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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 21, 2018)
Page 4A East Oregonian Wednesday, November 21, 2018 CHRISTOPHER RUSH Publisher KATHRYN B. BROWN Owner DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor WYATT HAUPT JR. News Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OUR VIEW Make a plan to do a good deed G ood deeds don’t happen by accident. Some are jump-started by coincidence — a need presents itself and a well-meaning person responds. But most are the result of careful thought and planning, of addressing a need not as a single incident but as a confluence of circumstances that will rear their heads again and again. The needs become a calling, and people rally together to address them. We see the work of nonprofits year- round. It takes on many forms, from feeding hungry people to sheltering neglected animals, from offering grief counseling for hurting families to fighting illness and disease, from helping a local child learn to read or play a sport to sending gifts across an ocean for a child in poverty. And the work is hard because the need is great. This is the start of the giving season, for both philanthropic and practical reasons. Because of the blessings in our own lives, we’re reminded of misfortune in the lives of others and often moved to make a gift. And many are looking at their year-end accounting and looking to do some charitable giving. Whatever the motivation, the money enables these organizations to pay their staffs and rent and buy the goods and services to accomplish their goals. But the money isn’t enough. Writing a check helps an organization balance its own bottom line, but what most of these groups will tell you is they need dedicated volunteers. Staff photo by E.J. Harris Volunteer Mariza Sharpe serves up salad to Mickey Morris and Shavon Slack on Oct. 25 at the Harkenrider Senior Activity Center in Hermiston. We’ve highlighted a few of the people who fill that role in today’s holiday edition. They exemplify the intentional effort it takes to make good deeds a common occurrence. Some volunteer in multiple places for a variety of causes. There are many more, and there is much more to do. We thank all of our readers who use their time to make their communities better places to live, and encourage any who have not found a place to donate and serve to consider it this holiday season. OTHER VIEWS Fighting the spiritual void W YOUR VIEWS Tribe should not silence differing opinions Free speech and free expression are bedrock rights of all citizens of our great democratic country. However, free speech for Umatilla tribal members will be suppressed and censored unless we march in lockstep to the tribal government party line. Earlier this year the Confederated Umatilla Journal, a publication owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, twice refused to publish my opinions on relevant tribal issues just because I had a differing opinion. The first unjustified denial of my free speech rights occurred when I rebutted, supported with facts, an editorial on tribal education. The second came when I responded to a CUJ article on Cayuse Technologies, a tribally owned business, wherein I wrote, again supported with facts, that we owners (shareholders) do not benefit much from CT. The issue I am writing about today is the lack of free speech, and the lack of transparency. The East Oregonian newspaper has been the primary source of news and Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. information for our tribal community for generations. Thus, when the CUJ suppressed my two letters, I submitted the letters, verbatim and identical, to the EO and the letters were published in a timely manner. There was obviously nothing in my letters that was libelous, obscene, threatening, or otherwise out of line, or the EO never would have published them. At any rate, I am OK that I have to use a forum or venue other than our tribal newspaper to express my opinion. Also, it is obvious that the only reason the decision-makers at the CUJ denied my free speech rights is they personally do not agree with the content of what I wrote. If tribal government allows them to do this, it raises the legitimate question: Do we have a democracy if free speech rights can be denied on the whims of people working in tribal government? Genuine products of journalism, like the East Oregonian, do publish opinions from their readership that may differ from theirs. Tribal leaders have always welcomed input and viewpoints from the tribal membership. And that is all my two letters are — input from a tribal member. Bob Shippentower Pendleton herever I go I seem to die at any second, he felt his soul run out of his body. It stayed meet people who are out, traumatized, on red alert, for either dealing with decades. trauma or helping others dealing Tick told Art: “We can try to with trauma. In some places I make your body and this life a meet veterans trying to recover safe place for your soul to move from the psychic wounds they back into. If we can get you off suffered in Iraq or Afghanistan. David alert, if you can learn to Sometimes it is women Brooks combat trust a little bit … maybe we can struggling with the aftershocks Comment bring you two closer together.” of sexual assault. Sometimes People who are recovering it is teachers trying to help from trauma often embrace the students overcome the traumas they’ve language of myth, which offers us suffered from some adult’s abuse or templates of moral progress. Recently, abandonment. in New Orleans, I met the founder of Wherever Americans gather and try a community of vets called Bastion. to help each other on any deep level, The men and women there are taught to they confront levels of trauma that their training has often not prepared them for. see their lives as a hero’s journey with three stages: from Separation through Our society has tried to medicalize trauma. We call it PTSD and regard it as Initiation, and then back to Return. When we see our lives in mythic an individual illness that can be treated terms, we can see that life still offers a with medications. But it’s increasingly clear that trauma is a moral and spiritual chance to do something heroic. “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities issue as much as a psychological or chemical one. Wherever there is trauma, of the human life,” Joseph Campbell wrote. there has been betrayal, an abuse of Tick points out that most ancient authority, a moral injury. cultures put returning soldiers through Medication can rebalance chemicals purification rituals. The men came back in the brain, but it can’t heal the inner self. People who have suffered a trauma from battle and the terrible things they had done there, and they were given a — whether it’s a sexual assault at work chance to cleanse, purify and rejoin the or repeated beatings at home — find community. The community would take that their identity formation has been possession of the guilt the soldiers may interrupted and fragmented. Time have felt for the things they had to do on doesn’t flow from one day to the next, its behalf. but circles backward to the bad event. The Tohono O’odham, a Native People who endure trauma American people from the Sonoran sometimes say that they feel morally Desert, once practiced a 16-day tainted. They have the same plaintive purification ceremony. mindset as the old man at the cemetery These ceremonies had, Tick writes, in “Saving Private Ryan,” who says to what most rites of passage have: a his wife, “Tell me I’m a good man.” sacred space, training by the elders, As a culture we’re pretty bad at ordeals that prepare and test the initiate, dealing with moral injury. Sometimes I look at the rising suicide and depression rituals that symbolize the transformation taking place. After the cleansing, the rates, the rising fragility and distrust, blood-soaked soldier was now known and I think it all flows from the fact as a warrior, a positive leader in the that we’ve made our culture a spiritual community. void. When you privatize morality and I wish our culture had many more denude the public square of spiritual rites of passage, communal moments content, you’ve robbed people of the when we celebrated a moral transition. community resources they need to There could be a communitywide rite of process moral pain together. passage for people coming out of prison, The good news is that the people for forgiveness of a personal wrong, for who are addressing trauma most people who felt they had come out the directly are reviving a moral language other side of trauma and abuse. There’d and developing a moral curriculum. be a marriage ceremony of sorts to mark Edward Tick is a therapist who has the moment when a young person found been working with survivors of wars the vocation he or she would dedicate for decades. In his book “War and the life to. Soul,” he writes that PTSD is best It’ll take a lot to make our culture understood as a “soul wound, affecting a thick moral culture. But one way or the personality at the deepest levels.” another, nations and people have to One of his patients, Art, told Tick, grow a soul big enough to enclose the “My soul has fled.” He felt it leave his traumas that haunt them. body at Khe Sanh. Art was a machine- ■ gunner repelling wave after wave of David Brooks has been a senior editor North Vietnamese’ assault, killing them at The Weekly Standard, a contributing edi- by the score. tor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, One day the North Vietnamese and he is currently a commentator on “The overran his position, and while he was Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” sprinting away in retreat, expecting to 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. 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.
