OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2015
Finding a connection amid tragedy
Founded in 1873
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
How can we
process yet another
campus shooting?
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
We must take fuel
spills seriously
I
remember where I was when
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Sandy Hook school shootings in
Newtown, Connecticut.
I was about 25 miles away at a
Christmas party, when a columnist
came in and said “there was a shoot-
ing in Newtown, maybe at a school.”
Craig Ruttle/AP Photo
We took in the news, but didn’t
put down our forks. Even then, the
thought was, “Oh, just another ran-
dom shooting.” It’s that easy to be
jaded.
tanker piercing its fuel tank on a pier and leaking hundred
As the day went on, the magnitude
RIWKHKRUUL¿FLQFLGHQWXQIROGHG
of gallons of diesel into the Columbia River Friday is a re-
On the morning of Dec. 14, Adam
minder of how quickly maritime accidents happen and why its so Lanza, 20, killed 26 people at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in New-
important to have well-polished response plans.
Investigators have yet to de-
A study reported last month WRZQ7ZHQW\RIWKHVODLQZHUH¿UVW
grade students. Others were teachers
termine what went wrong, but centering on the Exxon Valdez and aides. Earlier that morning, Lan-
it’s possible to say some things spill in Alaska found, for exam- za had also killed his mother in their
went right: Coast Guard Incident ple, that even low-level oil expo- home. He later took his own life.
My reactions Thursday in Oregon
Management Division investi- sure causes heart defects in salm- were similar to those I felt in Decem-
gators were dispatched, a con- on and can lower their chances of ber 2012.
After all, it was supposed to be
tainment boom was deployed, survival.
something
of a festive day in the
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“We now know the developing
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vessel’s agent hired Clean Rivers ¿VKKHDUWLVH[TXLVLWHO\VHQVLWLYH ational marijuana sales, the end of
Cooperative from Portland to to crude oil toxicity, and that sub- D ¿JKW WKDW KDG GLYLGHG FLWL]HQV IRU
cleanup the spill.
tle changes in heart formation can years and backed up city council cal-
like a clogged water pipe. That
These actions plus an array of have delayed but important con- endars
Thursday night, we were prepared for
others are outlined in the Lower VHTXHQFHV IRU ¿UVW\HDU VXUYLY- the somber airing of Oregon Public
Columbia River Geographic al, which in turn determines the Broadcasting’s “Unprepared,” the
Response Plan, which was updat- ORQJWHUPDEXQGDQFHRIZLOG¿VK documentary on the threat of a Cas-
cadia Subduction Zone megaquake.
ed earlier this year by the Coast populations,” a NOAA Fisheries’ Enough gravitas for one day.
Guard and state environmental Northwest Fisheries Science
Then the news.
Not another campus shooting.
agencies. Preparation is premised Center researcher said.
Not to hear the news from the
on the well-understood fact that
Taking this into consideration,
small city of Roseburg in central Or-
limiting damage necessitates hav- even modest spills like the one egon.
ing detailed procedures already last week deserve the profession-
Yet that was exactly what we
worked out, plus practice drills al attention it received. There can were hearing. As the day unfolded,
and mechanisms for holding be a sense among some members we learned a 26-year-old man had
shot and killed nine people in an in-
companies accountable. The plan of the public that worrying about troductory English composition class
is available at www.tinyurl.com/ petroleum products in the water is at Roseburg’s Umpqua Communi-
ty College before dying, either in a
NewOilSpillPlan.
a “Chicken Little” exercise.
shootout or by his own hand.
Even small spills and leaks add
But spills — small, medium
0HGLD EULH¿QJV ÀRZHG LQ IURP
up to considerable environmen- and enormous — happen all the the Douglas County Sheriff’s Of-
tal damage. The consequences time, and warrant the attention ¿FH&11)R[061%&²DOOZHUH
DUHVLJQL¿FDQWDQGLW¶VZRUWKHY- and money we invest in mini- there. The shooter, Christopher Sean
Harper-Mercer, was described as a
eryone’s attention to avoid these mizing them and cleaning them California transplant with a fetish for
problems.
up.
military gear and weapons. A loner.
Nobody knew much about him.
In hours, the incident spurred
gun debate anew, brought President
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Why do state
lines matter?
There is resentment at feeling like
an outsider in one’s own state
The casket of teacher Anne Marie Murphy is lifted into St. Mary Of
The Assumption Church in Katonah, N.Y., Dec. 20, 2012. Murphy was
killed when gunman, Adam Lanza, walked into Sandy Hook Elemen-
tary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Dec. 14, and opened fire, killing
26, including 20 children, before killing himself.
SOUTHERN
EXPOSURE
B Y
R.J.
