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.