TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
Brown’s ‘response’
insults, patronizes
A group of county commissioners
from across Oregon, including Mark
Bennett of Baker County, along with
the Association of Oregon Counties
and Oregon Restaurant and Lodging
Association posed a simple, straight-
forward proposition to Oregon Gov.
Kate Brown regarding the stringent
restrictions the governor has im-
posed on businesses in 15 counties,
Baker among them.
This group received a written
response to its April 27 letter.
Although to describe Brown’s April
29 letter as a “response” is to indulge
in a fair amount of charitable exag-
geration.
The governor’s letter reads more
like a list of platitudes and ques-
tionable claims designed to mollify
those who dare to question Brown’s
decision to, among other things, treat
Multnomah County, with a popula-
tion of more than 820,000, the same
as Baker County and its 16,800
residents.
The commissioners’ letter was
prompted by Brown’s decision
to move those 15 counties to the
extreme risk level for the spread of
COVID-19 from April 30 through at
least May 6. For counties at extreme
risk, indoor dining is banned in
restaurants and bars, and occupancy
in theaters, gyms and fi tness centers,
along with museums and some other
types of businesses, is curtailed so
severely that many have no choice
but to close temporarily.
The commissioners pointed out in
their letter that, after more than a
year of dealing with the pandemic,
restaurants and bars have proved
that they’re capable of operating safe-
ly, and that county health offi cials
should be allowed to determine the
level of restrictions that are reason-
able. “It is no coincidence,” the letter
reads, “Oregon has not seen one
instance of a super spreader event
tied to our hospitality industry.”
Rather than directly address this
point in her letter, the governor
instead begins by touting Oregon as
having “among the lowest COVID-19
case rates, hospitalizations, and
deaths in the nation.”
That’s true. But it hardly counts
as justifi cation for banning indoor
dining in 15 counties. If anything, the
opposite is true, since indoor dining
has been allowed during much of the
pandemic in parts of the state.
Brown goes on, also accurately, to
note that cases and hospitalizations
have been surging in the state. She
writes: “I was presented with data
showing two paths Oregon could
take: one in which we took no action,
or one that required a temporary
tightening of restrictions for certain
counties but could save roughly 180
Oregonian lives ... Which path would
you choose?”
Notwithstanding the latter sen-
tence, with its gratuitous implica-
tion that these lowly county offi cials
could hardly understand the level
of responsibility the governor labors
under, Brown fails to connect the
“data” with the ban on indoor dining
— which, after all, was a focus of the
commissioners’ letter. In a subse-
quent paragraph she refers to the
“scientifi c modeling that predicted in-
creased deaths and hospitalizations
if we didn’t enter Extreme Risk,” but
again without offering a scintilla of
evidence that banning indoor dining,
among the many other restrictions
imposed on counties at extreme risk,
is a signifi cant vector of the virus.
Indeed, what we’ve heard from state
and county offi cials, during the cur-
rent and previous surges in infec-
tions, is that the biggest problems are
private social gatherings, not restau-
rants and bars.
Is the “scientifi c modeling” the
governor cited so sophisticated
that it can determine, for instance,
how many of those 180 lives will
be spared because restaurants and
bars in Baker County can’t have
indoor dining? Did the computers
consider the possibility that people
who ordered takeout meals gathered
to eat their meals with other people
in a setting that was more likely to
spread the virus than inside a res-
taurant, where masks are required
and the ventilation system is more
effective than in a typical home?
Instead of details, the governor
asks that we simply accept that it
was a simple matter of imposing
restrictions or allowing 180 people
to die — that a matter as complex as
the individual decisions of a couple
million people in 15 counties can be
distilled to two concrete, indisputable
outcomes.
The governor notes that she
worked with the legislature to
“secure $20 million in urgent re-
lief funding for Oregon businesses
impacted by Extreme Risk.” That
will be benefi cial to some businesses,
although the money is hardly likely
to be a panacea for the thousands of
businesses affected in 15 of Oregon’s
36 counties.
But again, this misses the point
of the commissioners’ letter, which
merely asks the governor to justify
restrictions that fall so heavily on a
specifi c business sector. It would be
much wiser, not to mention fi scally re-
sponsible, to save that $20 million for
other needs rather than spending it
to help businesses that needn’t have
been harmed in the fi rst place.
Of course no reasonable person ex-
pected the governor, upon reading the
commissioners’ letter — along with
similar criticisms from other quarters
about moving 15 counties to extreme
risk — would immediately admit her
mistake and reverse the decision.
But it’s perfectly reasonable to
expect the governor to answer an
earnest question — what evidence
shows that banning indoor dining
will have a signifi cant benefi t in
curbing the spread of COVID-19 —
with something more concrete than
cliché-larded references to Oregon
as a “special place” and the “brighter
days” to come.
Perhaps the most galling passage
in Brown’s letter is this: “As Governor,
I chose to save lives ...”
The implication is that people who
disagree with her decisions don’t
want to save lives. This is patroniz-
ing, insulting and patently absurd.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
City Council’s cavalier attitude
toward vaccination rates
Please extend my appreciation to Samantha
O’Conner for the article she wrote about the
April 27 Baker City Council meeting.