M ARX
ciation to the fore, and invoked Sandy
Hook, Aurora, Colorado, and Virginia
Tech.
And then we on the coast received
concerned calls and emails. To many
people outside the state, Roseburg
might as well be Portland. “Was this
near you?” “Are you all right?” “God,
how horrible!”
I barely know Roseburg, other than
for its proximity to Eugene, where
my son went to college. I think we’ve
driven through it a couple of times.
Roseburg sounds like a nice, family
community, a lot like Newtown.
In reality, Oregon is a big state and
Roseburg is far away from Clatsop
County.
So I told my concerned East Coast
friends, “No, it wasn’t near us. We are
all right. And yes, it was horrible.”
It all felt so glib and impersonal, as
if it was just another layer of cushion
from tragedy.
Then I remembered the aftermath
of Sandy Hook. One of the victims,
Anne Marie Murphy, was a local res-
ident. Murphy, 52, was employed by
the Newtown Board of Education as
a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary.
She happened to be the sister of my
dentist, and although she had lived
in Newtown for 14 years, she was
We need
something
to link to our
personal core.
born and raised in our little New York
community. Her body was found cra-
dling 6-year-old special-needs stu-
dent Dylan Hockley, who also died in
the massacre.
The Roman Catholic Church held
a funeral Mass six days later. It was
¿OOHGWRRYHUÀRZLQJZLWKSHRSOHZKR
remembered her. The Archbishop of
New York, Timothy Cardinal Dolan,
conducted the funeral. In an obituary,
Anne Marie Murphy was remem-
bered for her love of the arts, walks
in the outdoors and, most importantly,
her family.
Later Thursday afternoon, a man
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and had a hollow look on his face. “I
went to that college, you know,” he
said. “It was 30 years ago. But I went
to that college.”
It was this connection — tenuous
as it might be. Much like that we felt
with Anne Marie Murphy in our New
York town, that we both dread and yet
need. We need something to link to
our personal core, a connection, slim
as it might be, of a friend of a friend,
someone we once worked with or
just recognition of a place we passed
through and stopped for lunch.
My connection, this time, is Ore-
gon. No state has a stronger identity.
Like everywhere, the line “It can’t
happen here” is a tired cliché. We all
know it can. The question is, what are
we going to do about it?
R.J. Marx is the South County re-
porter for The Daily Astorian and the
editor of the Seaside Signal and Can-
non Beach Gazette.
Shhhhh. It’s the most important thing
ing on who’s counting)
“The next two decades
rose inexorably until the
can be even better and can
middle of the 20th centu-
become the greatest era of
progress for the world’s
ne man’s idea to make Hawaii. Garreau links coastal
e journalists are a bit ry, then roughly stabilized
poor in human history,”
Eastern
Oregon
and Oregon with coastal California,
like vultures, feasting on for a few decades. Since
Radelet writes.
the 1990s, the number of
Eastern Washington part of Washington
and
British war, scandal and disaster.
I write often about in-
poor has plummeted.
Turn on the news, and you see
Idaho makes cultural sense. Columbia in a region called
equality, a huge challenge
• In 1990, more than
in the U.S. But globally,
Politically and constitutionally, Ecotopia. Eastern Oregon and Syrian refugees, Volkswagen cor- 12 million children died
inequality is diminishing,
before
the
age
of
5;
this
ruption,
dysfunctional
government.
the scheme is unlikely.
Washington are part of a vast re-
because of the rise of poor
toll has since dropped by
Nicholas
But the discussion generated gion extending into the Midwest
<HW WKDW UHÀHFWV D VHOHFWLRQ ELDV more than half.
countries.
Kristof
by Ken Parsons, a LaGrande and a broad swath of Canada. It in how we report the news: We cov-
What does all this mean
• More kids than ever
er planes that crash, not planes that are becoming educated, especially in human terms? I was thinking of
farmer, is useful. Jade McDowell is called the Empty Quarter.
off. Indeed, maybe the most girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls that last week while interviewing
of our sister newspaper, the East
Behind the LaGrande farm- take
important thing happening in the in developing countries completed el- Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel
Oregonian, described his con- er’s proposal is real sentiment world today is something that we ementary school; now, 80 percent do. Peace Prize winner. Malala’s moth-
Granted, some 16,000 children er grew up illiterate, like the wom-
cept in a story we published last — the resentment of feeling like almost never cover: a stunning de-
cline
in
poverty,
illiteracy
and
dis-
still
die unnecessarily each day. It’s en before her, and was raised to be
Tuesday.
an outsider in one’s own state.
ease.
maddening in my travels to watch invisible to outsiders. Malala is a
What Parsons proposes is As physically close as Astoria is
Huh? You’re wondering what children dying simply because they complete contrast: educated, saucy,
similar to the State of Jefferson, to Portland, some political dif- I’ve been smoking! Everybody were born in the wrong place at the outspoken and perhaps the most vis-
ible teenage girl in the world.
which a Port Orford man pro- ferences can seem like gaping knows about the spread of war, the wrong time.
