VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, May 18, 2019
East Oregonian
A5
When pigs swim
T
he state of Iowa contains 55,869.36
square miles, 2,987,345 humans,
and 16,900,000 hogs. That works
out to 52.4 humans per square mile and
302 hogs per square mile, or roughly
six hogs per person. Memorize these
numbers.
Set the time machine to the present.
The Mississippi and several tributaries
are spilling onto the 5 percent of Iowa
that lies below levee height. Assuming an
equal distribution of hogs across Iowa,
about half a million hogs are in danger of
drowning.
During the Flood of 2008, many hog
producers had several days warning and
took preventative measures, including
shoring up the levees and trucking hogs to
higher ground. Assuming that 100 hogs fit
in a hog trailer, it would take 5,000 truck-
loads to evacuate all of our hogs. That did
not happen. A bunch of hogs drowned.
An average modern hog barn contains
about 2,500 animals. Let us assume that
only four of these barns get inundated so
we have 10,000 swimming pigs. Healthy
active pigs are able to swim quite well,
but the goal of hog producers is to raise
a 250-pound animal in 160-180 days, so
they are not getting a lot of aerobic exer-
cise before they hit the water, and many of
them drown before they can be packaged
as bacon. They don’t have the muscle tone
to keep on treading water.
During the last flood, some free-swim-
ming hogs did make it to higher ground
by getting caught in eddies and swirling
back toward the levees. This didn’t work
out well for them. The last place that you
want to have sharp-hoofed, tough-snouted,
250-pound critters rooting around for
tender shoots and bugs is on top of the
banks you’ve built to protect you from the
waters. So, in a nod to reverse Darwin-
ism, law enforcement agencies held an
impromptu hunt and shot the pigs on the
levees. The smartest and strongest pigs did
not survive after all.
But wait, what about those free spir-
its, those surfer pigs, those that went with
the flow and floated downstream to safety
in strawberry fields forever? You and I
and Charlotte the spider know that at least
one Wilbur is out there in the wild lands
tonight, dining on truffles, trying to fig-
ure out how to ditch his insecticide-im-
pregnated eartag and trade it for a squeeze
tube of sunblock and a headband.
Which brings us to the real meat, so
to speak, of this narrative. Every mem-
ber of my family has reacted to this idea
with the assumption that I’ve been car-
ried away by a mental flood. These pooh-
pooh attitudes are not going to keep me
from sharing with you, Dear Reader, a
ground floor opportunity to invest your
income tax check in this year’s Surefire
Million-Dollar Invention. Be advised that
this newspaper column is patented, copy-
righted and guaranteed to cure warts, so
if you rip me off I’ll dust off my Church
of the Transcendental Oneness lawyer’s
certificate and sue your butt clear back to
Bakersfield.
OK. Ready? Let’s invent, and capitalize
the PETA, the Piggy Emergency Tread-
ing Appliance. This is really a rather sim-
ple design exercise. We need to come up
with a life preserver for pigs, one that can
be easily and quickly attached to a hog, or
10,000 of them, in case of flood.
Our invention should be able to support
250 pounds indefinitely, be brightly col-
ored, with room for identification number
or logo, and not take up much space when
not deployed. (I see racks of them hang-
ing around the perimeter of the hog barn.)
I lean toward CO2 inflation rather than
closed-cell foam. Also, based on personal
experience with trying to rope rogue pigs
in a rainstorm, a pig doesn’t have much of
a neck. So, we should skip the vest design
and build something with a single strap
around a pig just behind its front legs that
deploys with the yank of a cord. Water
wings.
Let’s run an imaginary beta test on our
product. We are hog farmers. It is rain-
ing, the levees are failing, and we don’t
have enough trucks. We have 2,500 250-
pound hogs in one single barn, or 625,000
pounds of pork on the hoof, worth a mar-
ket price of around 75 cents per pound
for a total of $450,000 potential. No prob-
lem. We have at our ready 2,500 flota-
tion devices (purchase price $75,000) and
we have 10 guys from Honduras to help,
while we supervise.
The hogs are already penned. If each
guy can strap one PFD on one pig and jerk
the cord in 15 seconds, we are suiting up
40 pigs per minute. It takes an hour and
10 minutes to dress the hogs against the
flood. We open the doors to the barn and
leave the pigs in the pens, in their bright
devices, to float away if the water gets too
deep. If a monster flood occurs and we
save only 420 hogs, we break even on the
flotation investment. If the water never
rises, all the better. We send the devices
back to the Pendleton Pork Protection
League, LLC for a $10 per unit ($25,000)
recharge fee and are ready for next year.
J.D. S mith
FROM THE HEADWATERS
OF DRY CREEK
Note to potential investors: Don’t like
this opportunity? Stay tuned. After learn-
ing that several thousand turkeys drowned
in the last Iowan flood, I’ve begun
research and development on the WTF, the
Wet Turkey Floater.
———
J.D. Smith is an accomplished writer
and jack-of-all-trades. He lives in Athena.
YOUR VIEWS
GOP was lied to — again
What a shock it was to find out that
the liberal supermajority again misled the
GOP in Oregon. Time and time again, the
GOP is misled, and time and time again,
they fall for the lies of the left by tak-
ing the liberals at their word to do, or not
to do, something in exchange for GOP
support.
Once again the liberals agreed to
remove bad legislation, ie. gun control and
vaccine bills, if the GOP would return to
the floor to pass yet more taxes for their
tax-and-spend agenda. The left, at almost
heartbreak speed, are trying to bring back
the two bills. How many times does the
GOP have to be lied to before the light
goes on that the left will do anything to
pass a bill? Wake up, Oregon GOP, it is
time to stand up for the people and stop
cowering to the radical left.
