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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 18, 2017)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, February 18, 2017 Quick takes A day without immigrants Why take your kids out of school? What does that show? Don’t go to work. Close down your business. Do what you feel you need to do, but don’t put adult issues on your kids. — Nicole Wolf I did not sent my kid to school because she needs to learn how to be supportive to her culture and friends who doesn’t have the fortune of being legalized. Because of deportation the ones who are going to suffer most are our kids. A lots of them were brought very little and they don’t know their country of birth. — Fabiola Rios Olivas I wish people would understand that he is cracking down on illegal immigrants, not all immigrants. And the sweeps were going on during Obama’s administration also. Were there protests for those? — Judy Gormley Just because they didn’t go to school today does not make them illegal. They made a conscious decision to support an immigration law they feel is unjust. To assume that every Latino who didn’t go to school is illegal just goes to show the level of ignorance in our community. — Ray Gonzalez Every country has immigration laws. Is there a reason why only the United States should not have and enforce those laws? — Helen Willis Peaceful protests are a fundamental right whether you agree with the protesters or not. If you find yourselves angry about massive riots and now you find yourself equally as upset with peaceful demonstrations or protests please understand it’s that narrow minded thinking that is the real problem. Not every opinion is yours. — Dave Kellie Webb I totally support legal immigration but I don’t support illegal activity of any kind. Am I perfect? No! But that doesn’t mean I try to justify my wrongdoing. If I speed that is illegal. If I get caught I pay the conse- quences. I don’t protest and try to make everyone justify what I did. — Dani Smith The people who participated in today’s protest know exactly why they were protesting. The point was to show people what a day without an immigrant would look like. Regardless of how any of them came here, they do not condone the depor- tation of so many people and destruction of families. — Selene Torres-Medrano One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is that much can be summed up in just a few words. Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours @Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian. com, and keep them to 140 characters. East Oregonian Page 5A Of Yoruba chickens, the god Ogun and taxis I s it possible for a nation to embrace all manner of modern (read Western) ways without losing its soul? Well, the Japanese and the Vietnamese and the Koreans have learned best practices from the western world and improved upon many without sacrificing their own cultural heritage. Toyota, a victorious North Vietnam and Samsung, anyone? Actually, I had earlier learned much of this sensibility from my Peace Corps experience in Nigeria. Early on, I Tom was struck with the care Hebert that Nigerian taxi cab Comment drivers gave their cars, mostly small four-door British-made Morris Minors. Back in the 1960s, Nigerian roads were most often bits of asphalt and gravel between large potholes that could swallow a cow. Yet the Morris Minors all looked new, with some of them having a couple hundred thousand miles on them — they were spotless. And when the driver got in, they started immediately, without a whimper, like “Let’s get going!” The drivers were like proper horsemen; their cars seem to intuit them. And like a good horse, the cars seemed to love to work. But the lesson was driven home to me late one afternoon when I was taking a cab ride back to Ibadan. Somewhere out in the hinterland we were banging along through a village when suddenly the driver swerved to the right and smack, killed a chicken! He then mumbled something and touched an amulet hanging around his neck. I asked him what had just happened. He explained that he had just made a blood sacrifice to the great god Ogun, the Yoruba tribe’s god of war and thus of iron, like his Morris Minor. Indeed, I later learned that in the Yoruba religion Ogun is the traditional orisha or deity of hunters, blacksmiths and drivers. At that moment, I knew for fact certain that there was no such thing as a “Western technological know-how” that the then-Third World (now “developing countries”) would have difficulty learning; that somehow their home cultures would necessarily hold them back; that if their better angels had the edge then former colonial nations could prosper. If it wasn’t for the terrible political geography of a nation created in 1889 by a colonial power out of whole cloth and a map of the Niger River, and the endemic “Dash me, mista?” corruption of Nigeria, the country could now be another South Korea in the making. And, in fact, with its population of 174 million and Gross National Product of $1 trillion, and despite swervy leadership, bureaucratic rigidity and a troubled judicial system Nigeria sometimes seems like a country ready to take off. Photo courtesy Tom Hebert Tom Hebert in Kano, Northern Nigeria in 1963. He worked as an advance man, organizing national support network for the University of Ibadan Shakespeare Traveling Theatre tour. Photo courtesy Tom Hebert Tom Hebert, near Calabar, Eastern Nigeria in 1964 sharing a taxi with friends. Here’s what my very own Central Intelligence Agency says: “Nigeria has emerged as Africa’s