SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
Council
makes a
statement
The proclamation that Baker City Mayor Loran Jo-
seph read during the City Council’s Tuesday meeting,
and that he and the six other councilors approved,
was a well-crafted and welcome statement support-
ing the Baker City Police Department and the Baker
County Sheriff’s Offi ce. And as the proclamation
cited “local law enforcement” we ought to, as a com-
munity, also include the Oregon State Police and law
enforcement for the Forest Service and BLM.
The proclamation is no whitewash, no justifi cation
for police brutality.
“We are deeply concerned by the actions taken by
some police offi cers and the corresponding violent
protests and attacks on police offi cers,” the proclama-
tion reads.
That’s a reasonable statement. It recognizes that
police misconduct is not acceptable. And neither are
“violent protests” — as distinguished from the peace-
ful protests that have happened in Baker City and in
many other cities.
Most of the credit for the absence of violence and
confl ict goes to the people who participated, of course.
They have proved that the American ideal of free
expression — that we can disagree vehemently with
one another without resorting to violence — is not a
trite platitude.
But local police offi cials, including Baker City
Police Chief Ray Duman and Baker County Sheriff
Travis Ash, have contributed by endorsing these
events so long as they remain peaceful. Police needn’t
be involved when people are expressing their consti-
tutional rights.
The City Council’s proclamation acknowledges that
local police agencies have an obligation to regularly
review their policies, particularly on the use of force,
to see if they can be improved. And councilors pledge
to help with that process through the city manager,
which oversees the police department.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
Achieving equality requires
votes as well as protests
Mr. Jacoby, in his June 5 editorial,
states “the swiftness with which the
justice system has moved against
Chauvin and the other offi cers ...” isn’t
correct. It’s disappointingly a refl ection
of systemic, problematic notions many
people, not just whites, hold subcon-
sciously: that our justice system moves
quickly. Not so if the perpetrators are
the police. Not so if the victims aren’t
white.
In Minneapolis, justice wasn’t swift
or true, but reactionary. From articles
I’ve read, Minneapolis police regula-
tions required the other offi cers to
intervene and stop the murder. Did
that happen? No. Did the city’s police
leadership immediately act when a
citizen’s rights were violated by rogue
offi cers and he was murdered? No. It
took the people taking to the streets
demanding justice.
Thank you to those of you who
joined the protest in Baker City.
Mr. Floyd’s death is another of the
many straws breaking our nation’s
back. It’s an ugly thing when such
realities come to light, as they all too
often do.
Baker County doesn’t escape a rac-
ist history; an example being pioneers
senselessly murdering Chinese for
no reason other than their race. Our
country is steeped in racism. Many
tried — particularly Quakers — to
point out the wrongness of slavery
when our country was newly fl edged.
President Lincoln, acting on the very
words upon which our country was
founded, took on a segment of our
country that built itself on the ex-
tremely un-Christian, inhumane mis-
treatment of other humans because of
the color of their skin. Did it go away?
No.
We had neighbors, avowed racists,
who fl ed LA after the Watts riots in the
1960s. Many remember the mayhem of
1968. Ferguson, Missouri, less than 10
years ago. Has anything changed? No.
In an interview, a politician stated
he supports the peaceful protests
around the country, but remember
to express that protest at the polls in
November. We couldn’t agree more. Af-
rican Americans live daily what most
of the rest of us cannot fathom.
Change won’t come overnight or
with one election. We all must work
hard to keep the efforts to bring equal-
ity and justice to all Americans as
promised us in the founding documents
of our nation.
Rick Meis
Susan Bolgiano
Halfway
Innocent human lives need
to be protected
We have all been horrifi ed by the
images of George Floyd’s death. Yes, his
life matters, as all lives matter.
However, every day hundreds of hu-
man beings are killed by having sharp
objects driven into the base of their
skull and the contents sucked our, or
having their limbs ripped from their
body and being vacuumed from their
mother’s womb. The majority of these
innocent human beings are black. Even
in the midst of our justifi able anger and
sorrow at the death of George Floyd,
Planned Parenthood calls their butch-
ery “essential” and demands that our
tax dollars be used to fund the killings
of defenseless human lives. We should
all be outraged and let our political
representatives know we do not want
our tax dollars spent to destroy more
lives. We also need to support families
through crisis pregnancy centers.
Choose life.
Karel Dyer
Baker City
Hearts column well done
Regarding your “Changing hearts,
minds” in the June 6 Herald ...Well
done. Very well done.
Dixie Sutton
Baker City
Dreams can take us back to our childhood
I had a dream the other night
and the setting was the home and
neighborhood where I grew up
— chronologically, at least — but
where I haven’t lived in 32 years.
The details of the dream started
to dissipate, as they so often do,
before I had even gotten out of bed.
I believe a skunk was involved
but it’s possible I transposed the el-
ements of one dream into another.
(I have been menaced by skunks
in many dreams. I have no idea
what Freud might make of this
and am glad he’s not available to
tell me.)
