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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (April 13, 2019)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, April 13, 2019 East Oregonian A5 You can get anywhere from here A Sense of Place. That’s the theme of next week’s BMCC Arts and Culture Festival, a week of music, writing, film, and community discus- sion. It’s also the theme of Yamhill Coun- ty’s Terroir Arts and Culture Festival in McMinnville the following weekend. In fact, a sense of place is what has put Northwest literature on the map for read- ers everywhere. So I wasn’t surprised to notice in the Spring issue of “Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place” that nine of the contribu- tors have read at Pendleton Center for the Arts First Draft Writers’ Series. Or are about to read: Vince Wixon will be here on Thursday. We pay pretty close attention to place in Umatilla County. How could we not, living where we do? This year BMCC has invited me to be the festival’s artist-in-residence. My novel “All Coyote’s Children” is set on the Uma- tilla Indian Reservation, and from the time I published my first book, “Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land,” place has been an essential part of my writing. I’ll be giving readings and hop- ing for the kind of lively Q and A sessions we have at First Draft. And on Thursday at noon I’ll be joining Rich Wandschneider and Pamela Reese to think out loud about home, about making a home in this place. I’m especially looking forward to this discussion because I am searching for answers. This place we love, this incred- ible Northwest — in fact, this entire con- tinent and the South American continent as well — was already “home” to many, many people when my ancestors arrived. And my ancestors’ relationship to place — conquest, control — led to a whole lot of suffering for those people. I thought I knew quite a lot about that suffering. Sand Creek, the Trail(s) of Tears. Boarding schools. “Kill the Indian and save the man.” Allotment Acts. Ter- mination. But in the community room at Pendleton Public Library, while doing background research for “All Coyote’s Children,” I was stunned to find these words, written by Oregon’s first histo- rian, Herbert Howe Bancroft: “The quick extermination of the aborigines may be regarded as a blessing both to the red race and to the white.” How do I — how do any of us — live with that? We have begun, at last, to try. To make amends. But is issuing an official if half- hearted government apology, or starting public events with an oral land acknowl- edgment and supporting the return of as much homeland as possible to Native peo- ples — is that enough? I’m here, and Europe can’t take me back. I’d have to split myself into too many pieces. And like you, I love this sage- steppe land, the shadows of the Blues. Who wouldn’t love the river of my childhood home, the Clearwater? The most beautiful river in the world, I think, every time I drive along that canyon. Or the Wallowa country, where I was privi- leged to live for over a decade. The high desert east and south of us, the stunning shapes and shades of the Palouse. But I know what happened in these places. So how can I live here with integ- rity? How can I be “home”? Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” has one sugges- tion. If our ancestors came as immigrants to this continent, she says, we can never become indigenous. “No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes with soul-deep fusion with the land.” But like contemporary immigrants, we can become “naturalized.” Rather than seeing the earth primarily as a resource to exploit, we can learn to have a deeper — and reciprocal — relationship with the plants and animals and peoples of this place. We can learn what they have to teach us and accept our responsibilities to them as well as the gifts they give us. Impossibly idealistic? Maybe. But my Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla neighbors don’t call such ideas pie in the sky. They call it First Foods. If we’re lucky we get invited to the huckleberry feast. I’m still searching for my own way for- B ette H usted FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE ward. But I hope the title of this column — words I heard spoken in Harney County, in the center of all that space — will some- day prove true. “You can get anywhere from here.” ——— Bette Husted is a writer and a student of T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in Pendleton. OTHER VIEWS The politics of our disgrace at the border S uppose one night there is a knock on your door. You open it to find 100 bedraggled families shivering in your yard — exhausted, filthy, terri- fied. The first cry of your heart would be to take them in, but you’d know there were too many. But you’d still do something. You’d rally your neighbors and the local authorities and put some system in place — some way to provide immediate care, figure out who these people were and how, within your means, you could lift them up. And this is precisely what the U.S. has failed to do in handling the refugees who are flooding across the southern border. There is nothing remotely like an adequate system in place to handle the hundreds of thousands of people flee- ing violence in Central America or seek- ing economic opportunity. And there is no prospect of a plan being put in place from either Republicans or Democrats. And in that way the border cri- sis is paradigmatic of our politics right now. Both parties are content to adopt abstract ideological postures. Neither is interested in creating a functioning sys- tem that balances tradeoffs and actu- ally works. In the age of Trump, national politics is showbiz — self-righteous per- formance art to make the base feel good about itself. The Trump show is all about tough- ness and cruelty. The administration adopted a zero-tolerance policy that was supposed to deter potential immigrants. It failed miserably. Roughly 103,000 unauthorized immigrants reached the U.S.