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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (May 13, 2017)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, May 13, 2017 East Oregonian Page 5A Standing for science and the arts C oming out of the Safeway parking lot recently I was struck by the bumper sticker on the pickup ahead of me. GIVE INTELLIGENCE A CHANCE. Good idea, I thought. But what does it say about us, about our society, that we need to suggest this on a bumper sticker? That the idea is even a little bit controversial? We haven’t started killing anyone who wears glasses, as the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia when they feared that such people might be intelligent, even educated. But we have had to march in support of science — 225 or more gathered in Pendleton last month on Earth Day, hundreds of thousands in cities around the world — and the word has been out for quite a while about the foolish folks who major in the humanities, literature and philosophy, art and music and history and such things. Thinking about all this made me remember a happier time, back in the 1980s, when I accompanied three high school students from Joseph to a science and humanities conference in the Valley. Michael and Martin and Mary and I saw slides taken over a geologist’s shoulder, through the rear window of his pickup, as he fled the Mount Saint Helens eruption. I’ll never forget the rapidity of that approaching fury. How was he to make sense of what he had seen, he wondered, the incredible immensity of that power? And the limits of his own field, of human power? All those dead … That afternoon we heard a high school student read her prize-winning poems. Another student wondered why bumblebees spend the night on thistle blossoms — the petals are prisms, he discovered, small solar power plants. On the way home the four of us talked about the way science and the humanities are a bit like the bilateral symmetry of our own bodies — left and right, yin and yang — discovery and interpretation equally essential. I’m elated that people marched for science in our town, and I dare to dream that we might someday be willing to march for the humanities, too. For truth in all its forms. Ideally, of course, we wouldn’t have to march for either one. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his memoir “Between the World and Me,” credits his mother with teaching him to question himself as well as others through the act of writing. She had made sure he learned to read when he was four, and when he was in trouble at school (“which was quite often”), the questions she gave him to answer — Why did he feel the need to talk at the same time as his teacher? Why did he not believe his teacher was entitled to respect? How Give intelligence a chance. would he want someone to behave while he was talking? — forced him to interrogate himself, and by extension, begin to think about the motives and behavior of others. At Howard University he would discover poets, and with them “an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago: the craft of writing as the art of thinking.” Writing, he realized, was “ultimately, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.” So. Poetry. Who knew? Still in his early 40s, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for Atlantic, is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Genius Grant. “Between the World and Me” won the 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction, and it was Oregon State University’s Common Reading selection for incoming 2016-2017 first year students. When I found a copy at the Pendleton Public Library, I realized why the selection committee’s choice had been unanimous. Written as a letter to his then fifteen-year-old son after the death of Freddie Gray, the book is in many ways also a letter to America. Imagine the discussions we could have, I thought, if everyone read this book. And imagine the society we could have, if all of us — like Coates’ mother, an African- American woman raising her children in B ette H usted FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE the ’80s-era violence of their Baltimore neighborhood — chose to give intelligence a chance. ■ Bette Husted is a writer and a student of T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in Pendleton. An exile returns to his roots T An Oregon gross receipts tax By Yamhill Valley News Register T he governor and Legislature are battling on two fronts to balance the state budget for the next biennium. On the first, the government has no choice but to curb spending. The Oregon Constitution requires the state to balance its budget ever two years to prevent the kind of out-of-control debt and spending we see at the federal level. Accordingly, Gov. Kate Brown released a three-point plan last week to help cut a $1.6 billion deficit by pruning expenditures. Brown proposed a task force to identify elements that can be privatized or leveraged, impose market-driven compensation for salaries and crack down on unpaid tax obligations to the general fund, currently running half to three-quarters of a billion. Many won’t like the resulting cuts to services and grants, but they are essential. A bipartisan letter from the Ways and Means co-chairs said as much, noting, “Without action to contain the growing costs of state government now, the structural imbalance will cause even greater deficits in future years.” But over the long haul, cuts won’t be enough. Changes to the tax code are needed in order to raise additional funds more efficiently. Legislators seem set on a corporate gross receipts tax of 0.25 percent to 1.0 percent. And either would be much easier to swallow than that outlandish 2.5 percent written into last year’s failed Measure 97. Oregon’s current corporate income tax is abused by large corporations. There are myriad methods they can use to dodge net income numbers and take advantage of tax credits, thus incurring a smaller tax payment than warranted. A gross receipts tax is much easier to manage on the state side and much more difficult to abuse on the business side. However, research shows corporate activities taxes tend to translate into higher prices for consumers. Ultimately, the company is able to pass on much of the burden. That’s particularly true of retailers with the capital to produce their own ingredients and create their own products — companies like WinCo, Safeway and Walmart. They enjoy a huge advantage over smaller, locally rooted businesses