The places that fi gured promi-
nently in this particular dream,
however, remained vivid, and for
the rest of the morning my mind’s
eye would occasionally stray back
to those once-familiar rooms and
sidewalks and street views of the
pleasant residential district in
Stayton, about 15 miles southeast
of Salem.
I lived in the house from 1972,
when my parents had it built (my
grandpa, Edd Jacoby, was the
contractor) until the fall of 1988,
when I went off to the University of
Oregon. I spent my college sum-
mers in Baker, working for the For-
est Service, so I never again lived in
Stayton. My parents sold the house
in 1992.
I wasn’t yet 2 when my family
moved into the house on North
Fern Avenue and so it is the only
home I knew as a child.
At various times I claimed as
JAYSON
JACOBY
my own three of its four bedrooms,
although for many years I shared
fi rst one room, and then another,
with my older brother, Michael.
It was in the bedroom at the
southwest corner where, trying
to outrun Michael in a race for a
coveted toy — a rooster, as I recall
— I tripped and dashed my head
against an old-fashioned school
desk (the kind with a folding wood
top that weighs as much as a
kitchen table).
This collision opened a bloody
gash between my eyes that
required several stitches to close
and left a white scar that seems to
lengthen as the years pass.
(This seems to me unfair, that
the physical remnant of a wound
should become more prominent
even as its creation becomes
increasingly fuzzy, but my fea-
tures have never seemed to care a
whit for what I think about them
anyway.)
Our garage is where I climbed
aboard my fi rst real bicycle, a baby
blue single-speed with a banana
seat and a chain guard emblazoned
with the slightly embarrassing, and
curiously boastful, name “Big Deal.”
I pedaled that bike in endless
circuits of the neighborhood, roll-
ing west on Kathy Street, north
to Shaff Road and south to Regis
Street, over to Evergreen on the
next block to the east or, if I was
feeling especially adventurous,
all the way to Douglas Avenue —
familiar but, at a distance of two
blocks, still different enough to
seem a trifl e disconcerting.
It’s hardly surprising, of course,
that I remember the details of the
place where I came of age. I’m sure
everybody does — especially if, as I
did, you lived in the same house for
the whole span of those formative
years.
And yet, having lived somewhere
else for considerably more than
half of my life, weeks pass dur-
ing which I don’t spare a single
thought for that house in Stayton,
or for that neighborhood.
Which is why I fi nd it passing
strange that my subconscious, at
irregular and utterly unpredictable
intervals, chooses to take me back
there while I’m deep within that
mysterious mental cavern that is
sleep.
The experience, in common with
many dreams of places or people
you don’t often think of while
awake, is not altogether unpleas-
ant.
I have awakened from these
nocturnal meanderings in my old
neighborhood feeling all but over-
whelmed by nostalgia. And I mean
that variety of nostalgia in which
the past isn’t a discrete series
of events, some of them embar-
rassing or otherwise painful, but
rather a period defi ned by placidity
and happiness, when Halloween
always yields a bounty of candy but
no midnight trip to kneel before
the toilet, when each Christmas
bestows the gift you most cherished
that year, when every summer
evening features root beer-fl avored
popsicles and there are no mosqui-
toes.
But at the same time I feel a
queer sense of displacement.
This isn’t that gratifying relief of
climbing out of sleep and realizing
that whatever awful fate befell you
during the dream wasn’t real.
What I mean is the sudden and
unexpected intersection of the
present and the distant past — the
peculiar meeting of the man and
the boy he once was.
He is familiar, that boy, but he’s
also a stranger because although
his life is of course my life it’s also
true that too many years have
passed, so much time that although
I know it was me crashing into that
desk and riding that bicycle and
ripping the paper off those presents
I can’t remember what it actually
felt like to do any of those things, or
a thousand other things.
This bothers me in a way I can’t
quite explain.
It seems to me that if I can
still dream of that place, then my
memories of it should be more
distinct — more, well, real.
I have many times over the past
couple decades detoured to Stayton
while I was visiting my parents,
who moved fi rst to Salem and, a
few years ago, to Mill City.
I have driven past my old house.
A few times I even walked the
neighborhood.
This, of course, was a much more
immersive experience than even
the clearest dream. But it disori-
ented me in much the same way. I
felt at once happy to consider my
good fortune to have grown up in
a stable, loving and supportive
home where nothing too terrible
ever happened, and yet saddened,
nearly to the brink of tears, at
the reality that those days, those
experiences, can never be retrieved,
are gone as completely as the blood
I spilled in that bedroom.
(Although I suppose the forensic
gurus, with their vials and test
tubes, might yet be able to assem-
ble a DNA profi le.)
I hope, as all of us hope, to know,
in my last hour, that I have lived a
good life, been a good person.
But I can’t resist the temptation,
sometimes when I’m dreaming
and sometimes when I’m not, to
wish that just one time more I
might ride that bike on those same
sidewalks, perhaps on an autumn
evening with dusk coming on and
the smell of woodsmoke in the air,
and the soft crunch of maple leaves
beneath my tires, heading home to
a hot dinner.
Jayson Jacoby is editor
of the Baker City Herald.