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.