largest economy but economic diversification and strong growth have not translated into a significant decline in poverty levels, however — over 62 percent of Nigeria’s 170 million people still live in extreme poverty. And despite its strong fundamentals, oil-rich Nigeria has been hobbled by inadequate power supply, lack of infrastructure, delays in the passage of legislative reforms, restrictive trade policies, an inconsistent regulatory environment, a slow and ineffective judicial system, unreliable dispute resolution mechanisms, insecurity, and pervasive corruption.” There’s also vicious Boko Haram, which aims to establish an Islamic state at any cost. It “opposes any political or social activity associated with Western society, including voting, attending secular schools, and wearing shirts and trousers.” And what abou tthose Morris Minors? Let’s just say that the 1963 event with the chicken blood sacrifice sent my mind in interesting new directions — making me more modest in my Americanism. ■ Tom Hebert is a writer and public policy consultant living on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Happy 108th birthday, Wallace Stegner W allace Stegner copies of “Angle of Repose” lived through with a request for Stegner’s almost the signature on all of them entire 20th century because the book had “left a and wrote his way deep-seated impression” on through more than all 25 members of the club. half of it. His fan mail Many letters asked for started with a trickle autographs, some confessed in the 1930s, opened Matthew love, and one was written by up to a flow in 1943, a couple on their honeymoon. Stewart after the publication of A British fan of Stegner’s Comment “The Big Rock Candy “Women on the Wall” Mountain,” and then included this brief review of rushed like the rivers he loved the book: “I think it is lovely, so do until his death on April 13, 1993. my friends, we all hope you make Many letters came on his birthday, masses of money, and pay no tax.” Feb. 18. Today, they are preserved Among the thousands of letters that with the rest of his papers at the readers wrote, the theme that recurs University of Utah’s J. Willard over and over again is that Stegner Marriott Library. respected his readers, their lives The letters arrived by plane and the places they inhabited. from Kenya, Japan and England, Most profoundly, he was and by hand from Los Altos Hills, capable of writing about heartbreak California, where Stegner and his without succumbing to nihilism. family lived when they were not His characters suffered real pain, traveling or spending the summer and many of them failed. But at their cabin in Vermont. Book Stegner’s characters sometimes clubs from across the nation wrote went beyond the failures, if only to Stegner, from the Literary by one step, and he never fell into Ladies of Hyde Park, Vermont, to cheap sentiment. a Vietnam veterans’ book club in As a woman wrote after New York City that enclosed 25 finishing “Crossing to Safety:” “It has something to do with bonds 1990 collection of essays, “What and frailties, a sense of place and are People For?,” Stegner was events unfolding, and above all, a regional writer “who not only endurance.” (wrote) about his Stegner respected region but also those who fell (did) his best into the abyss and to protect it, by saw it for what it writing and in was, but endured other ways, from nonetheless. its would-be Stegner also exploiters and told hard truths destroyers.” to his readers Berry contrasted — particularly Stegner with the his readers in the “industrialists of West — about the — Fan letter to letters” who mine region’s past and Wallace Stegner “one’s province present. Decades for whatever can before the “New be got out of it Western Historians,” several of in the way of ‘raw material’ for whom acknowledged his influence stories and novels.” and corresponded with him, A woman from Montana told Stegner brought serious and critical Stegner, “Somehow I have a sense attention to the settling of the of the land from reading your book West. He could criticize the region that I have not found in a long from within; in the words of a time, and the urge to tell you that man who wrote to him in 1978, he looking back to the years when I could “handle the region’s culture was an unprepossessing small girl without condescending to it.” suffering some of the same mental As one of his most famous tortures that you seemed to, I readers, his friend and former figuratively wave to you across the student Wendell Berry, put it in his prairie miles that lay between us. “I think it is lovely, so do all my friends, we hope you make masses of money and pay no tax.” You have used your background well — the prairie and I are proud of you.” If wisdom is simply pulling back the curtain to reveal a howling empty wasteland, 20th century fiction was full of such debilitating wisdom. Stegner was generally agnostic about any ultimate reality, but refused doubt as an excuse for selfish despair. There were too many people who had fallen in love with the land, and who counted on him; there were too many places that were threatened and fragile. In one of his most famous phrases, he described the West as the “geography of hope.” Letter after letter thanked Stegner for his sympathy, but also for his thoughtful nudge to move past the pain and live. ■ Matthew D. Stewart is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org). He received an M.A. in American studies from the University of Wyoming and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at Syracuse University.
