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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 19, 1998)
AUGUST 19, 1998 Page A4 (Elje Jìortlauò ©hseruer Editorial Articles Do Not Necessarily Reflect Or Represent The Views Of ^ o r tl a n h ffibseruer r e s Please lake a minute to send us vour comments. W e’ re always trying to give you a better paper and we can't do it without your help. Tell us what you like and w hat needs improvement... any suggestions are welcomed and appreciated. We take criticism well! Get your pow erful pens out N O W and address your letters to: Editor. Reader Resuon s r, P,O. Boi 3137. Portland. QR 97208. (The pottiani» (©bseruer (U SP S 959-680) E stablished in 1970 Charles Washington Publisher & Editor Mark Washington Distsribution M anager Gary Ann Taylor Business M anager Larry J. Jackson, Sr. Director o f Operation Iesha Williams Graphic Design Laphael Knight Graphic Design Contributing Writers: Professor McKinley Burt, Lee Perlman, Joy Ramos 4747 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Portland, Oregon 97211 503-288-0033 • Fax 503-288-0015 Email: Pdxobserv@aol.com Deadline fo r all submined materials: Articles:Friday, 5:00 pm Ads: Monday, 12:00pm POSTMASTER: Send Address Changes To: Portland Observer, P.O. Box 3137, Portland, OR 97208. Periodicals postage p a id at Portland, Oregon. Subscriptions: $60.00 per year The Portland Observer welcomes freelance submissions. Manu scripts and photographs should be clearly labeled and will be returned if accompanied by a self addressed envelope. All created design display ads become the sole property o f the newspaper and cannot be used in other publications or personal usage without the written consent of the general manager, unless the client has purchased the composition o f such ad. © 1996 THE PORTLAND OBSERVER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART W ITH OUT PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED. The Portland O bserver-O regon’s Oldest Multicultural Publica tion—is a member o f the National Newspaper A ssociation-Founded in 1885, and The National Advertising Representative Amalgamated Publishers, Inc, New York. NY, and The West Coast Black Publishers Association • Serving Portland and Vancouver. SUBSCRIBE TO TTuxn “A Its all about the art o f reading - you can’t curl up in the NET with a good book. It won’t allow you to reach up on your shelf and effortlessly turn to that awesome paragraph or chapter which is hard-wired in your mind for life. Occasionally, the page is a work o f art where some inspired ink slinger has made ornaments out o f the letters o f the alphabet with his use of swirling serifs. And sometimes an equally strik ing illustration will adjoin the script. You can close your eyes and re-read the message on the bus, on the plane, or between servings at that good res taurant; you will never lose a fact. I received some interesting com ments on last week’s introduction to this series, “McKinley, I knew you would find a way to get us’ in there some way.” You certainly got that right! I’ll be on my job as long as we have rascally main-line’ historians who somehow always manage to leave out the warm, human element ot A fri - can interaction with other races o f mankind. The reader had reference to my account o f the ‘Havana Cigar-Mak- <Thr ^ o r t l a n b (tflb B eru er The Portland Observer can be sent directly to your home for only $30.00 per year. Please fill out, enclose check or money order, and mail to: T he History of R e d in g ”, 11 B y P roe . M ckinley B urt S ubscriptions P ortland O bserver ; PO B ox 3137 P ortland , O regon 97208 Name: _______________________ _—----------------------------------------- Address:__________________ __ _____ —— —------------------------------- City, S tate:---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Z ip-C ode:_____ ______________— ------—----------------------------------- ers’ in Key West, Florida who wrote to Alexander Dumas, the noted black French author (“The Three Muske teers, The Count o f Monte Cristo, Etc.” ). These workers (1870) sought permission to name their prize prod uct after a character in his novel. It seems that they employed a narrator to read to them during their boring task and Dumas- was their favorite author. R equest granted. 