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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 22, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Friday, September 22, 2017 OTHER VIEWS 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 Tip of the hat; kick in the pants A tip of the hat to two local residents who recently dusted off their CPR training to save two lives in Umatilla County. In Pilot Rock, police officer Daniel Badal used CPR on Aug. 18 to keep a man without a pulse alive long enough for him to be transported to St. Anthony Hospital, where medical professionals were able to stabilize the patient and save his life. Similar action on Monday in Hermiston from Steve Brown — who was out bowling at Desert Lanes — may have saved a life as well. Brown performed CPR at the bowling alley until EMTs arrived, who then whisked the victim to a hospital where he remains in critical condition. Critical is a good word for describing the importance of immediate response in a medical emergency. Professionals may be only 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds away, but each and every second matters in times of emergency. Take this opportunity to refresh your CPR skills if you’ve learned them before, or start from scratch. Ask your boss to host CPR classes, or call your local medical center to find out when their next offerings are. You might be the next person in line to save a life. A tip of the hat to Weston Middle School for their grant-winning video that helped the school and its students secure some much-needed fitness equipment. Exercise legend Jake Steinfeld made the $100,000 presentation Wednesday that will allow the school to upgrade their fitness center, as well as combine with a state grant to hire a physical education teacher for Athena Elementary. Physical education is under renewed focus, as young people spend more of their time online and with their digital devices. Giving students good equipment and teachers who inspire them to stay active and healthy is a key part of their early education. A tip of the hat to our dear pal and columnist Colin Brown, “The Limey Pastor,” who will be moving on from his stint at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Boardman. Brown has been writing weekly faith columns for this newspaper for more than a year, even through a scary medical emergency that put him on his back and under a surgeon’s knife. His kindness, humor and wit — and his love of God and all creation — shine through in his writings, which offer a modern approach on religion that remains girded by all the traditional underpinnings. Luckily for readers, Brown will continue writing his weekly columns (which appear on Fridays, see page 7A), so his sermons and reflections aren’t going anywhere. But the Boardman faith community bids you adieu for now, Pastor Brown. 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 Who are we managing our forests for? Growing up in Cascade Locks in the 1940s, I would listen with awe to the many stories about wildfires told by my family and older friends. Stories of fire jumping the Columbia, people covering their shingle roofs with burlap soaked with water to protect their homes from cinders, people riding logging trains out of the mountains while trestles were on fire, etc. Scary stuff. But they made me believe that fire prevention was very important. In the 1950s and 1960s I spent summers working for the Forest Service. Fire prevention was the number one priority for the Columbia Gorge Ranger District and every thing we did was done with the understanding we were doing this to better protect our forests. We opened trails that had not been worked since the CCC boys left at the beginning of World War II. We opened and built roads to provide quicker access for fire suppression and for potential fire breaks. In the Bull Run Watershed small pockets of old dying trees were clear cut to reduce the potential for lightning caused fires. Funds from the sale of the logs would go into the federal coffers to be distributed back to the counties, schools, roads, etc. Everything was done to prevent mega fires. This appeared to me to be a win/ win deal. Fire hazard trees were being removed, roads were being constructed for quick access and funding was being provided for necessary services. Then the emphasis began to shift. Trails were for recreation, clear cuts were ugly, fire could be beautiful if you would just wait a hundred years, companies were believed to be making money off our trees, lawsuits were filed, roads needed to be destroyed to limit access. We needed to bring the forest back to its prehistoric state. All of this was happening with the population increasing and our climate changing. Now we are paying the price for this shortsightedness and lack of common sense. We have to decide for whom we are managing these forests. The native population at one time may have burned the forests periodically. Their management objectives were different from what our objective should be. We need to be thinking about 100 years or more from now, as well as today. Carlisle Harrison Hermiston 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. Meet the world’s leaders, in hypocrisy L eaders from around the world support family planning, and so on. have descended on New York For the first time in human history, for United Nations meetings, less than 10 percent of the world’s fancy parties, ringing speeches about population is living in extreme poverty, helping the poor — and a big