A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Keeping around
8-man football
O
n Saturday, Nov. 27, 2021, one of the more
exciting high school football games in
many years played out on the grass at Baker Bull-
dog Memorial Stadium in Baker City.
But if the Oregon School Activities Association
(OSAA) makes a change that its football com-
mittee has proposed, that thrilling game between
Powder Valley and Adrian — Adrian rallied to
win 46-38 — might be the last of its kind.
On Dec. 20 the OSAA committee proposed to
eliminate the 8-man football format that many
Class 1A schools, including Powder Valley, have
played in for decades.
Th e 8-man category would be replaced by
divisions of 9-man and 6-man leagues. Larger
schools, including Class 4A Baker, would contin-
ue to play standard 11-man football.
Th e committee’s proposal would move Powder
Valley, along with Wallowa and Joseph, into a
6-man league.
Josh Cobb, the Badgers’ head coach, doesn’t
think much of that plan.
“Eight-man just feels right,” he said recently. “I
see 6-man as a good thing for schools that truly
don’t have the student body.”
Th at includes Pine Eagle, Huntington and
Burnt River high schools in Baker County, which
already play 6-man football. Th at’s reasonable
based on their enrollments — Huntington (24),
Pine Eagle (53) and Burnt River (20).
But Powder Valley, with an enrollment of 71,
and Adrian (79), can comfortably fi eld 8-man
squads.
“I don’t want to play 6-man,” Cobb said. “We
have 30 kids on the team.”
Although OSAA would allow Powder Valley
and other schools slotted into a 6-man league to
request a move to a 9-man league, the current
8-man format is working well.
And it’s by far the favored format among the
schools involved.
Brad Dunten, Powder Valley’s athletic director,
recently surveyed Class 1A schools in an eff ort to
gather data to be presented at the OSAA commit-
tee’s meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 5 in Wilsonville.
Of the 95 schools he surveyed, athletic direc-
tors or other administrators from 75 responded
to a question about whether they preferred an
8-man or 9-man format. Of those, 71 chose
8-man (94.7%).
To the question of whether they would like to
continue the current formats, with 6-man, 8-man
and 11-man leagues, 85.5% of the administrators
said yes. Th e same percentage of respondents
are opposed to the committee’s plan for 6-man,
9-man and 11-man leagues.
Dunten’s survey also asked school offi cials to
list their reasons for preferring one model over
another. Responses from those who want to re-
tain the 8-man format included (Dunten’s report
didn’t include the name of the school or adminis-
trator):
• “8-man is established, available in surround-
ing states for scheduling.”
• “8-man has a long tradition in Oregon with
neighboring states that use the same format. Go-
ing away from tradition and what our neighbors
use seems unnecessary.”
• “8-man has served large 1A schools well
competitively, however it would not enhance or
provide any opportunities to change course for a
9-man model.”
In a Jan. 3 email that includes results of the
survey, Dunten wrote: “It seems 8-man football is
alive and doing well in the State of Oregon.”
Credit to OSAA for trying to make sure that all
schools, regardless of enrollment, can fi eld foot-
ball teams. But the current system, with 6-man,
8-man and 11-man leagues, is meeting the needs
of the smaller schools, making possible classic
games such as the Powder Valley-Adrian state
title contest.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
COLUMN
Signs of light amid the gloom
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Nothing keeps sleep at bay these days
like huffing up a few articles about de-
mocracy’s doomsday.
Barton Gellman, America’s ranking
Cassandra, anticipated “the death of the
body politic” in a recent essay in The At-
lantic. Donald Trump is staging a come-
back, Gellman wrote, and crafting ways
to subvert the vote if it doesn’t go his way.
If Trump makes it back to the Oval Of-
fice via an epochal cheat, the levees of de-
mocracy will indeed have been breached.
Injustice will roll down like a mighty
stream.
“There is a clear and present danger,”
Gellman prophesied, “that American de-
mocracy will not withstand the destruc-
tive forces that are now converging upon
it.”
Indeed, destructive forces — specifi-
cally, my own brain-gnawing panic — re-
liably converge upon me at 4 a.m. Dan-
ger, death, destruction. And, of course,
disease. For an extra shudder of predawn
dread, I study the hockey-stick surge in
COVID cases. A COVID chart and a Bar-
ton Gellman audiobook could keep me
buzzing on high alert for days on end.