-Mexico border in March, sion that made illegal entry a twice as many as in March 2018. federal crime. Others gesture Aside from baring his fangs, toward the open border crowd Trump is uninterested in pro- with policies like eliminating cessing the extra refugees. The ICE. This is Trumpian extrem- ism reversed. facilities are overwhelmed. Over Immigration is one of those 800,000 people have their cases issues on which the extreme pending. New asylum-seekers positions are wrong, because the are held for a couple of weeks, D aviD correct answer means balancing dumped out on the streets, and B rooks COMMENT competing goods. most will wait until 2021 to get On the one their formal hear- ings. My col- hand, these peo- THE U.S. CANNOT ple are our neigh- leagues Michael bors. Many of Shear, Miriam TAKE IN EVERYBODY them come to us Jordan and Manny with harrowing Fernandez cite WHO WANTS TO COME. stories of hus- the words offi- SO THE FIRST TASK IS bands murdered, cials are using to daughters raped, describe the situa- TO SET PRIORITIES. tion: “operational mass extortion. emergency,” “sys- It’s our obligation temwide meltdown,” “the system is on and joy to reach out to them with a hand fire.” of solidarity. It’s barbarism to send them The field is wide open for the Demo- back to lawlessness. crats to come forth with a decent plan. On the other hand, many who are But on many issues the 2020 Democrats coming across seeking asylum do not aren’t really having a primary campaign; qualify for it. When they get their hear- ings, only 20 percent win the right to they’re having a purity test. The can- didates are not sure if they can deviate stay in the United States because they’d from wherever the social media warriors face persecution in their home countries. have defined the leftward edge. So the Many come for traditional economic rea- sons. The murder rate in El Salvador has Democratic show consists of indignant fallen by half since 2015, while the num- generalities intended to sound radical ber of asylum-seekers has skyrocketed. while changing nothing. The U.S. cannot take in everybody Many Democrats in Congress are who wants to come. So the first task is denying there even is a crisis on the bor- der. The only Democratic candidate with to set priorities. The victims of violence an immigration plan so far is Julián Cas- and persecution get top priority, then tro, who wants to repeal a 1929 provi- those being systemically denied their basic rights because their country has become a failed state, then those seeking economic betterment. Then you create a system to imple- ment those priorities. Over the short term do the things any practical mayor would do: build new detention centers at the border; expand the capacities at the ports of entry; expand the number of judge teams, to speed through the back- log; create an orderly release procedure coordinated with humanitarian agen- cies; increase the number of counselors so refugees can navigate the system; vet children in their home countries for ref- ugee status so they don’t have to make a fruitless trip. Over the long term, you help build better police and justice systems in the home countries. You cooperate with Mexico to jointly tackle this challenge we face together. You might shift to a more skills-based immigration system while increasing the number of refugees we take in each year. Designing a practical response that wins widespread support is, in theory, not hard. But it requires starting with a certain question: What can we do to help them? Much of today’s politics starts from a different question: What posture can I adopt that will reflect well on me? What can I say to prove I’m manly or woke? This is what happens when the pol- itics of practical action get replaced by the politics of performative narcissism. ——— David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. Simplify tax day for Americans The New York Times C ongress has landed on one of those rare ideas that commands support from both Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, it’s a bad one. On Tuesday, the House approved leg- islation misleadingly titled the Taxpayer First Act that includes a provision pro- hibiting the Internal Revenue Service from developing a free online system that most American households could use to file their taxes. The Senate is considering a similar piece of bipartisan legislation. This makes no sense. Congress should be making it easier for Americans to file their taxes. Instead of barring the I.R.S. from making April a little less miserable, why isn’t Congress requiring the I.R.S. to create a free tax filing website? Better yet, the United States could emulate the roughly three dozen coun- tries, including Chile, Japan and Britain, where most taxpayers do not need to fill out tax returns. In some of those coun- tries, the accuracy of tax withholding is sufficient to obviate the annual filing pro- cess. In others, the government sends out completed forms to most taxpayers. In Estonia, filing taxes can be done in less than three minutes. The federal government collects enough information about most Ameri- can households to mail out a completed tax form that people would simply need to verify, sign and return. President Ron- ald Reagan proposed a version of just such a system. In 1998, Congress passed a law instructing the I.R.S. to develop such a system by 2008. President Barack Obama endorsed the concept during the 2008 presidential campaign. It still hasn’t happened. The explanation is sad but not sur- prising. The most vocal opponent of sim- plicity is Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, which has spent millions of dollars lob- bying against efforts to reduce demand for its services. The company draws sup- port from conservatives worried that making it easier to file taxes would make it easier to raise taxes. Intuit and its allies, including pro- ponents of the legislation, say that it’s cheaper and better for the government to let private companies run the system. But companies have little incentive to advertise the availability of free filing or to make the system easy to use. Indeed, they have every reason to steer people away from the free products. That is how they make money. As a result, the government is saving taxpayer money at the expense of those taxpayers. Members of Congress pay lip ser- vice to ideas like filing taxes on a post- card, but they continue to perpetuate the current system of mass April immisera- tion by preventing the most obvious and effective way to simplify tax collection.