1 have written an o rg a n iz a tio n in Key West to learn if the Cuban expatriates still follow this practice. Thistechniqueofa ‘read ing’ is followed in our neighborhood book clubs today and on a regular basis at popular bookstores. But I’ll warrant you that even the most knowl edgeable military buff doesn’t know that his didactic practice began al most 1500 years ago on a craggy Ita lia n hill c alled “ M onte Cassino”( scene o f a bitter World War II siege). Civil Rights Journal Environmental J ustice And Convent B y B ernice P owell J ackson Convent, Louisiana is a little town o f 2700 or so people located be tween New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Sitting right alongside the M issis sippi River, Convent is in an area which the state calls the Chemical Corridor because o f the dozens of chemical plants located there. Those o f us who are concerned about envi ronmental justice have another name for that area however. We call it Cancer Alley because of the incred ibly high incidence of all types of cancer found in the residents. And, oh, by the way, the majority o f the residents o f Convent are African American and most of them are poor. For hundreds o f years the area between Baton Rouge and New O r T hank Y ou F or R eading T he P ortland O bserver Tragedy and Hope in Africa afterm ath of the tragedies an ocean away actually reaffirm som ething enormously positive: they reaffirm O nce again, the w orld is con the essential decency o f hum an fronted by the scourge o f evil, by kind, and its determ ination to per the aw ful w illingness o f some hu sist despite crushing setbacks. man beings to inflict pain and su f So, as in Oklahom a C ity, we see fering upon the innocent in order not only the organized governm en to, by their perverse reasoning, tal response. we also see ordinary make a political statem ent. citizens rushing to the sites o f the Once again, we endure the agony tragedies to, if necessary, help in- o f the afterm ath. and, equally im portant, to bear We see, w ith a shock, the physi w itness to-the search for survi cal dam age that has been done to vors. human bodies. Because the shock They com e because they know w aves o f the horrendous crim e that the hope o f finding survivors reach every place human decency is in itse lf a repudiation o f the exists, w e feel the psychological barbarism o f the killers. They un traum a o f those who were at ground derstand that in bearing w itness zero and survived, as if the broken against atrocity, we declare our w indow glass and shards o f metal, selves for decency in the conduct w ood and concrete w ere lacerat o f human affairs. In N airobi and ing our ow n souls. Dar Es Salaam as in O klahom a The bom bings o f the American C ity, that universal reaction rep em bassies in N airobi, Kenya and resents the hope o f the w orld. Dar Es Salaam , T anzania are trag In that way, the tragedies in edies in w hich the human costs-o f Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam also lives cut short, o f prom ise not to offer the Am erican people a more be fulfilled, o f suffering loosed positive way o f looking at Black around the globe yet again-for- Africa, a region o fthe world whose ever dim inish into insignificance reality, still, is so often skew ed by the tw isted souls responsible for some observers’ untrustw orthy at it. they have forfeited their con titudes. nection w ith hum anity. They are A frican A m e ric a n s’ feelings as w orthless as dust. about the rela tio n sh ip to Black W e in A m erica know, now to A frica has long been subjected our sorrow, that individuals o f such to the sam e kind o f racist d isto r profound malevolence lurk not ju st tion as our p ercep tio n o f our re in A sia, A frica, Europe or Latin latio n sh ip to A m erica itself. The A m erica. They are not ju st o f reality is that B lack A m e ric a ’s “ th o s e o th e r p e o p le .” The true feelings have alw ays been crum pled wreckage in Nairobi and m ore com plex, m ore nuance than D ar Es Salaam should rem ind us- th e ra c ist fa n ta sie s have su g in case w e’ ve forgotten-that a simi- gested. lar horrific act happened in the M ora M c C le a n , p re sid e n t o f American heartland, destroying the th e A fric a A m e ric a In stitu te , lives o f A m erican men, women, sk e tc h e d one fa c e t o f th a t r e la and children, as these have d e tio n s h ip w hen she w ro te in a stroyed the lives o f A fricans and r e c e n t is s u e o f th e U rb a n Americans. L e a g u e ’s m a g a z in e , O p p o rtu But we m ust not fail to recog n ity J o u rn a l, th at an atta c h m e n t nize that, in its awful w ay, the H ugh B. P rice , N ational U rban L eague P resident by f Alberto Manguel in his “History of Reading” (Viking 1996) tells us that Saint Benedict o f Nursia founded a monastery on this cragg hill halfway between Rome and Naples. "Believ ing like sir Thomas Browne, that God offered us the world under two guises, as nature and as a book, Benedict __ decreed that reach ing would be an es sential part o f the monastery’s daily I I’ k o i essor \ 1 ( K IM I V life.” We rem em ber Bl R I that the Cuban ci g ar-m akers in F lorida had