
Russia and North Korea.
Not.
President Trump re-
fuses to reveal his tax re-
turns. Meanwhile, tax re-
turns have been lawfully
requested since the scan-
dal-ridden presidency of
Warren Harding in the
1920s. The law, which
says the U.S. House Ways
and Means Committee can request and
review any American’s tax return, has
always been honored. Now, Trump’s
Secretary of the Treasury, Steven
Mnuchin, without power by statute
to intervene into the U.S. Tax Analy-
sis offi ce, is
p reve n t i n g
Trump’s re-
turns
from
oversight
by
Con-
gress. Looks
like
public
employee
Mnuchin also
works only
for Donald
Trump.
Just
one
more exam-
ple
among
so many that
gene h.
mcintyre
Keizertimes
moments of transcendence and works
of beauty.
From my fi rst visit to Notre Dame
just before Christmas in 1973 and
continuing through many others, I
always found the cathedral at once
wondrous and welcoming. It was a
blend of the sacred and the profane
as bustling tourists made their way
by pews where the devout and the
doubting offered their prayers to a
God they hoped was listening.
When I was there, I was always
aware of French Catholicism’s moral-
ly bifurcated history. It was a force for
both shameful collaboration with the
Nazis and the Vichy regime during
World War II, and also heroic resis-
tance. So we should not be shocked
by this very human institution’s more
recent failures. There have been lies
told to cover up corruption, but
truths preached in the name of love
and justice.
At times, I think that those who
are leaving the church -- the outraged
parents, the women and LGBTQ
people who feel excluded from its
concern -- may simply have more
courage than I do. Yet I still want to
place my bet with those who insist
the church can be delivered, who re-
member, as with Notre Dame, that it
is a work in progress about which we
always have to ask, “What, exactly, do
you rebuild?”
No matter how skeptical I get,
I fi nd myself joyful at Easter Mass,
year after year, when we fi rst hear the
words, “He is risen, Alleluia!” It will
take time and care, but I know Notre
Dame will have its Alleluia moment.
I pray there will also be one for the
church that inspired its creation.
cause alarm. The Congress-approved
Secretary of Homeland Security
(DHS) and most of the division heads
under the DHS, including, among oth-
ers, the Director of the Secret Service,
have been discharged or fi red from
their duties and replaced by acting
heads who simply work for Donald
Trump, not the American people. Sub-
sequently, all matters that establish and
preserve our security are now decided
by one American who has placed the
safety and health of 323 million Amer-
icans under his single-minded, often
arbitrary, whimsical control.
Avoiding naivete, I’m aware that no
one besides my wife and daughters care
whether I contract a migraine or any
other malady. Nevertheless, If anyone
besides myself values a free country,
our human rights, a government design
with separation of powers and checks
and balances by three separate entities,
it is high time every American get ac-
quainted with the threat and do what
he can do to defend and thereby save
the United States.
( Gene H. McIntyre shares his opin-
ion regularly in the Keizertimes.)