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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
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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.