Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Saturday, September 9, 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 EO MEDIA GROUP East Oregonian • The Daily Astorian • Capital Press • Hermiston Herald Blue Mountain Eagle • Wallowa County Chieftain • Chinook Observer • Coast River Business Journal Oregon Coast Today • Coast Weekend • Seaside Signal • Cannon Beach Gazette Eastern Oregon Real Estate Guide • Eastern Oregon Marketplace • Coast Marketplace OnlyAg.com • FarmSeller.com • Seaside-Sun.com • NorthwestOpinions.com • DiscoverOurCoast.com OUR VIEW DACA and legislative failure Earlier this week, Donald Trump rescinded DACA, an Obama-era policy that gave short-term relief to about 800,000 residents who illegally entered the United States as children. Nicknamed “Dreamers,” those young people temporarily protected by DACA are among the most widely supported groups of illegal immigrants in the country. According to most recent surveys, 75-80 percent of Americans approve of keeping them in the U.S., either via some sort of avenue to citizenship or under special government protection from deportation. After all, these are children who arrived here without really having a choice, have known no other home and have committed no crimes while in this country. Still, there are immigration hardliners who won’t budge, and those 20-25 percent of Americans and their representatives have stopped any meaningful immigration reform from being enacted, even on a lay-up like the Dreamers. For decades our national legislative bodies have failed in their duties. In order to protect their own hides from that vocal minority, members of those bodies have disregarded the will of a large majority of Americans. And in covering their own behinds, those Congressmen are hanging Americans — and should-be Americans — out to dry. This country has long needed comprehensive immigration reform, but Congress hasn’t got it done. This country has long needed massive infrastructure investment, but Congress hasn’t got it done. This country has long needed comprehensive tax reform, but don’t hold your breath. This puts presidents in a poor position. Being a constitutional law scholar, Barack Obama admitted that his DACA program was on shaky legal ground from the beginning. He made no bones about that, but felt he had no other choice because Congress had abdicated its duties by doing nothing and leaving a critical problem festering and unresolved. President Trump claimed this week that DACA was sure to be challenged in court — and it would likely fall. Perhaps he is right. But the announcement of his decision was nearly universally panned by Congressmen both Republican and Democratic. Yet how hypocritical of them. They are the people who can solve this mess, yet they choose to criticize rather than create. A wide majority of Americans want to protect Dreamers. Congress should do their job and create a reasonable, legal system for doing so. Then get on to the next problem on the list. 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. OTHER VIEWS Strength in unity The Daily Astorian F or many Americans, the unimaginable images of 16 years ago today are burned into our national fabric, never to be forgotten. Those searing memories of mass death and destruction resulted from coordinated attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda aboard four hijacked airliners. Two hijacked jets toppled the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center while a third slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Aboard the fourth hijacked plane, which initially changed course toward Washington, D.C., passengers bravely fought the terrorists and the plane crashed into a vacant field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In all, the attacks killed 2,997 people, injured more than 6,000 others, and caused at least $10 billion in infrastructure and property damage. The deaths tragically included more than 325 responding law enforcement officers and nearly 100 firefighters. The 9/11 legacy, however, goes far beyond the attacks. It rattled our national consciousness, our sense of security and it changed our lives in ways we previously took for granted. A generation of children born that year are now teenagers entering their final years of high school, about to enter adulthood in a world far different than before their birth. They have never experienced our nation at peace. What they have seen is that the attacks spurred the War on Terrorism, which continues to this day, the longest war in our history. They have learned the 9/11 events also spawned increases in hate crimes, overarching government surveillance and profiling. They have observed that as the war progressed it created bitter political partisanship and has cost billions of tax dollars. They have watched as it has divided those who believe the money should have been spent to cure deep domestic ills with those who say the far-away fighting is protecting our freedom, security and values. As citizens and taxpayers, we must consider it all as we try to set a positive example for the future. While we need to oppose those who engage in hate and violence and uphold the principles our nation was founded upon, we must always hold government directly accountable when it oversteps or misleads. Importantly, we must also never forget the pain and loss of life from 9/11, and we must never lose sight of the incredible heroism and sacrifice it provoked or the national unity that surfaced in its wake. On that day and those that immediately followed, we weren’t Democrats and Republicans, we weren’t divided by race and cultural issues. We unified as one nation, people helping people, sacrificing when necessary, all Americans. It’s not the first time we’ve had that national unity, and it won’t be our last. It’s in our blood and dates to our nation’s birth. It heroically rises like the American flag hoisted by three firefighters at ground zero in the 9/11 aftermath, and it proudly flies like the Star-Spangled Banner over Fort McHenry in Baltimore 203 years ago this week during the War of 1812. Each time our freedom is threatened, and whenever the country or a region suffers a calamity, Americans always respond. The outpouring of national support for the victims of hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Harvey provides recent examples. Our history is filled with countless others. What we must do is to continue to learn from these lessons. They teach us all that our strength as a country is in our unity, not in our divisiveness. 