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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 21, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Saturday, January 21, 2017 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager EO MEDIA GROUP East Oregonian • The Daily Astorian • Capital Press • Hermiston Herald Blue Mountain Eagle • Wallowa County Chieftain • Chinook Observer • Coast River Business Journal Oregon Coast Today • Coast Weekend • Seaside Signal • Cannon Beach Gazette Eastern Oregon Real Estate Guide • Eastern Oregon Marketplace • Coast Marketplace OnlyAg.com • FarmSeller.com • Seaside-Sun.com • NorthwestOpinions.com • DiscoverOurCoast.com OUR VIEW OTHER VIEWS The internal invasion T AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta President Donald Trump smiles during the inaugural luncheon at the Statuary Hall in the Capitol, Friday in Washington. Living with Trump legends or Meryl Streep. Friday it became official: Donald Whether President Trump likes it J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th or not, this will be a divided country. president of the United States. He gets to run it, we have to live in it. No, he is not favored by a So how do we make it better? majority of Americans, but he How can we bridge the divide? won the election. The keys to We can start with communication. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have We consider our thoughts and write exchanged hands and the earth did them down, send them to you to not tilt off its axis. The country still read and respond. We hope you stands, and the democratic transfer do more of the of power yet again — two-way provided proof of We hope Trump’s latter conversation is the the strength and first brick toward resilience of the successes are United States. plentiful and we bridge-building. This opinion We’ve made page not a safe clear our distrust of really do get sick space. is We expect to Trump. In our view, of winning. present ideas that he has not proven to others don’t agree be a moral person, with, and to be nor knowledgeable about the many problems this country confronted with ideas that challenge our thinking as well. faces. We’re worried that his bag of We can all say something, and tricks is filled only with platitudes we can all do something. Protest and insults. peacefully, if you so chose. Donate But worried is no way to go to the charity of your choice. Buy through life, nor a presidential term. American products. Hire American Perhaps Trump will be similar to the 44 men before him, just one that likes workers. Read a newspaper. Be involved in local decisions. Make to beat his own chest a little more suggestions. Write your Congressman than the rest. We’re happy to give him credit for and tell them how Obamacare each and every success he earns. And affected you — if it saved your life we hope those successes are plentiful or priced you out of house and home. and we really do get sick of winning, We need knowledge, not rancor. Our politicians need it even more. whatever that means. Donald Trump has his work cut But we know that Trump has out for him. We must no longer cheer a tendency toward division and a his rock throwing — nor our own — penchant for conflict. His few calls but instead implore him to build. for unity are drowned out by his Together we must work, against all continual jabs at whoever he chooses threats both foreign and domestic, to to fight with at the time — House Keep America Great. Republicans, the media, civil rights Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS Officeholders shouldn’t be able to hand-pick successors The (Bend) Bulletin regon House Bill 2429 is a tribute to Doug and Gail Whitsett. But it’s not for the work the married Republicans did to represent their districts in Eastern Oregon. It’s for the way the Whitsetts effectively picked their successors. Just minutes before the filing deadline for the Republican primary in March, former Klamath County Commissioner Dennis Linthicum filed for Doug Whitsett’s Senate seat. Businessman Eric “Werner” Reschke filed for Gail Whitsett’s House seat. Then, the day after the deadline, both Whitsetts pulled out of their respective races. The Whitsetts, Linthicum and Reschke insisted they had done nothing wrong. But plenty of people thought it looked wrong. It was wrong. Rep. Mike McLane, R-Powell Butte, the House minority leader, said he might have filed to run O for Doug Whitsett’s Senate seat if he had known Whitsett did not plan to run. It was unfair to McLane and anyone else who thought about running but perhaps did not want to challenge an incumbent. Democrats don’t do well in that part of Oregon. The Republican primary can be the only real contest. Both Linthicum and Reschke went on to win their elections relatively comfortably. This legislative session, State Rep. Julie Parrish, R-West Linn, introduced HB 2429 to attempt to prevent a similar thing from happening again. The bill gives office-seekers more time to apply if an incumbent state senator or state representative files for re-election and then withdraws. It doesn’t matter if there was a deal or not in the withdrawal of the Whitsetts. Voters should pick who represents them. The incumbent officeholder should not be able to game the process to influence his or her successor. Lawmakers should pass HB 2429. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our web- site. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. Send letters to 211 S.E. Byers Ave., Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com. his is a remarkable day in the give consistent, clear and informed history of our country. We direction, the whole system goes have never over our centuries haywire, with vicious infighting and inaugurated a man like Donald Trump creeping anarchy. as president of the United States. You Some on the left worry that we can select any random group of former are seeing the rise of fascism, a new presidents — Madison, Lincoln, authoritarian age. That gets things Hoover, Carter — and none of them exactly backward. The real fear in the are like Trump. Trump era should be that everything David We’ve never had a major national Brooks will become disorganized, chaotic, leader as professionally unprepared, degenerate, clownish and incompetent. Comment intellectually ill informed, morally The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin compromised and temperamentally unfit as the man taking the oath on Friday. So of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, let’s not lessen the shock factor that