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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 6, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Wednesday, September 6, 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 OUR VIEW You can’t fix stupid, but you can take away its matches The Columbia Gorge is aflame, through the Gorge for the next decade should be a reminder each and every and the smoke from Eagle Creek time we pass: Don’t use fireworks has mixed its way (along with smoke from other regional fires) into in Oregon’s forests. Bad things will happen. You may be held criminally Eastern Oregon. Although the view is hazy and the and financially responsible. air quality abysmal, We must make its quite clear that it perfectly clear to A simple the massive blaze those who have long was started with lived in and loved reminder: Don’t fireworks illegally this state, and those use fireworks in who are new arrivals, set on the Mt. Hood National Forest. it is never OK Oregon’s forests. that According to to use fireworks on witnesses, a group public land. Parents of teenagers casually tossed smoke must instill that in their children. bombs and fireworks into the steep Lighting fireworks in Oregon forests valley beneath beautiful Punch Bowl must be culturally verboten — it Falls. A surprise to no one with cannot be something that crosses a brain, the dry September brush the mind of even the most rebellious caught fire. That fire soon got bigger, teenager. We have too much at stake, and by the time of this writing had spend too much money, time and grown to more than 10,000 acres. energy trying to keep Oregon as Thousands of people have evacuated, beautiful and environmentally pure as many homes are in danger, and possible to have it all go up in smoke so are historic buildings like the by one careless hand. Oregon could consider banning Multnomah Falls Lodge. That’s not to mention the environmental damage fireworks. Sale, possession and use. If an outright ban is a bridge too far, then in a place like Eagle Creek, which perhaps consider hiking taxes high is a haven for salmon and steelhead enough that we can continue hiking in and other wildlife. Oh, and there is a green Oregon. Shouldn’t fireworks be the recreational damage done to one taxed immensely to pay for the cost of of the most beautiful and most-used fighting the fires that result from them? hikes in the Gorge. We’re as red-blooded, Fourth of Damage, damage, and more July-firework loving Americans as damage. you’ll find from sea to shining sea. Even though most of our readers But if you love this country, and you are well aware, this is a critical time love this state, wouldn’t you show it to remind Oregonians of the dangers by not setting it on fire? of fireworks. And a drive or hike 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. YOUR VIEWS ‘Stars and bars’ a bad fit for Round-Up merchants When I was little I studied the Civil War outside of school. I learned in the books that I read that the Civil War was fought over slavery and the United States won. The southern armies almost always flew the battle flag or “stars and bars” because the official flag of the South was too easy to mistake for the American flag. It’s an enemy flag. Round-Up isn’t about the Civil War. The hubbub about flag vendors on Main Street isn’t about free speech, this is about time and place. Confederate flags don’t fit Round-Up. Liberty Flags & Gifts told me last year that they have flags from many enemies of the United States and not just the Confederate flags. Round-Up definitely is not about treason. Go get your $6,000 somewhere else. If you’re for the Confederacy or the stars and bars or whatever, that’s fine with me. I just think you’re stupid. James Tibbets Pendleton Confederate flag is not racist, should be welcome In response to the Main Street Cowboys not allowing the flag vendor to be on Main this year, here is what I have to say. First of all, the flag is not the “Confederate Flag.” It is the “Battle Flag of Northern Virginia.” The stars are laid out in the pattern of an X, and the blue bands are put on the 13 stars to show that the southern states no longer wanted to be a part of the union with the northern states. In simpler terms, the message of flag’s design is simply this: cross us out of your Union. The southern states withdrew from the union in a movement called “secession,” which led to the Civil War. That is the only message this flag is sending. If this flag actually represented slavery, hatred, white supremacy or something worse — as so many biased and uneducated people so foolishly believe — then its design would reflect that by incorporating images of those whom it stood against, and there would be a big X on their images. But that is not what is on this flag. And that is not the message this flag sends. This flag is not racist. Never has been. Never will be. All that people need to have to be able to see and understand this truth is a basic knowledge of history and an ounce of common sense. We need all the vendors and all diversities of the vendors to keep this town alive. We cannot start acting like other states. This hate has to stop somewhere. I refuse to let this town end up like Charlottesville, or the many others desecrating monuments. We will not run over people, we will not tear down our statues, will not tear down our heritage. We are famous for Round-Up. This could tarnish us, first the flag, then what — our statues? Then what? We look no better than any other state and then no one wants to come to Round-Up or to our town for fear of being harmed or run out of town due to race, creed or color. That’s not what this country is about. We are all equal. Donald Edwin Lien Jr. Pendleton OTHER VIEWS The real campus scourge cross the country, college curated selves,” as UCLA psychologist freshmen are settling into their Elizabeth Gong-Guy called them, new lives and grappling with “amplify the fact that you’re sitting in something that doesn’t compete with your residence hall alone.” protests and political correctness for Gong-Guy runs her university’s the media’s attention, something that Campus and Student Resilience no one prepared them for, something program, which helps students with that has nothing to do with being emotional struggles and exemplifies “snowflakes” and everything to do with many schools’ intensifying efforts Frank being