OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the
good things they do to make the North Coast a better
place to live, and also those who should be called out for their
actions.
SHOUTOUTS
This week’s Shoutouts go to:
• Veterans of our armed services who have proudly served
our country protecting our freedom, and all those who are on
active duty. We are also heartened that Oregonians showed
their support for veterans this week at the polls by decisively
approving Measure 96, which allocates state money from a
portion of lottery proceeds to fund needed veterans services.
• The Columbia River Maritime Museum and David
and Anne Myers who presented the museum with a $1 mil-
lion Legacy Endowment. The nonprofit museum conducted its
annual meeting with its membership last Friday evening and
detailed its achievements of increased attendance, better finan-
cial standing, progress on exhibits and storage, and expanded
educational programs. The evening was capped with the
endowment announcement and applause for the Denver couple,
who have been married for 64 years and have been longtime
members active in the museum.
• The Seaside High School cross country team, which fin-
ished second in the 4A State Meet last weekend. Seaside’s
Bradley Rzewnicki finished fourth individually, while Astoria
High School runner Lucas Caruana finished fifth. Meanwhile,
in high school football, Astoria won its opening state play-
off game 48-14 against Gladstone and will now play Cottage
Grove in the state quarterfinals tonight at CMH Field. The
Knappa team lost to St Paul 32-24, which ended its fine sea-
son. Across the Columbia River, Ilwaco will begin its play-
off run with a game against Toledo Saturday afternoon in
Centralia, Wash., while at the 1B level, Naselle will play
Rainier Christian in a state playoff at 7 tonight at Kentwood
High School.
• The Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce and orga-
nizers of the Stormy Weather Arts Festival for staging the
29th annual event that infused Cannon Beach throughout last
weekend with creativity, imagination and energy. Despite
Mother Nature being uncooperative, the well-attended festival
included its annual dinner and auction, concerts, artist demon-
strations along with receptions hosted by local galleries, street
corner musicians, a fashion show and a three-woman play.
• The Seaside Elks, who conducted a dinner and auction
last weekend to raise money to provide items for the Holiday
Helpers Thanksgiving Boxes with a goal of helping feed 100
families during the holidays. The boxes will contain turkey,
eggs, milk, fresh produce and other food needs, as well as
household items including soap, toothpaste, paper products and
other needed necessities.
• The Chinook School, in Chinook, Wash., and those who
have helped bring it back to life. Originally built in 1924 as
part of a wave of new building activity that included recon-
struction of Astoria’s downtown after the 1922 fire, the class-
room building now houses a branch office of the Long Beach
Peninsula Visitors Bureau, and has much additional space for
a variety of other activities. In combination with the school’s
old gymnasium, the newly renovated office/meeting space will
function as a conference center for the area.
CALLOUTS
This week’s Callouts go to:
• The state of Washington for spending $119,577 to shoot
a total of seven wolves. Fish and Wildlife Department officials
spent the money on an operation from August until Oct. 19 in
an unsuccessful effort to eliminate a wolf pack which had been
preying on cattle in the Coville National Forest. Only seven
of the 11 wolves in the pack were killed, so the problem still
persists despite the costly efforts to eliminate the wolves. The
expense to the taxpayers included renting a helicopter, hiring a
trapper and paying the salaries and benefits of state employees
involved in the operation.
• National political pundits, who prior to the election
called the president-elect’s campaign dead and predicted an
early evening victory for Hillary Clinton. Those same pundits
are now telling Americans exactly what Donald Trump will
do as president. While we endorsed Clinton, the election went
the other way, and what we know right now, is what we don’t
know. So we’ll take the pundits’ speculation with a grain of
salt.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should
know about? Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and
we’ll make sure to take a look.
A time to keep fighting back
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
New York Times News Service
A
s I watched the unfolding
electoral disaster on Tuesday
night, a banner appeared on
the New York Times website for the
musical “Hamilton.”
It made me wonder what Alex-
ander Hamilton would think of the
state of the nation
he helped create
and the man who
just took the White
House. But even
more, it reminded
me that the battle
that has consumed, tormented and
once almost destroyed our country is
still raging.