The left-wing radicals running Ore-
gon claimed that President Trump’s tax
cuts will hurt the middle class in Oregon.
While the Trump-hating left wing con-
demns the tax cuts, the truth comes out
that, because of the tax cuts, the average
Oregon taxpayer is expected to receive a
$350 plus kicker payment due to increased
revenue — more than double what the
state economist predicted. Not to the
surprise of anyone with a brain, House
Speaker Kotek already is introducing a
bill to take half of the kicker, which is tax-
payers’ money, to help fund some more of
her pet projects.
As the radical left pushes for the
decline of Oregon, the spineless GOP con-
tinues to fall for more lies.
John Harvey
Stanfield
PERS is the scapegoat for all
Oregon’s woes
Friday’s East Oregonian had an article
about our legislators wanting to keep half
of the Oregon kicker to fix some highways
and bridges. Whoa, does anyone remem-
ber when Oregon passed a total of 3 cents
a gallon gas tax to pay for bridge repair?
Where did that money go? By the way, the
tax is still there.
Oregon is run, for the most part, by
incompetent people in almost every depart-
ment. Whenever there is a scandal, the
scandal has coverups, lies, misinforma-
tion or spin. The day after it is reported, out
comes an article about PERS.
PERS is the scapegoat for everything
wrong with Oregon. Oregon is corrupt,
breaks federal laws and thumbs their nose
at federal law. Good luck when we go
bankrupt.
Roesch Kishpaugh
Pendleton
The story the media misses
M
y colleague David Bornstein
ple who weave social fabric, and this week
points out that a lot of American
about 275 community weavers gathered
journalism is based on a mistaken
in Washington, for a conference called
theory of change. That theory is: The world
#WeaveThePeople, organized by the Weave
will get better when we show where things
project I’ve been working on at the Aspen
have gone wrong. A lot of what we do in
Institute.
our business is expose error, cover
The people at this gathering are
problems and identify conflict.
some of the most compelling peo-
The problem with this is that
ple I’ve ever met. Charles Perry
we leave people feeling disempow-
was incarcerated for nearly two
ered and depressed. People who
decades and now connects com-
munity members to health care
consume a lot of media of this sort
systems in Chicago. Dylan Tête
sink into this toxic vortex — alien-
ated from people they don’t know,
was an Army ranger who served in
fearful about the future. They are
Iraq, suffered from PTSD and has
D aviD
less mobilized to take action, not
built communities in New Orle-
B rooks
ans for vets. Sarah Adkins came
more.
COMMENT
Bornstein, who writes for
home one Sunday to find her hus-
The New York Times and also
band had killed their kids and him-
co-founded the Solutions Journalism Net-
self, and she now runs a free pharmacy and
work, says that you’ve got to expose prob-
leads a life of service in Appalachian Ohio.
lems, but you’ve also got to describe how
Pancho Argüelles works in Texas,
the problems are being tackled. The search
accompanying workers who have suffered
for solutions is more exciting than the prob-
spinal cord injuries on the job. He helps
lems themselves.
find the diapers, wheelchairs and other
But many of our colleagues don’t define
things that will allow them to live with
local social repair and community-build-
dignity. Pancho radiates a deep wisdom,
ing as news. It seems too goody-goody,
almost a holiness. As he and the others
too “worthy,” too sincere. It won’t attract
spoke about their values, the same thought
eyeballs.
kept pounding in my head: How is this not
That’s wrong.
a story? Why don’t we cover these people
I’ve spent the past year around peo-
more?
At most conferences people lead with
their bios, but at this gathering people led
with their pain.
A prominent researcher described how
she was abused as a child, and how this led
her into her research into children’s emo-
tional development. A woman from South
Carolina talked about loved ones she had
lost and the time she tried to talk a man out
of jumping off a bridge, finally confessing:
If you jump, I’m going to jump, too. A man
admitted that all the people he had loved
had left him, and that he had lived with the
trauma believing that his wife will leave
him, too. In the atmosphere created this
week he felt free to let go of that trauma.
It was emotionally gripping through and
through. The weavers know how to open
relationships with vulnerability and they
know how to build connections and move
to action. Their defining feature is that they
are geniuses at relationship.
This was a gathering in which it was
permissible to be an angry black person.
Some of the African-American partici-
pants fully ventilated their anger at injus-
tice. It was uncomfortable and searing, but
the discomfort broke through barriers and
moved us closer.
Martha Welch, a professor and
researcher at Columbia, pointed out that
our emotional health is dependent on con-
nection with others. We don’t just regulate
emotions ourselves. We co-regulate with
others and need connection with others to
keep from spinning out of control.
The weavers are acutely sensitive to
states of mind that can build or mar a rela-
tionship: how people can feel more or less
efficacy, depending on the emotional con-
ditions in a room; how words like “social
justice” and “biblical” can be good or bad
depending on whom you are speaking
with, and how much damage is done when
people demand you use words their way,
instead of asking: Well, what do you mean
by that word?
Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that
associational life is the central feature of
American life. But somehow we in the
media under-cover this sector. We barely
cover the most important social change
agents. These people are not goody-goody.
They are raw, honest and sometimes rude.
How did we in our business get in the
spot where we spend 90% of our coverage
on the 10% of our lives influenced by poli-
tics and 10% of our coverage on the 90% of
our lives influenced by relationship, com-
munity and the places we live in every
day?
———
David Brooks is a columnist for the New
York Times.