a ‘reader’ to reveal the beauty or inspi ration o f literary gems which could relieve a boring task. Saint Benedict anticipated them with his “Article 38”; that there should be an appointed reader during meal times and that there should be the greatest silence at the table. “Whatever is needed in the way o f food, the brethren should pass to each other in turn, so that no one need ask for anything.” You may not wish to “ask for any- thing” while being enthralled with this beautiful and oh-so-informative book. One o f the joys o f reading Alberto Manguel’s text is that this author himself often invokes that “whole page” image for the reader; imprinting a message that can easily be recalled anytime; anyplace. That is communication. As I said earlier, “you cannot curl up in the NET with a good book”, and peo p le are fast learn in g that cyberspace is for the storage and re trieval o f data. Book publishing and distribution is accelerating weekly - new catalogs in your mail each day. And have you seen “Reader’s Digest” big new entry into the fray; and I do mean big’. You won’t stick these new issues in your pocket or purse. Yes, there has been a major para digm shift-back to the printed page for true knowledge. The WEB pro vides the data; titles, authors, pub lishers, booksellers and prices. You know, I remember a page from child hood, Herman M elville’s descrip tion o f becalmed sailors in “Moby Dick, like a painted ship on a painted sea.” Cont’d next week. to o n e ’s a n c e s tr a l h o m e la n d do es not a u to m a tic a lly d im in ish th e a tta c h m e n t to o n e ’s own n a tiv e lan d . In fa c t, the e x p e r i ence o f A m erican e th n ic groups as a w h o le in d ic a te s th a t it o f ten le a d s to a g re a te r c iv ic in v o lv em en t. The joyous embrace of that com plexity can be seen in the lives o f Julian Bartley, the A m erican C on sul G eneral in N airobi, and his son, Jay, both o f whom perished in th e e m b a ssy b o m b in g . M r. Bartley, 55, was a 24-year veteran o f the Foreign Service having pre viously served in the Dom inican Republic, C olom bia, Spain, Israel and Korea, his son, 20, a sopho more at United States International U niversity, in N airobi, was w ork ing at the em bassy for the summer. A ccording to the N ew York Times A ugust 9 account o f the m e morial service in N airobi for the American victims, “ By all accounts the father and son w ere an im m ensely popular duo w hose head long em brace o f Kenya life had been lovingly retu rn ed by the people they met and befriended.” The larger point is that the trag edy also underscored that it was not ju st A m ericans o f A frican de scent who saw the beauty in Black Africa. A friend told the Tim es that M olly H uckaby H ardy, 51, an o th e r career Foreign S ervice em ployee w ho w as w hite and who also died in the N airobi bom b ing, “ju s t loved being th ere, I think. She found East A frica a beau tifu l p la c e .” It is this-the stories o f the ca pacity o f hum an beings to see and em brace the beauty o f their sur roundings, be they in O klahom a or Black A frica-w hich transform s the horror o f this tragedy into a declaration o f hope. leans was an agricultural and fishing area. Before the Civil War it was an area full o f plantations and in the century or so after the war it re mained a rural area where people fished in the river for oysters and fish and grew crops which fed their own families. But about forty years ago all o f that changed as the state ot Louisiana decided to give tax abate ments to huge chemical corporations to locate their plants there, along the - river where transportation was easy and cheap. The trade-off for this new development, or so the residents were led to believe, was good jobs. After nearly two generations o f this development most o f the people who live along Cancer Alley remain poor and few o f them work in the highly-technical jobs which the plants offer. A drive through the parking lots around the plants shows license plates from other states and other . • and i only _1__ a X* tew _ families have counties really benefitted from the plants. Now the state o f Louisiana wants to locate a new plant in Convent. They want to locate one o f the most toxic o f all chemical plants in little Convent, promising jobs and eco nomic development. They want to allow Shintech, a Japanese-owned plant to build the w orld’s largest polyvinyl C ontinued T o P age B4 Yes! It's your time! You couldn't have dreamed it better if youd tried. You've learned that hard work and long hours definitely pay off and that getting ahead is easier when there's family behind you. That's the way it is with American Family Insurance. 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