OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
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.
E
SHOUTOUTS
• Crew members of the
U.S. Coast Guard cutter Alert
who volunteered and tended
to gravesites at Ocean View
Cemetery in Warrenton earlier this
week to help improve maintenance
on the grounds. About 20 members
of the crew worked most of the
day Monday and Wednesday chop-
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
Members of the U.S. Coast ping down weeds between grave
Guard spent Monday morn- markers, removing trash and debris
ing at Ocean View Ceme-
and cleaning up around markers
tery in Warrenton, volun-
teering their time to help and headstones. The city of Astoria
mow and clear weeds from owns the cemetery and the Parks
around headstones.
and Recreation Department main-
tains it but has received complaints
from loved ones about the upkeep of the grounds. The Alert is
currently in dry dock and crew members said they just wanted to
give back to the community.
• Agnes Waliser and Harley Wait, who were honored last
weekend in Kennewick, Washington, at the 99th annual con-
vention of the Washington State American Legion. Waliser,
from Pacific County Fire District 1, is a pioneering woman fire-
fighter who will retire this fall and was named Washington
Firefighter of the Year; and Wait, a Long Beach Peninsula pas-
tor, serves with the South Pacific County Technical Rescue Team
and was named state Emergency Rescue Technician of the Year.
Both gave credit for the achievements to those who have trained,
encouraged and supported them.
• Former Astoria Library director Bruce Berney, who will
have an archive named in his honor. According to current library
director Jimmy Pearson, the Astoriana Collection that contains
“anything and everything you would want to know about the city
of Astoria and its history” will now be called the Bruce Berney
Archives. Berney was the library’s director for 30 years until
his retirement in 1997 and was responsible for purchasing the
library’s first edition Lewis and Clark Journals.
• Volunteers organized by the Lower Columbia Hispanic
Council and the Astoria Parks and Recreation Department,
who recently gathered and cleaned up debris around Tapiola
Park and expanded the footprint of the playground. Jorge
Gutierrez, the council’s executive director, said the effort is an
outcome resulting from the Astoria City Council adopting an
inclusivity resolution that recognizes the contributions of the
Hispanic community.
• Organizers and participants at the recent 33rd annual
Sandsations sand-sculpting event in Long Beach. Teams in divi-
sions ranging from masters to families to novices spent six hours
working on their creations while a throng of spectators enjoyed
the beach and watching them sculpt their imaginative works.
The creations included sculptures such as the “7 Wonders of
the World” and “Submarine Sandwich,” which featured a great
white shark pursuing the meal, a submarine, that had the body of
a sandwich.
CALLOUTS
• Thieves in Grants Pass who ruined a wood bench
honoring two Oregon teenagers who died in a plane crash
last year. According to the Grants Pass Daily Courier, the
bench is at the entrance to a field at Grants Pass High School,
where Max Belnap and Ryan Merker competed at sports.
The duo died in a plane crash off the Oregon Coast near
Brookings on July 4, 2016. Belnap’s younger brother, Lucas,
made the memorial bench as part of his Eagle Scout project. It
was dedicated at the end of the school year. The thieves stole
two large slabs of elm from the bench last weekend, leaving just
a metal frame. Lucas’s mother, Cheryl Belnap, said the project
was a labor of love for her son, and the vandalism is
devastating.
• The Washington State Department of Health, which apol-
ogized after offending people with an anti-marijuana message
that was targeted at Hispanic youth. The public health campaign
included advertisements and at least one billboard in the Yakima
area that says, “We don’t need pot to have fun” and “We’re
Hispanics … We’re cool by default.” Reaction on social media
was harsh and a department spokeswoman said it was clear some
were offended. The department intends on removing the bill-
board, the spokeswoman said.
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.
‘First they came for ...’
By CHARLES BLOW
New York Times News Service
t is no longer sufficient to brand
Donald Trump as abnormal,
a designation that is surely
applicable but that falls significantly
short in registering the magnitude of
the menace.
The standard nomenclature of
normal politics must be abandoned.
What we are witnessing is nothing
less than an assault
on the fundamentals
of the country
itself: on our legacy
institutions and
our sense of pro-
tocol, decency and
honesty.
In any other circumstance, we
might likely write this off as the trite
protestations of a man trapped in a
toddler’s temperament, full of melt-
downs, magical thinking and make
believe. But this man’s vindictive-
ness and mendacity are undergirded
by the unequaled power of the
American president, and as such he
has graduated on the scale of power
from toddler to budding tyrant.
This threat Trump poses — to
our morals, ethics, norms and
collective sense of propriety — may
be without equal from a domestic
source.
Everything he is doing is an
assault and matters on some level.
His desecration of the Boy
Scouts’ national jamboree matters.
Not only did he turn his appearance
before the boys into a political rally
in which they booed both former
President Barack Obama and former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
he seemed to be appealing to their
basest instincts.