It is the battle between rural and
urban, between those who want to
keep things as they are, and those
who are not part of that order and
want a new one. It started when the
country was born, and it has been
bound up inextricably in race. It’s
a battle of culture and religion, too,
but race — starting with the impla-
cable evil of slavery — has primar-
ily driven the divisions in this coun-
try since 1789.
On Tuesday, every nonwhite
group in America voted overwhelm-
ingly for Hillary Clinton. Actu-
ally, Clinton seems to have won the
national vote by a small margin, but
that’s not what counts. The Elec-
toral College system has long been
broken, but President-elect Donald
Trump won decisively and we have
to honor the legitimacy of his elec-
tion, which is probably more than he
would have done.
But did it have to be so ugly and
leave us a nation more divided and
mistrustful of one another than ever?
Did it have to be about racial and
ethnic and cultural intolerance —
about the forces of fear and division
that the Republican Party has been
exploiting for decades?
Rural and white
On Tuesday, Trump built his vic-
tory in rural, white America. He built
it on the backs of ordinary working
Americans, for whom I doubt he has
any real regard, and those who are
angry at corruption and the power
of the wealthy establishment, even
though he epitomizes both. Exit polls
show that huge majorities of Ameri-
cans think illegal immigrants should
not be deported, and yet many of
those same people gave their votes
to Trump.
Racial divisions tore Americans
apart in the Civil War, and during
Reconstruction, the Depression, the
evil days of segregation, Jim Crow
and lynching, and after the passage
of the major civil rights laws, against
which the right has been fighting
since they were signed.
The conservative justices on the
Supreme Court deepened the problem
when they gutted the Voting Rights
Act in 2013, and Republican-con-
trolled legislatures swiftly enacted
new laws to drive away minority vot-
ers, especially in the South.
President Barack Obama was gra-
cious on Wednesday morning, saying
he was heartened by Trump’s talk of
unity. (We will have to see whether
that’s the usual message of unity
from the right, which translates as
“Agree with us and we’re happy to
include you.”)
“We all go forward with a pre-
sumption of good faith in our fellow
citizens,” Obama said.
He was right. In fact, his elec-
tion should have proved that. But the
intolerant right never gave him that
benefit of the doubt, and race was at
the core of their response. Trump cre-
ated his political platform by trying
to destroy the legitimacy of Obama’s
presidency on racial and jingoistic
grounds.
The Supreme Court is likely lost
now for generations, since Trump
will get one and probably two
choices for that body. The entire
Washington government is in the
grip of a new and frightening Repub-
lican Party. Hard-won rights may
well be lost, especially for women
and minorities.
Stay engaged
It would be easy to be consumed
with anger, and I am. It would be
easy to walk away. But Obama
was right. This is a moment to stay
engaged, and to fight back.
As the Texas politician Jim High-
tower wrote, “striving for democracy
is bone-wearying agonizing, frustrat-
ing, cruel, bloody and often deadly
work.”
Democrats and others alienated
by this election will need to find
leaders who will make far better can-
didates than Hillary Clinton ever
was. There will be a Congressio-
nal election in two years, and a gov-
erning coalition that depends almost
entirely on aggrieved whites cannot
long endure.
“The important thing to know
is that you are wanted,” Hightower
said. “You are needed. You are
important. You are not only what
democracy counts on, you are what
democracy is.”
Ten-step program for Trump trauma
By GAIL COLLINS
New York Times News Service
W
ell, wow. We’ve got a
president-elect who a great
many Americans regard
as the spawn of Satan. A dimwit-
ted, meanspirited
spawn embodying
the nation’s worst
flaws, failings and
nightmares.
But on the
lighter side ...
The question today is how to deal
with the reality of Donald Trump,
next president of the United States.
Remember, we’re doing this for your
mental health, not his.
The bottom line is to presume
the best while preparing for the
worst. “They killed us but they ain’t
whooped us yet,” said Tim Kaine,
channeling Faulkner in one of the
losing team’s biggest applause lines.
