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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 27, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Wednesday, December 27, 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 Offi ce Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW Oregon must protect its ag zoning rules Pacific Oce an A land use fi ght is shaping up in shares some of the group’s concerns. As in many of these land use Southern Oregon’s Douglas County issues, we are confl icted. that pits the broader interests of We have always maintained agriculture against the interests of urban developers — and perhaps the that private property owners interests of specifi c land owners who should generally be allowed to use their land might want to sell. for the purpose Douglas County that provides the commissioners highest return. For are considering Area in detail an owner, land changing the Douglas Co. suited for only designation of mulls plan to marginal crop nearly 35,000 rezone 35,000 production might acres in farm and acres of farm- forest zones to well be worth more land and “non-resource as a sizable plot for forestland transitional lands.” a “rural lifestyle” 101 That would allow dwelling. LANE up to 2,300 20-acre At the same home sites to be time, we know Bay carved out of land that once truly 138 COOS Roseburg now reserved for productive 42 farmland is used agriculture and for something timber harvests. 62 According to the other than farming, JACKSON county, the sites the soil is often N JOSEPHINE are of low quality lost forever to Medford 20 miles 199 for commercial agricultural production. farm production Capital Press graphic Signifi cant loss and taken together of production leads to a loss of represent only about 1 percent of infrastructure that supports farming farm and forestland in the county. — storage, processing, packing, They speculate that no more transportation. And that hurts farmers than half the lots would ever be with otherwise viable operations. developed. We haven’t heard much from the The county contends that current people who own the land, which is zoning doesn’t support the demand scattered around the various cities for “rural lifestyle” dwellings. in the county. That could explain the It’s unclear who is clamoring for county’s low estimate of just how these types of properties, but it’s a safe bet there would be demand from much of this land could ever go on the block. wealthy retirees and out-of-towners Willing buyers need willing looking for vacation properties to sellers. take advantage of the area’s good Indications are good that this weather and scenic beauty. dispute will end up with the state Not so fast. State land use regulators and farmland preservation Land Use Board of Appeals. We’d like to know, on a plot- advocates are concerned by the by-plot basis, the true productive proposal. potential of the land. Is any of it Advocates at 1,000 Friends of Oregon say the county hasn’t proven improperly categorized? That question is moot if the the need for more rural housing county is exceeding its authority. stock and is pulling a fast one by Anyone hoping to pull up stakes misapplying authority it’s granted in favor of a prime “rural lifestyle” under Oregon’s land use laws to dwelling — perhaps someday here meet its objectives. in Eastern Oregon — will have to Oregon’s Department of Land wait for these issues to be resolved. Conservation and Development 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 9 million children need Congress to act on CHIP The (Rochester, Minn.) Post Bulletin T here’s a tendency, whenever Congress isn’t doing what we personally would like it to do, to say that the honorables have their priorities mixed up. But when it comes to funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides medical care for about 9 million children through Medicaid and other programs, we can say without fear of hyperbole that Congress indeed has its priorities messed up. In the race to come up with a tax cut plan that lards gifts primarily on corporations and the wealthy, Congress is dragging its feet on renewing funding for a program that benefi ts the most vulnerable among us. CHIP provides health coverage for 8.9 million children whose families don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford insurance. The program is administered by the individual states, several of which are now on the verge of running out of money. That’s because the current round of funding for the program, which costs $16 billion a year, expired Sept. 30 and Congress hasn’t gotten around to passing an extension. Some senators and House members have given lip service to renewing it, but nothing has happened yet. Among the states hardest hit is Minnesota, which ran out of CHIP money last month and is keeping it going with state money. Oregon and Colorado will be the next to run out. Lawmakers from both parties say they intend to pass an extension. But some Republicans want to tie it to an Obamacare repeal or other issues. Failing that, they warn, an extension for CHIP might have to wait until early 2018. The United States already trails many other western countries when it comes to children’s health. Infant mortality rates are as much as 42 percent higher in the U.S. than in comparable developed countries. Early neo-natal deaths are as much as 66 percent higher, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker. And among 17 developed countries, a 2013 study found that American children are more at risk of dying before age 5 than children elsewhere. Clearly, we’ve failed our children too many times in too many ways. Dragging out or, even worse, abandoning CHIP funding is just the latest example. It’s an especially egregious oversight in this season of celebrating the birth of a child who changed the world. It’s not too late, and it’s the perfect season, for Congress to change course and put CHIP funding, and our children, at the top of the list of year-end priorities. Infant mortality rates are 42 percent higher in the U.S. than in comparable developed countries. OTHER VIEWS The 2017 Sidney Awards, part one T hose of us on the Decision Desk disapproved of. Her father announced of the Sidney Awards faced a she would have to take a beating as moral dilemma. Could we give a punishment. She told her father that Sidney to an essay the title of which we Lola, the family slave, would take it couldn’t quote in a family newspaper? for her. Lola silently stepped forward: We decided that our mission, “Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 celebrating the year’s best long-form lashes, punctuating each one with a journalism, is more important than word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me.” Lola the staid and stifl ing morality