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.