Forget about moving abroad. Of
course it sounds tempting, but you’d
be surprised how many countries are
unenthusiastic about acquiring new
former-American citizens. The Cana-
dians will just keep telling you about
their terrific, sensible, well-adjusted
young prime minister. Plus there’s
that terrible housing bubble in New
Zealand.
The plan
Let’s get more practical. Here
goes:
A 10-Step Program for Adjusting
to President-Elect Donald Trump
1) Start with a night of heavy
drinking. Already done that? Good,
you’re on your way.
2) Acknowledge that Donald
Trump is not crazy. Obviously, he
has been known to act crazy in pub-
lic. But if you met him at a private
social occasion you would proba-
bly find him to be a fairly pleasant
person.
I say that as someone who once
got a letter from Trump telling me I
had the face of a dog. But the next
time I saw him at a lunch meeting
he was fine. Told interesting jokes
about how much money he got for
product placement on his TV show.
Obviously, this isn’t the equivalent of
“Theodore Roosevelt reincarnated.”
But we’re trying to work with what
we have here.
3) Trump has the attention span of
a gnat, but if he appoints reasonable
and intelligent people to his Cabinet,
the government could run OK.
It will be easy to tell if this is not
going to happen: Attorney General
Rudy Giuliani.
4) Ditto with foreign affairs.
Trump has seemed pretty hands-
off when it comes to international
involvement, so perhaps with the
right advisers, he might take a mod-
erate approach that would disappoint
the Republican hawks.
Tip-off that this one’s a non-
starter: Secretary of State Newt
Gingrich.
5) If you’re worried about social
issues, remember that until fairly
recently, Trump was a rather liberal
Manhattanite.
But just in case, you might want
to write out a large check to Planned
Parenthood.
6) When it comes to big domes-
tic policy questions, to Trump they’re
just applause lines or bargaining
chips. Anything could go either way.
While that’s not necessarily calm-
ing, it’s better than assuming he actu-
ally believes all the stuff he says.
What kind of program could he
really, really get his heart and soul
behind? The only thing I can imag-
ine is a multitrillion-dollar Donald
Trump Historic Biggest Ever Infra-
structure and 50-State Golf Course
Building Program.
Election results
7) About the election results:
Don’t let people tell you that the vote
proves half the American popula-
tion is racist. There’s another reason-
able explanation for Trump’s victory.
In most presidential elections, peo-
ple decide between change and con-
tinuity. Hillary Clinton was running
to continue the Obama legacy. After
a president serves two terms, Amer-
icans generally vote for change, and
the other party’s nominee.
Yeah, I know — those people
yelling the N-word or “Sieg heil!” at
the rallies. But if you dwell on them,
you’re not going to want to go out
of the house anymore. Think of it as
basically a change/no change elec-
tion. Plus some deplorables rattling
around the basket.
8) We ought to give anybody a
second chance, even if it’s Donald
Trump. “We now are all rooting for
his success,” said President Barack
Obama. Really, you do not want
to be one of those people like, um,
Omarosa Manigault, Trump’s direc-
tor of African-American outreach,
who told a reporter on election night
that when it came to enemies, “Mr.
Trump has a long memory and we’re
keeping a list.”
Now that’s the kind of attitude
that might come in handy if you’re
a repeat contestant on a cheesy real-
ity show like “The Celebrity Appren-
tice.” But obviously that has nothing
to do with being chief executive of
the United States.
9) Try to think about some of
the other election results on Tues-
day that were more positive. Some
states passed new gun control ini-
tiatives. Others raised the minimum
wage, and several legalized recre-
ational marijuana. Which will defi-
nitely come in handy over the next
few years.
10) At Thanksgiving, if your
family keeps trying to trade Trump
insults, redirect the conversation to
that great Chicago Cubs World Series
win.
It may be a hard meal to get
through, but remind yourself that
a couple of days later, our presi-
dent-elect is scheduled to take the
witness stand in a Trump University
fraud trial.
There’s always a silver lining.