dose of and we probably could virtually hypocrisy. eliminate it over the next 15 years if And — finally! — this is one area it were a top global priority. Trump where President Donald Trump has rightly hailed PEPFAR, the AIDS shown global leadership. Nicholas program President George W. Bush If there were an award for United Kristof devised, but he also has proposed sharp Nations chutzpah, the competition cuts in its funding). Comment would be tough, but the medal might The progress on stopping human trafficking is also inspiring. I go to Trump for warning that if moderated a U.N. session on the topic, and necessary, “we will have no choice but to it was heartening to see an overflow crowd totally destroy North Korea.” There were engaging in a historically obscure subject, gasps in the hall: A forum for peace was used even as a new report calculated that there are to threaten to annihilate a nation of 25 million 40 million people who may people. be called modern slaves. There also was Trump’s Prime Minister Theresa May praise for American convened perhaps the largest humanitarian aid to Yemen. meeting of foreign ministers Patting oneself on the back ever on human trafficking. is often oafish, but in this We now have the tools to case it was also offensive. achieve enormous progress Yemen needs aid because the against these common U.S. is helping Saudi Arabia enemies of humanity — starve and bomb Yemeni poverty, disease, slavery — civilians, creating what the but it’s not clear we have the U.N. says is the world’s will. What’s striking about largest humanitarian crisis. In this moment is that we have other words, we are helping perhaps the worst refugee to create the very disaster that we’re boasting about crisis in 70 years, overlapping alleviating. with the worst food crisis in It was also sad to see 70 years, overlapping with Trump repeatedly plug risks of genocide in several “sovereignty,” which tends countries — and anemic to be the favored word of global leadership. governments like Russia “There is a vacuum of (even as it invades Ukraine leadership — moral and and interferes in the U.S. election) and political — when it comes to the world’s China (as it supports corrupt autocrats from trouble spots, from Syria to Yemen to Zimbabwe to Myanmar). Myanmar and beyond,” notes David Miliband, Speaking of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi the president of the International Rescue skipped the U.N. meeting, after being feted Committee. Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s last year, because it’s awkward to be a Nobel foreign minister, agrees: “I think there’s a Peace Prize winner who defends a brutal leadership vacuum.” campaign of murder, rape and pillage. Many There are exceptions: Wallstrom, U.N. Muslim leaders in attendance, like Recep Secretary-General António Guterres, Canadian Tayyip Erdogan, did highlight the plight of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and more. the Rohingya suffering an ethnic cleansing in But many countries are divided at home, Myanmar. If only they were as interested in distracted by political combat and looking their own political prisoners! increasingly inward, and in any case, the U.S. Meanwhile, world leaders usually ignore remains the indispensable superpower, and it places that don’t fit their narratives. Everybody is AWOL. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has pretty much shrugged at South Sudan and achieved a degree of irrelevance that no one Burundi, both teetering on the edge of thought possible, and Trump is slashing the genocide; at Congo, where we’re headed for number of refugees accepted, cutting funds for civil strife as the president attempts to cling to the U.N. Population Fund and proposing huge power; and at the “four famines”: in Nigeria, cuts for diplomacy, peacekeeping and foreign Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan. To Trump’s aid (fortunately, Congress is resisting). credit, he expressed concern Wednesday about The number that I always find most South Sudan and Congo and said he would daunting is this: About one child in four on this dispatch U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to the planet is physically stunted from malnutrition. region to see what can be done; let’s hope his And while it is the physical stunting that we administration provides desperately needed can measure, a side effect is a stunting of brain leadership. development, holding these children back, In fairness, there are broader reasons for holding nations back, holding humanity back. hope, including astonishing progress against So it’s maddening to see world leaders global poverty — more than 100 million posturing in the spotlight and patting children’s lives saved since 1990. Every themselves on the back while doing so little to day, another 300,000 people worldwide tackle humanitarian crises that they themselves get their first access to electricity, and have helped create. 285,000 to clean water. Global poverty is a ■ huge opportunity, for we now have a much Nicholas Kristof grew up on a sheep and better understanding of how to defeat it: cherry farm in Yamhill. A columnist for The resolve conflicts, invest in girls’ education, New York Times since 2001, he won the empower women, fight malnutrition, Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and 2006. It’s maddening to see world leaders patting themselves on the back while doing so little to tackle humanitarian crises that they themselves have helped create.