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 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com. OTHER VIEWS How the far right came to love hippie food Some time ago, I found myself in One of Beck’s sponsors promotes a buffet line around piles of inedible “better ideas for off-the-grid living.” looking grains, greens and grassy- Another offers “next level gardening smelling gratins at an alternative food with a geodesic greenhouse.” These cooperative’s Sunday dinner. No part items would have fit, years ago, into of this meal, I was assured, had been the Whole Earth Catalog, a must-read touched by the corporate food chain, for the no-deodorant set. the Big Ag puppeteers with their One side, now, is heavily armed, taxpayer-subsidized toxins. Timothy and the other seems friendlier, The evening was all very yeasty and the products named for Burt and Egan dreadlocky, as you would expect. The Annie, Ben and Jerry. A consistent Comment food was — I’m sorry — wretched. I thread through the years is distrust didn’t see it then, but I understand now of institutions, of the Man. Another that many social movements start on the fringe shared belief is self-sufficiency. frontier, where earnestness ultimately wins out The 1969 Whole Earth Catalog heralded over the skepticism of people like me. the “power of the individual to conduct his It’s no secret that Whole Foods, the $13.7 own education, find his own inspiration, shape billion acquisition of Amazon, took the his own environment and share his adventure “business” model I found in a leaky old loft in with whoever is interested.” Port Townsend, Washington, This sentiment heavily long ago, and gave it a influenced Steve Jobs. The profitable corporate sheen. catalog, he said, “was one of But what’s less well the bibles of my generation.” known and somewhat In his famous 2005 Stanford surprising is how that same commencement address, food ethic drifted over into Jobs compared the Whole the paranoid world of the far Earth Catalog to an early right, where no truth is self- version of Google — evident and the apocalypse is “idealistic, and overflowing always imminent. At the dark with neat tools.” confluence of hippie and There was a brief, shining Hitler, you can buy a year’s point when we seemed to supply of Earth-friendly have reached a national quinoa. consensus in the politics What’s sad, and indicative of natural food: Michelle of the wretched Trump era, Obama’s vegetable garden. It is how something that started was simple, instructive and in a wave of hope and optimism migrated to Jeffersonian, backing the notion that there’s closed-minded, mercenary quarters. an easy alternative to all the awful additives at You can trace a bit of this transition to the American table. John Mackey, the Texas co-founder of Whole But even something as wholesome as a Foods. A libertarian and admirer of Ayn Rand, healthy diet message got dragged through the he once lived in a vegetarian collective. “I right-wing swamp, prompting a defiant Sarah thought I’d meet a lot of interesting women,” Palin to offer sugar cookies to students living he told The New Yorker. “And I did.” through an obesity epidemic. By the time Whole Foods had purchased One of the first acts of President Donald Wild Oats, the communal ethic had been Trump’s administration was to reverse an overtaken by imperial ambition. But that was Obama era proposed ban of chlorpyrifos, a nothing compared with some of the current pesticide shown to cause brain damage in peddlers of alt-foods. children. Trump has also rolled back new So, in between rants about how Ku Klux food rules designed to reduce sodium levels in Klan members are “just Jewish actors,” schools and give consumers more nutritional Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones sells information. an exhaustive line of strange food. His market Trump’s supporters live, disproportionately, is “preppers,” people who’ve been preparing in the Diabetes Belt, as the Centers for for the End, for some time. Disease Control labels parts of the country Jones’ website urges fellow knuckle- with highest percentage of people made ill by draggers to “secure your food independence” an excess of the awful American diet. with his organic-sounding Patriot Pantry. And while Trump’s most fervent supporters From “fluoride-free mouthwash” — the better in the hard right are preparing for End Times to secure precious bodily fluids, one assumes with chemical-free freeze-dried and other — to “strawberry fields cream of wheat,” pseudo organics, their man gorges himself on he assures his followers that his “non-GMO Big Macs and slabs of well-done steaks and meals have a 25-year shelf life.” Plus, no tries to keep the rest of us in the dark. The added MSG! food message from this White House: Eat Over at The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s soft- your poisons, and don’t ask where they came rock version of the hard right, a targeted from. demographic is the grumpy Trump supporter ■ who wants to Grow Your Own. The site’s Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a story diet is heavy on the threat of transgender writer for The New York Times, first as the kindergartners. But with food, Beck is closer Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a to that co-op I visited. national enterprise reporter. What’s sad is how something that started in a wave of hope and optimism migrated to mercenary quarters. CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES U.S. PRESIDENT Donald Trump The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ U.S. SENATORS Ron Wyden 221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg. Washington, DC 20510 202-224-5244 La Grande office: 541-962-7691 Jeff Merkley 313 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 202-224-3753 Pendleton office: 541-278-1129 U.S. REPRESENTATIVE Greg Walden 185 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 202-225-6730 La Grande office: 541-624-2400 GOVERNOR Kate Brown 160 State Capitol 900 Court Street Salem, OR 97301-4047 503-378-4582 REPRESENTATIVES Greg Barreto, District 58 900 Court St. NE, H-38 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1458 Rep.GregBarreto@state.or.us Greg Smith, District 57 900 Court St. NE, H-482 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1457 Rep.GregSmith@state.or.us SENATOR Bill Hansell, District 29 900 Court St. NE, S-423 Salem, OR 97301 503-986-1729 Sen.BillHansell@state.or.us