should ways of speaking and interacting will be reverberate across this extraordinary moment. degraded and shredded. The political system It took a lot to get us here. It took a and the economy will grind to a battered once-in-a-century societal challenge — the crawl. stresses and strains brought by the global That’s ultimately why this could be a information age — and pivotal day. For the past it took a political system few decades our leadership that was too detached and class has been polarized. sclerotic to understand and We’ve wondered if there deal with them. is some opponent out there There are many ways that could force us to unite to capture this massive and work together. Well, failure, but I’d rely on the that opponent is being old sociological distinction inaugurated, not in the form between gemeinschaft and of Trump the man, but in gesellschaft. All across the the form of the chaos and world, we have masses of incompetence that will voters who live in a world likely radiate from him, of gemeinschaft: where month after month. For relationships are personal, America to thrive, people organic and fused by across government will particular affections. These have to cooperate and build people define their loyalty to arrangements to quarantine community, faith and nation and work around the in personal, in-the-gut sort president. of ways. People in the defense, But we have a leadership class and an diplomatic and intelligence communities will experience of globalization that is from the have to build systems to prevent him from world of gesellschaft: where systems are intentionally or unintentionally bumbling into impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and a global crisis. People in his administration formal. and in Congress will have to create systems Many people in Europe love their particular so his ill-informed verbal spasms don’t derail country with a vestigial affection that is coherent legislation. like family England, Holland or France. If Trump’s opponents behave as clownishly But meritocratic elites of Europe gave them as he does — like the congressmen who an abstract intellectual construct called the are narcissistically boycotting the inaugural European Union. — the whole government will get further Many Americans think their families and delegitimized. But if people redouble their their neighborhoods are being denuded by the commitment to constitutional norms and impersonal forces of globalization, finance and practices, to substance and dignity, this thing is survivable. technology. All the Republican establishment Already you see the political system could offer was abstract paeans to the free uniting to contain Trump. In negotiations on market. All the Democrats could offer was Hillary Clinton, the ultimate cautious, remote, the Hill, administration officials feel free to ignore his verbiage on health care and other calculating, gesellschaft thinker. issues. Members of his team are already good It was the right moment for Trump, the at pretending that Trump doesn’t mean what ultimate gemeinschaft man. He is all gut he clearly does mean, on matters of NATO instinct, all blood and soil, all about loyalty and much else. over detached reason. His business is a pre-modern family clan, not an impersonal I’ve been rewatching “Yes, Minister” these corporation, and he is staffing his White days. That was a hilarious British sitcom House as a pre-modern family monarchy, about a permanent government apparatus that with his relatives and a few royal retainers. In contained and overruled a bumbling political his business and political dealings, he simply master. America will need a beneficent version doesn’t acknowledge the difference between of that sort of clever cooperation. private and public, personal and impersonal. With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the Everything is personal, pulsating outward disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic from his needy core. cause that brings us together. The very thing that made him right ■ electorally for this moment will probably David Brooks became a New York Times make him an incompetent president. He Op-Ed columnist in September 2003. He is the ultimate anti-institutional man, but has been a senior editor at The Weekly the president sits at the nerve center of a Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek routinized, regularized 4-million-person and the Atlantic Monthly, and is currently a institution. If the figure at the center can’t commentator on PBS. For America to thrive, people across government will have to cooperate and build arrangements to work around the president. YOUR VIEWS Land near Umatilla River not best place for new housing The purpose of this letter is to let people know of a proposed change in the status of the land on the north side of the Umatilla River. The city owns a number of small parcels of land on the north side of the river. One of the larger plots lies at the end of Northwest Seventh Street (east side of the street). The planning commission proposes to partition a segment of that plot and offer it for sale for the purpose of developing housing. The land is zoned R3, high density residential. The property description given by the planning commission is in error. It indicates the parcel is fairly level land, with a noticeable drop-off nearer the river. The drop-off is actually very steep at the north side of the parcel in question. The 100-year flood line is at the mid-point of the plot. It is proposed that vehicle access to the property be a driveway (yet to be constructed) at the end of Northwest Seventh Street. Because it is a dead-end street, Northwest Seventh does not lend itself to parallel parking. Current residents must “head in,” which allows them to back around before pulling forward up the hill to exit. Using half the street as a driveway is impossible under the circumstances. At a time when many cities are working to make their environment more livable by promoting wild spaces and park areas, it seems backward for us to destroy one of Pendleton’s most enjoyable areas by developing it instead. True, the city’s various departments are concerned about — and are attempting to improve — the housing in town. An excellent goal. But this is not the best place to do it. I encourage people to come down to the south end (the bottom) of Northwest Seventh Street and take a look at the land the city proposes to develop. Imagine another apartment or condo in this location. Is this what we want? Is this what’s good for Pendleton? Peg Willis Pendleton