The article showed Beverly Calder’s cour-
age in insisting on addressing the Council’s
responsibility to set an example for dealing
with this community’s Corona crisis, especially
vaccination hesitancy.
Except for Councilors Sells and Spriet,
Mayor McQuisten and four other councilors
are taking a very cavalier attitude toward the
fact that many of our citizens are not getting
vaccinated. The Council is thereby condoning
citizens not doing what’s necessary for our
community to reach herd immunity. Such an
attitude will lead to further spread of the virus
and its variants and to unnecessary suffering
and deaths.
Mayor McQuisten, rather than leading dur-
ing this time of crisis, rather fl ippantly said it’s
not the Council’s place to act as “nannies” for
residents. How disgraceful!
Gary Dielman
Baker City
Local residents have the power
to help businesses survive
If I hear one more person complaining
about our poor local businesses and how they
are suffering while these same individuals
refuse to mask up, keep a safe distance or quit
having parties that turn into super spreader
events, I am going to lose it!
What is wrong with you people? Don’t you
understand that YOU have had the power all
along to minimize this? YOU can help local
businesses stay open. All you have to do is
wear a mask, social distance, get vaccinated,
and quit having those lovely little family
gatherings for a while until this thing is under
control. If you don’t want to mask up and keep
your distance, then stay home! You sound
like a bunch of spoiled little brats demanding
another candy bar.
Asking too much? Apparently, because too
many of you are not bothering. If you don’t
want to participate in resolving this dreadful
disease, then for God’s sake, keep your mouths
shut. You have no right to complain when you
refuse to be part of the solution.
YOU are putting local businesses in the red.
YOU are responsible for the spread of
coronavirus.
Quit using Governor Brown as your scape-
goat. She’s trying to save lives across the state
and you are not making it any easier. Guide-
lines have been established and there are
several million of us that must cooperate now.
This is not about your rights.
This is about your choices.
Choose to be part of the solution and help
our local businesses survive.
Cindy Birko
Baker City
A simple way to express attitudes
about border change
Mr. Deschner has written a well-reasoned
and entertaining letter concerning a pro-
posed border change between Oregon and
Idaho. However, the length of the letter may
be intimidating to those people to whom he
refers in his comment about Idaho’s welcome
sign alongside the freeway. A simple acronym
is already in place as the state’s name which
proclaims the attitude projected by the border
change idea and its supporters — I’m Dis-
gruntled And Hate Oregon.
Buck Pilkenton
McEwen
OTHER VIEWS
Schools shouldn’t police
kids’ online lives, usually
Editorial from The Los Angeles Times:
In a case that began with a teenager’s
Snapchat rant against her cheerleading
squad, the Supreme Court on Wednesday
considered whether and when a school can
punish students for what they say online
when they aren’t in school. We hope that the
court will say: very rarely.
In 2017 a student known in court fi lings as
B.L. was upset when she failed to make the
varsity cheerleading team at Mahanoy Area
High School in Pennsylvania. While hanging
out with a friend at a local store, she took a
photo of herself and her friend raising their
middle fi ngers and posted it on Snapchat. Ac-
companying the photo was this message: “F—
school, F— softball, F— cheer, F— everything.”
Snapchat is designed to delete messages
once they’re seen, but a screenshot of B.L.’s
rant was shown to her cheerleading coaches.
She was suspended from the junior varsity
team. B.L. sued, alleging that the school had
violated her free speech rights. She prevailed
in the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in
Philadelphia, which ruled that the school
couldn’t punish her for “off-campus speech.”
In Tinker v. Des Moines School District, a
landmark 1969 decision involving students
who came to school wearing black armbands
to protest the Vietnam War, the court declared
that students in public schools don’t leave
their free speech rights at the “schoolhouse
gate.” But it also indicated that schools could
punish students for speech at school that
posed the threat of “substantial disruption of
or material interference with school activities.”
At Wednesday’s argument the justices wres-
tled with the question of whether the advent
of the internet had moved the schoolhouse
gate — and the ability of schools to punish
some student speech — into cyberspace.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed that
“nothing in Tinker suggests ... that it applies
outside of the school environment.” Neverthe-
less, Justice Stephen G. Breyer indicated that
the court could fi nd that schools have some
authority over disruptive or dangerous speech
outside the school. He added, however, that
judges should remember that “it’s outside the
school, and that’s primarily the domain of the
parents.”
We agree that there are rare instances in
which a school properly can punish students
for online utterances, such as threats of
violence or incessant bullying that turn the
classroom into a hostile learning environ-
ment.
But the court shouldn’t erase the legal
distinction between how students behave
at school and how they act at home — even
if they’re logging on to the internet in their
bedroom to complain that their teacher is
a moron or that homework is an abomina-
tion. As B.L.’s attorney David Cole eloquently
put it, students shouldn’t have to “carry the
schoolhouse on their backs in terms of speech
rights everywhere they go.”
Letters to the editor
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