human. to address loneliness, among other Bruni They’re lonely. mental health issues. Comment In a sea of people, they find Extended, elaborate freshmen themselves adrift. The technology that orientation schedules are another keeps them connected to parents and high intended prophylactic against loneliness, school friends only reminds them of their which is a common reason for dropping out. physical separation from just about everyone And as Lawrence Biemiller recently noted they know best. That estrangement can be in an article in The Chronicle of Higher a gateway to binge drinking and other self- Education, there’s even a push to place and destructive behavior. And it’s as likely to derail design freshmen dormitories so that solitary their ambitions as almost anything else. time is minimized and interaction maximized. Brett Epstein felt it. “I spent my first night Three new residence halls at Goucher in the dorm and it hit me like a pile of bricks: College, one of which opened last fall and It’s just me here,” Epstein, a 21-year-old senior two of which are nearing completion, typify at the College of Charleston, told me about his this trend. Goucher’s president, José Antonio start there three years ago. “I was completely Bowen, said that the center-of-hall situation of freaked out.” bathrooms, the glass walls Clara Nguyen felt it, too. of laundry rooms and even “It’s a lot more difficult to the speed of the wireless make friends than people connection in common make it out to be,” Nguyen, areas — much faster than in a 19-year-old sophomore at the rooms — are deliberate UCLA, told me about her pushbacks against forces experience last year. “I didn’t that can isolate students. know how to be someone “Students are arriving new while at the same time on college campuses with being who I always was.” all of their high school The problem sounds so friends on their phones,” ordinary, so obvious: People Bowen told me, referring in an unfamiliar location to the technological quirks confront dislocation. On their of today. They too easily own two legs for the first substitute virtual interactions time, they’re wobbly. Who for physical ones, would expect otherwise? withdrawing from their Well, most of them did, immediate circumstances because college isn’t sold to teenagers as just and winding up lonely as a result. any place or passage. It’s a gaudily painted That’s why the solution isn’t hourly promise. The time of their lives! The disparity messages from concerned moms and dads, between myth and reality stuns many of them, whose stubborn attentiveness, no matter and various facets of youth today — from how well meant, can leave their children social media to a secondary-school narrative psychologically frail. Mental health experts that frames admission to college as the end of and college administrators recommend a more all worry — worsen the impact. thoughtful organization of campus life and Harry Rockland-Miller, who just retired more candid conversations about the tricky as director for the Center for Counseling transition to college. and Psychological Health at the University Nguyen, the UCLA sophomore, said that in of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me the her Vietnamese-American family in Southern emblematic story of a freshman he treated: California, all the talk was of doing well “He was 18. He came to school and was enough in high school to get to college and invited to a party his first weekend, and he not about the challenges college itself might didn’t know anybody. So he started to drink. present. Epstein, the College of Charleston He drank way too much and ended up lying senior, said that his popularity in high school on a bench in his residential hall, feeling very in the suburbs of New York City perhaps sick. Nobody stopped and said, ‘How are you distracted him from any awareness that “I doing? Are you OK?’ And he felt so isolated. was going 700 miles away and being dropped When he came in to speak with me the next in a place of 10,000 people and wasn’t day, the thing that struck him — what he going to know anybody.” What followed, he said — was, ‘There I was, alone, with all these added, was “a long battle with anxiety and people around.’” depression.” Alone, with all these people around. In One of the narrators of Tom Perrotta’s a survey of nearly 28,000 students on 51 superb new novel, “Mrs. Fletcher,” is a former campuses by the American College Health high school lacrosse star who arrives on Association last year, more than 60 percent said campus “after all the endless buildup” and that they had “felt very lonely” in the previous develops a “queasy feeling” that his world has 12 months. Nearly 30 percent said that they had become at once more populous and a whole felt that way in the previous two weeks. lot colder. “There I was, people-watching and Victor Schwartz, medical director of the eating my omelet,” he says of one morning in Jed Foundation, which is one of the nation’s the dining hall, “and the next thing I knew my leading advocacy groups for the mental throat swelled up. And then my eyes started to health of teenagers and young adults, said that water.” those findings were consistent with his own We urge new college students not to party observation of college students today. “While too hard. We warn them of weight gain (“the they expected that academics and finances freshman 15”). We also need to tell them would be sources of stress,” he told me, that what’s often behind all that drinking and “many students were lonely and thought this eating isn’t celebration but sadness, which is was sort of unique to them, because no one normal, survivable and shared by many of the talked about it.” people around them, no matter how sunny Their peers in fact do something that mine their faces or their Facebook posts. couldn’t back in the 1980s, when I attended ■ college: use Facebook and Instagram to Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for perform pantomimes of uninterrupted fun and The New York Times since 2011, joined the unalloyed fabulousness. And these “highly newspaper in 1995. A College freshmen are settling into their new lives and grappling with something that no one prepared them for: they’re lonely 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 website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com. Be heard! Comment online at www.eastoregonian.com