PAGE A14, KEIZERTIMES, OCTOBER 22, 2021
Vaccine resisters sacrificing
their jobs are not heroes
PUBLIC SQUARE welcomes all points of view. Published submissions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Keizertimes
Let's grow our own teachers
The Salem-Keizer School District and
the community should return to a progam
of old: Grow Our Own. Grow our own
teachers from the students at our schools.
Teaching is a wonderful profession
that offers a wide variety of options, from
elementary school to high school, from
the arts to the sciences to athletics. By
promoting teaching as a profession to
those aleady in our schools, the district
can develop the future of our schools.
Grow Our Own would create a pipeline
of homegrown instructors who not only
know the area, but more importantly, they
would know the people. With more than
80 different languages spoken in Salem-
Keizer schools, imagine how a future ele-
mentary school student can blossom if
their teacher also speaks Farsi or Urdu or
Russian.
Contemporary teachers and adminis-
trators can identify those who lean toward
teaching and those with the aptitude for
it, then offer those students the pathway
to the degrees and certificates to a suc-
cess in the education field.
Grow Our Our can result in a more
diverse teaching staff. The program
should not negate the opportunity for
Open letter to the
Marion and Yamhill
commisioners
To the Editor:
The surprise departure of Bill Post
gives you an opportunity to replace him
with a more representative legislator—
one who accepts the reality of climate
change, the tragedy of gun violence, the
continuing threat of COVID and would
support legislation that addresses those
issues.
I have no illusions that you’ll appoint
such a rep, but at very least select one
with a firm grip on reality. One who
Editorial
people from outside the region to apply
for open positions. Diversity of educa-
tors is more than ethnicity—it is a diver-
sity of geographical backgrounds and
experiences. We can hire from outside,
as always, but put an added focus on
creating future teachers from people we
know—today's students.
To make it viable, such a program
needs dedicated and committed stew-
ards—administrators who recognize the
value of both diversity and familiarity.
A program should be designed to
entice possible candidates to consider
teaching as career, such as promises fo
financial help with education—Grow Our
Own scholarships, perhaps, and a prom-
ise of where they would be assigned.
We have the best resource for future
teachers sitting in our classrooms. Let's
help some of them grow into teachers of
tomorrow.
—LAZ
By MICHAEL GERSON
“Poor is the nation that has no heroes,”
Cicero said. But poorer still is a nation with
the kind of heroes celebrated on Fox News.
The nation’s leading purveyor of lethal
medical advice during a pandemic has
recently elevated the resisters against coro-
navirus vaccines—an airline pilot here, a
nurse there—as models of citizenship. These
abstainers are risking their livelihoods in
the cause of . . . what? Well, that depends on
your view of the vaccines themselves.
For generations we’ve had vaccine man-
dates, particularly for childhood diseases,
in every state plus Washington D.C. Few
thought to call this tyranny because com-
munities have a duty to maintain public
health, and individuals have a duty to rea-
sonably accommodate the common good—
even if this means allowing your child to be
injected with a substance carrying a minus-
cule risk of harm.
So there can be no objection rooted in
principle to vaccine mandates, unless you
want to question them all the way down to
measles, mumps and rubella. The problem
must be COVID-19 in particular.
If the coronavirus vaccines are risky,
experimental concoctions with frequent
side effects, then government and business
mandates are social coercion run amok. We
might as well mandate vaping.
But if these vaccines are carefully tested
and encourage greater immunity to a deadly
disease, with minimal risk of side effects,
then the “heroism” of vaccine resisters takes
on a different connotation: It means resist-
ers are less courageous and more selfish
than your average 6-year-old getting a sec-
ond MMR dose. Perhaps vaccine mandates
should be modified to include lollipops for
whingeing malcontents.
So which view is correct? If only there
were empirical means, some scientific
method, to test the matter. If only there had
been three phases of clinical trials, involv-
ing tens of thousands of volunteers, demon-
strating the drugs to be safe and effective.
If only the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and the Food and Drug
Administration were constantly monitoring
safety concerns about the vaccines. If only
we could estimate the number of COVID
deaths that might have been prevented if
vaccine uptake were higher.
To break the suspense—we do live in such
a world. “From June through September
2021,” concluded a recent Peterson-KFF
report, “approximately 90,000 COVID-19
deaths among adults likely would have been
prevented with vaccination.” So the matter
is simple: Who is making vaccination more
likely to take place, and who is not?
In this light, it’s hard to blame the small
group of workers who have been misled into
Letters
accepts the plain, proven over and over
fact, that Joe Biden won, Trump lost in
a fair and square election and will say so
publically.
In other words, choose a Republican,
not a deluded Trump cultist.
May your better angels help you make
a wise choice.
Martin Doerfler
Keizer
other
VOICES
believing that liberty is the right to infect
your neighbors with a deadly pathogen.
The main fault lies with the media outlets
that spotlight and elevate such people, and
with political figures who seek their political
dreams by encouraging lethal ignorance.
In the latter category, the Republican
governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg
Abbott of Texas are the repellent standouts.
If the coronavirus could vote, these men
would be governors for life. Most recently,
Abbott issued an executive order saying “no
entity” could impose vaccine mandates in
his state. So far, many Texas business enti-
ties have treated his order with contempt,
preferring to comply with President Biden’s
vaccinate-or-test mandate.
In my political youth, conservatives
praised state governments as “laboratories
of innovation.” Now they’re graveyards of
sanity and public spirit. And the actual
graveyards provide evidence.
The effectiveness of vaccine mandates
is demonstrated by current practice. The
United States has generally high rates of
coverage for childhood vaccinations. But in
states that make it easy to gain an exemp-
tion—for religious or sometimes “philosoph-
ical” reasons—the rates of coverage decline.
And we’ve seen outbreaks of preventable
diseases such as measles as a result.
For my part, I’m not even sure what a
“religious” exemption means in the case of
COVID. I understand that a few religious
traditions object to receiving medical care
entirely. But I don’t think this is the main
excuse for evangelicals seeking exemptions
from COVID vaccinations. What type or tra-
dition of religion asserts the right to avoid
minor risks and inconveniences in service
to our neighbors? The Church of Perpetual
Selfishness? The coven of Ayn Rand? Do
Christians really want to be identified as
people who permit breast augmentation but
frown on vaccination? Getting vaccinated is
not only good public health; it is also a small
but important act of generosity.
Abbott and his ilk are seeking a morally
desolate world in which people demand
their autonomy even if it kills their neighbor.
But there is a better world in which institu-
tions have duties to the health and safety of
citizens, and citizens have obligations to the
health and happiness of one another. That is
not only a better place to live—it is a place
where more of us would remain alive.
(Washington Post)
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