of a made no sound. David patriarchal bourgeois neoliberal society. The other monster essay is Ronan Brooks Farrow’s portrait of Harvey Weinstein’s So the fi rst Sidney goes to Thomas Comment Golianopoulos’ essay “(Expletive) victims in The New Yorker that, That Gator” from BuzzFeed. The together with Jodi Kantor and Megan essay is nominally about the death of Tommie Twohey’s work for The New York Times, Woodward. He was out drinking beers at his sparked this national re-norming. Farrow’s local bar in Orange, Texas, when he decided to piece is marked by its understated directness. take a swim in the nearby bayou. Somebody “I just sort of gave up,” one woman told him, describing what it felt like as Weinstein forced warned him that a large gator had been seen in sex upon her. “That’s the most horrible part of it days before. He shouted out the exclamation it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for that is the title of this article, jumped in the so long to so many women: People give up, bayou and was promptly killed by said gator. and then they feel like it’s their fault.” But the piece is really an engaging I can’t stop telling people about the description of a slice of American life that, when it is described at all, is usually done so in factoids I learned from Amia Srinivasan’s a patronizing anthropological manner. Tommie book review essay “The Sucker, the Sucker!” in The London Review of Books about the and his surviving twin, Brian, were manual personality of octopuses. laborers who went An octopus’ arms have through life working hard, more neurons than its partying hard and doing brain, so each arm can crazy stuff. Brian worked taste and smell on its own in a shipyard and now and exhibit short-term installs air-conditioners memory. An octopus can and likes eating odd change color to mimic things. “You’ve ever other animals, but it eaten cat?” he asks. There cannot itself see color. So was a big stray cat that kept hanging around bothering him so he killed how does it know which color to change into? Good question. and barbecued it. How’d it taste? “Oily, man. Octopuses are curious but sometimes Oily.” ornery. When researchers tried to train an Golianopoulos beautifully captures the octopus to pull a lever to get food, the octopus culture of the bar where the Woodwards hung kept breaking off the lever. Octopuses try hard out, Brian’s grief and a part of the country where people are fully eccentric and know how to escape from captivity, waiting for those moments when they aren’t being watched. to take care of things on their own. One octopus persistently shot jets of water at For demographic consistency, I’m the nearby aquarium light bulbs, repeatedly moving next to Christopher Caldwell’s essay “American Carnage” in First Things. Caldwell short-circuiting the electricity supply until it was fi nally released into the wild. writes one of the most comprehensive Lastly, Gary Saul Morson’s essay depictions of the opioid crisis. He captures “Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals” in The New how alluring the drugs are. “If a heroin addict Criterion takes us back to one of the greatest sees on the news that a user or two has died minds of the 20th century. Morson shows how from an overly strong batch of heroin in some spiritually ambitious Alexander Solzhenitsyn housing project somewhere, his fi rst thought was. “Once you give up survival at any price, is, ‘Where is that? That’s the stuff I want.’” ‘then imprisonment begins to transform Caldwell explains how the crisis has touched your former character in astonishing ways,’” even the small elements of life. Addicts need Morson writes, quoting Solzhenitsyn. It to make money to feed their habit. “Some neighborhood bodegas — the addicts know teaches friendship. You learn the most valuable which ones — will pay 50 cents on the dollar thing is “the development of the soul.” And so for anything stolen from CVS. That is why Solzhenitsyn concluded, “Bless you, prison, razor blades, printer cartridges and other for having been in my life.” expensive portable items are now kept under The second batch of Sidneys will be out on Friday — a child-friendly edition, sans lock and key.” expletives. At this point I’ll pause to recognize the ■ two monster essays of the year. Alex Tizon’s David Brooks became a New York Times “My Family’s Slave” in The Atlantic occupied Op-Ed columnist in September 2003. He readers’ time more than any other piece of has been a senior editor at The Weekly English-language journalism on the internet Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek this year. It’s about a woman who worked as and the Atlantic Monthly, and is currently a a slave in modern America. When Tizon’s mother was a girl she spoke to a boy her father commentator on PBS. Visit eastoregonian.com for links to all of these stories. YOUR VIEWS Defeat Greg Walden in 2018 As the new year arrives it is time that we took a look at who is representing us in Washington, D.C., from the Second Congressional District. It is totally apparent that U.S. Rep. Greg Walden is about as out of touch with his constituents as any representative from this district has ever been. He votes to end the Affordable Health Care Act, then he votes for the biggest tax reform bill in history (which won’t help most of his district), and when it comes to helping the vets he could care less. Ladies and gentlemen, is that the kind of representation we want in Washington, D.C.? I sure believe we can do better. Recently Rep. Walden was invited to hear the concerns of a group of volunteer veterans advocates from all over the U.S. when they were in the Rayburn Building holding a forum on vets’ issues, and never bothered to send a representative or show up himself. That told me he could care less about the vet and his or her problems. When spending for vets issues is one of the biggest bills in the Defense Department’s budget, I would think that Rep. Walden would at least have the common decency to send someone from his offi ce to listen and take notes. But no, he couldn’t be bothered, and yes, he knew 6-8 weeks in advance that the meeting was taking place. I personally have dealt with Rep. Walden’s offi ce and found that they could care less if they helped or not. I believe it’s time to send Walden packing like we did Gordon Smith and get someone to represent us in Washington, D.C., who isn’t afraid to ruffl e feathers and make waves if it helps someone in their district. Whether you vote for Jim Crary or Tim White or one of the others, it’s time to tell Greg Walden: “You’re through. Pack up and go home.” We need someone in Washington, D.C., that represents rural Oregon, not his big campaign contributors. Barbara Wright Pendleton 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.