What exactly did Trump mean
when he regaled the boys with the
story of the real estate developer
William Levitt, who, as Trump put
it:
“Sold his company for a tre-
mendous amount of money. And he
went out and bought a big yacht,
and he had a very interesting life.
I won’t go any more than that,
because you’re Boy Scouts so I’m
not going to tell you what he did.”
As the boys start to make noise,
Trump responds, “Should I tell
you? Should I tell you?” and then
proceeds to say:
“You’re Boy Scouts, but you
know life. You know life.”
Is this a version of Trump’s
“locker room talk,” that phrase he
used to excuse his genital-grab-
bing comments on the “Access
Hollywood” tape? This may seem
like a small thing in the grand
scheme, but it matters. The fact
that its shelf life felt like only a
few hours before the next outrage
underscores the degree to which
our national consciousness is being
barraged by the man’s violations.
But yes, it matters too, just as
Trump’s obsession with Obama and
Clinton matters.
Also, his public trolling of
Attorney General Jeff Sessions mat-
ters. The fact that he’s enraged at
Sessions for taking the appropriate
ethical step and recusing himself
from the Russia investigation mat-
ters. The fact that Trump essentially
told The New York Times on the
record that he would not have cho-
sen Sessions if he’d known Sessions
wouldn’t have stood firm in protec-
tion of him, matters.
Trump’s continuous attacks on
the media matter.
His pushing of the Republicans’
callous Obamacare repeal-and-
replace plan — a plan that would
strip health insurance coverage from
tens of millions of Americans, and
I
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
President Donald Trump waves to the crowd after speaking at the
2017 National Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, W.Va., on Monday.
On Thursday, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh released a
statement apologizing to members of the scouting community who
were offended by the aggressive political rhetoric in the president’s
speech three days earlier.
a plan that Trump has demonstrated
no particular policy knowledge of
— matters.
Trump’s tweet on Wednesday —
on the 69th anniversary of President
Harry Truman desegregating the
armed forces, no less — that “the
United States government will not
accept or allow transgender individ-
uals to serve in any capacity in the
U.S. military,” matters. There are
thousands of trans people already
serving in the military. The idea that
Multiple
populations
are being
assaulted at
once, across
race, ethnicity,
religion,
gender and
sexual identity.
a man with five draft deferments
would dictate that people who
volunteer to serve should not be
allowed to is beyond outrageous —
and it matters.
Trump’s pushing us closer
to international military conflict
matters.
And yes, the plodding Russia
investigation, which to Trump is an
agitation and threat, like an irremov-
able thorn in his flesh, matters.
This has come as a great
shock and demoralizer to many
Americans, not necessarily because
they didn’t think Trump was capable
of such depravity, but because they
simply were unprepared for the
daily reality of living a nightmare.
There is an enduring expectation,
particularly among American
liberals, that progress in this society
should move inexorably toward
more openness, honesty and equal-
ity. But even the historical record
doesn’t support that expectation.
In reality, America regularly
experiences bouts of regression, but
fortunately, it is in those regressive
periods that some of our greatest
movements and greatest voices had
found their footing.
President Andrew Jackson’s
atrocious American Indian removal
program gave us the powerful
Cherokee memorial letters. The
standoff at Standing Rock gave us
what the BBC called “the largest
gathering of Native Americans in
more than 100 years.”
Crackdowns on gay bars gave us
the Stonewall uprising. America’s
inept response to the AIDS epidemic
gave us Act Up and Larry Kramer.
California’s Proposition 8 breathed
new life into the fight for marriage
equality and led to a victory in the
Supreme Court.
The racial terror that followed
the Emancipation Proclamation
gave us the anti-lynching move-
ment, the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Ida B. Wells and James Weldon
Johnson.
Jim Crow gave us the civil rights
movement, and the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Rep.
John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer and
James Baldwin.
The latest rash of extrajudicial
killing of black people gave us
Black Lives Matter.
The financial crisis and the gov-
ernment’s completely inadequate
response to it gave us Occupy Wall
Street and the 99 percent.
A renewed assault on women’s
rights, particularly a woman’s right
to choose, gave us, at least in part,
the Women’s March, likely the larg-
est march in American history.
This is not an exhaustive list, but
just some notable examples.
It is a way of illustrating that the
fiery crucible is where the weapons
of resistance are forged; it is where
the mettle of those crusading for
justice, equality and progress are
tested.
Unlike the examples listed
above, Trump’s assault is intersec-
tional and nearly universal. Multiple
populations are being assaulted at
once, across race, ethnicity, religion,
gender and sexual identity.
So, in this moment of regression,
all the targets of Trump’s ire must
push back with a united front,
before it is too late.
As Martin Niemöller so
famously put it:
First they came for the Socialists,
and I did not speak out — because I
was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade
unionists, and I did not speak out —
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out — because I
was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and
there was no one left to speak for
me.