Even in countries like Pakistan,
rise
of
AIDS
and
other
diseases,
the
But
one
reason
for
our
current
posed in 1941. Counties in holes. For instance, the $15 min-
hopeless intractability of poverty.
complacency is a feeling that pov- the epoch of illiterate and invisible
Southern Oregon and Northern imum wage looks much different
One survey found that two-thirds erty is inevitable — and that’s un- women like Malala’s mother is fad-
California would become that in small towns than it does in the of Americans believed that the pro- warranted.
ing; the epoch of Malala is dawn-
ing. The challenge now is to ensure
portion
of
the
world
The
world’s
best-
new state. Jefferson Public city. It would push a broad mass
population living in
kept secret is that we that rich donor nations are generous
Radio,
headquartered
in of small and even medium-sized extreme poverty has al-
The
OLYHDWDKLVWRULFLQÀHF- in supporting the Global Goals —
Ashland, is a vestige of that businesses to the margins of in- most doubled over the epoch of
tion point when extreme but also that developing countries
poverty is retreating. do their part, rather than succumb-
movement. The radio station solvency. A business can’t spend last 20 years. Another
29
percent
believed
U.N. members have LQJ WR FRUUXSWLRQ DQG LQHI¿FLHQF\
Malala
is
has a far-reaching signal whose money it doesn’t have.
that the proportion had
just adopted 17 new (I’m talking to you, Angola!)
footprint mirrors the region pro-
While state lines are arbitrary remained roughly the dawning.
There’s one last false argument
Global Goals, of which
posed as a new state.
constructs — born of the polit- same.
the centerpiece is the to puncture. Cynics argue that sav-
That’s 95 percent of Americans elimination of extreme poverty by ing lives is pointless, because the
There is a large element of ical necessities of a century or
—
who are utterly wrong. In fact, 2030. Their goals are historic. There result is overpopulation that leads
WUXWK LQ WKHVH UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQ more ago — these borders often
the proportion of the world’s pop- will still be poor people, of course, more to starve. Not true. Part of this
proposals. They recognize the GH¿QHUHDOGLIIHUHQFHV0RYLQJ ulation living in extreme poverty but very few who are too poor to eat wave of progress is a stunning drop
geography of kinship. The most from Oregon into Washington, hasn’t doubled or remained the or to send children to school. Young in birthrates.
Haitian women now average 3.1
extensive attempt to grasp this one quickly sees the absence same. It has fallen by more than journalists or aid workers starting
half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 out today will in their careers see children; in 1985, they had six. In
was Joel Garreau’s 1981 book of statewide land use planning. percent in 2011 (the most recent very little of the leprosy, illiteracy, Bangladesh, women now average
The Nine Nations of North Washington has not preserved \HDUIRUZKLFK¿JXUHVDUHDYDLODEOH elephantiasis and river blindness that 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When
the poor know that their children
I have seen routinely.
America. Garreau got his idea farm land. That has allowed cit- from the World Bank).
will survive, when they educate their
When
95
percent
of
Americans
“We
live
at
a
time
of
the
great-
from years of reading news sto- ies such as Vancouver to steadi-
are completely unaware of a trans- est development progress among daughters, when they access family
ries while a reporter and copy ly consume arable, productive formation of this magnitude, that the global poor in the history of the planning, they have fewer children.
editor at The Washington Post.
agricultural soil.
So let’s get down to work and,
UHÀHFWVDÀDZLQKRZZHMRXUQDOLVWV world,” notes Steven Radelet, a de-
on
our watch, defeat extreme pov-
cover
the
world
—
and
I
count
my-
velopment
economist
and
George-
Garreau’s attempt to reckon
Salem would do well to grasp
erty
worldwide. We know that the
self
among
the
guilty.
Consider:
town
University
professor,
in
a
with the geography of cultural the alienation behind the new
• The number of extremely poor WHUUL¿F ERRN FRPLQJ LQ 1RYHPEHU challenges are surmountable — be-
kinship takes in the U.S. and separatist sentiments in Eastern SHRSOH GH¿QHG DV WKRVH HDUQLQJ The Great Surge: The Ascent of the cause we’ve already turned the tide
Canada, including Alaska and Oregon.
of history.
less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depend- Developing World.
O
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
New York Times News Service
W