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.