in passing costs along. Secondly, a receipts tax can prove devastating for mid-range businesses, which may easily log $5 million to $10 million in sales without finishing the year in the black. They could be tagged with tax bills of $50,000, $100,000 or more despite turning no profit. Unfortunately, there seem to be few alternatives on the horizon. As Sen. Mark Hass told The Oregonian: “If anyone has a better plan to look at how to reform and modernize corporate taxes, bring it forward.” For the sake of a healthy and diverse business community, we’d like to see something new emerge. In the meantime, it appears we’re stuck with this one. Quick takes Echo man faces eminent domain for sewer project $8 billion transportation plan debated for Oregon Will take if necessary? This is absolutely horrible, and extremely unfair. Ridiculous that Eastern Oregon would have to have a payroll tax increase for mass transit when we don’t have any. — Darby Keels — Stacey Erz Stanek Maybe offer to lease it from him; ensure that he and his kids can count on an additional revenue stream. — Douglas Rohde They will use the money for some- thing else then raise the gas tax at a later date and use the same lame excuses. — Allen Norman Pretty sad when someone works their life for what they have and because they do not want to sell the city of Echo will take it by force. How would the mayor and city council like their property taken? — Theresa Morley Swart PERS is not the demon. The $2,500 a month my guys who are retiring after 30-plus years of service to the State of Oregon are not the ones who are breaking the state. — Paul McDonough Morrow County’s growing economy Hermiston couple finally makes prom, 64 years later Go Morrow County! It sounds like if a person really wanted to work, they shouldn’t have any trouble finding a decent paying job. These two made me tear up when they came through the photo booth. Such a beautiful couple and an even more beau- tiful story! — Tom Arbuckle — Stacie Shular 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. here’s a place in the Corpulent ground squirrels northeastern corner of were everywhere, and I kept Oregon that I’ve come to stepping into badger holes — a disconcerting experience. It seemed love: Zumwalt Prairie, between impossible to scan the sky and the Wallowa Mountains and not see a hawk or eagle. To the Hells Canyon. It supports one of east, the prairie dipped down into the largest Buteo hawk breeding the complex of gorges heading to populations known on the Hells Canyon, and to the southwest continent, and contains the largest Richard I could see the snow-capped remaining bunchgrass prairie in LeBlond Wallowa Mountains over the North America. Comment shoulder of one of the Findley The prairie is a nearly treeless Buttes. expanse of low hills, plains, and And the wildflowers were swales. Wildflowers are abundant stunning. As I got among the grasses, and down on my knees to in early summer there try and identify them, I is an excess of color, as spontaneously said, “This if some sloppy god had is home.” spilled his paints. The That afternoon, I went grasses sway not only to the bookstore/espresso to the wind, but also to bar in the nearby the scurrying of ground town of Enterprise to squirrels, badgers and browse and hang out. gophers, and to the During one of my brief predatory swoops of conversations with the hawks and eagles. owner, I mentioned my This fecundity experience on the prairie appears to make no earlier that day. She sense. The soils are handed me a chapbook poorer than dirt. Euro- titled “The Zumwalt: Writings from the American settlers found the rocky earth Prairie,” a collection of essays, poems and too difficult to convert to cropland, so they historical accounts. In an essay by local put it beneath the hooves of cattle. Though resident Jean Falbo, I found a passage not native, the cows mimicked an essential that resonated with my experience on the natural process. In pre-Columbian times, the prairie likely was maintained in an open prairie that morning. The essay is titled “On Becoming Native to Place.” condition by fire and grazing elk. (As far “Before us was a herd of elk, perhaps as is known, there had never been bison on two hundred animals. They stood tensely Zumwalt Prairie.) Elk were nearly extinct still, eyes on us and ears radaring in our in Oregon by the end of the 19th century, direction. Some voiceless decision was and cattle more than adequately filled the taken and the herd moved down slope role of primary grazer. like a brown mudslide against the dark Crucially, some ranchers learned that yellow green grass, gaining momentum as restricting when and where cattle grazed they went. A more distant herd on Findley maintained the prairie’s health. On several Butte caught the message and started its large tracts, no area was grazed during own slide over the undulating land and the same season in consecutive years, disappeared from view. A bright evening allowing the habitat to recover. Elk were star appeared. ‘This is A’gamyaung,’ one of reintroduced in the 20th century, and they my friends, a Central Yup’ik Eskimo, said. now share the prairie with the cows. The After a pause, he went on to say, ‘It means Nature Conservancy reintroduced fire “I’m homesick for nowhere.” ’ Seeing we on its portion of the Zumwalt in 2005. didn’t get it, he explained that at moments The combination of grazing, manure, fire-created nutrients, nitrogen-fixing plants like these, his people said, ‘A’gamyaung’ — and, ultimately, life’s tenacious ability to — meaning to be at one with the universe, no matter where one might be physically.” wrestle nutrition from the most meager of I know that feeling, and I am now soils — has produced a marvelous diversity a prairie volunteer. After 55 years of of plants and animals. voluntary exile, I can now give something During a visit in early July 2008, I back to the state that raised me. saw one of the most beautiful and prolific ■ wildflower displays of my life. About five Richard LeBlond is a contributor to minutes after I got out of the truck, a coyote Writers on the Range, the opinion service started yipping at me from a low hill about of High Country News. A former inventory 300 feet away. He or she kept it up for biologist for the North Carolina Natural about 10 minutes; no doubt I was messing Heritage Program, he grew up in Oregon. with its dinner plans. In pre-Columbian times, the prairie likely was maintained in an open condition by fire and grazing elk.