Cassandra, let’s recall, was right. But it’s
also prudent to rest up if we’re going to
brace for America’s Armageddon. So I of-
fer these thoughts for the new year not as
a guarantee of hope, but to slow my own
insomniac roll. And maybe yours.
First off, there are true signs of light in
the gloom.
Americans are back to work, and wages
are high. Unemployment in the U.S. is
dramatically down, to 4.2% as of last
month. The stock market is buoyant, and,
in spite of widespread chatter about rising
prices, retail sales rose 8.5% year-over-
year between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24, accord-
ing to Mastercard.
Stimulus checks and child tax credits
lightened burdens for tens of millions of
families. As for inflation, Gus Faucher,
chief economist at PNC Financial Ser-
vices Group, predicts it will slow in the
coming year.
And don’t count American democracy
out yet. Trump’s Drive to End Democracy
is not yet a juggernaut. His promiscu-
ous endorsements of puppet candidates
in state and local races, where they could
help him overturn election results in
2024, have yielded mediocre results. He
is 0 for 2 in congressional endorsements,
and many of his other down-ballot dar-
lings are lagging in polls. Even the GOP’s
big winner in Virginia, Gov.-elect Glenn
Youngkin, got there by distancing himself
from the Marquis of MAGA.
On V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy In-
dex, which rates the political freedom of
nations on metrics like rule of law and
civil liberties, we aren’t (of course) hitting
the valedictorian marks of freaking Den-
mark, but the U.S. is still humming along,
roughly tied with Japan.
Meanwhile the U.S. Justice Department
is, if not devouring the long-running an-
ti-democratic attempt to thwart President
Joe Biden and install Trump as our for-
ever president, at least eating away at it.
In Michigan in December a federal
judge imposed sanctions on nine Big Lie
lawyers, including Trump pit bulls Sid-
ney Powell and L. Lin Wood, over their
the “historic and profound abuse of the
judicial process” expressed in their manic
lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election.
They could still face disbarment.
What’s more, the Justice Department
has charged at least 727 participants with
crimes related to the Jan. 6 insurrection,
and criminally indicted Stephen K. Ban-
non for blowing off a subpoena from the
House Jan. 6 committee. Mark Meadows,
another Trump factotum, has been held
in contempt of Congress for the same rea-
son. Both men could face prison time.
Then there’s the pandemic. A whop-
ping 73% of eligible Americans have had
at least one shot of the vaccine. That’s
compared to, oh, just about 0% last year
at this time. What’s more, the vax flat-
tened curves for the first deadly variants,
and omicron — the one currently laying
Americans low — looks to be far less le-
thal. A recent data analysis published in
Stat News showed “a continuing decline
in death rates, despite a radical increase
in cases.”
None of this is to say the end of the
world is not nigh. But our dread may be
less related to facts than mood. Psychia-
trist Simon Dein argues convincingly in
“COVID-19 and the Apocalypse,” a fas-
cinating recent journal article, that pan-
demics inevitably breed apocalyptic nar-
ratives. In plague times, religious people
are apt to double down on the Rapture,
while secular people see sociopolitical
or climate-crisis doomsdays. And yet we
survive.
So yes, the nation has suffered a huge
number of casualties from COVID. And
we have sustained a serious blow to de-
mocracy with Trump’s effort to disenfran-
chise and defraud us.
But key to those statements is the use of
the past tense. We have suffered. We have
sustained. British pediatrician and psy-
choanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote,
“There are moments when a patient
needs to be told that the breakdown, fear
of which is wrecking his life, has already
occurred.” Americans need to be told this
now.
The process of taking stock of how
much we have endured and, despite that,
how well we have fared through it all can
itself allay anxiety.
Let’s be impressed, all things consid-
ered. We’ve home-schooled kids, learned
to socialize in masks, endured quaran-
tines and gotten inoculated; we’ve econ-
omized, cared for others, sought and
rethought work; we’ve drawn close to
loved ones and consoled the bereaved. We
voted in the fairest election in American
history — and, in spite of some, um, chal-
lenges, we inaugurated a new president.
The breakdown happened, and, as a
certain anthem goes, the flag was still
there. Sometimes, that minor miracle
must be enough to get us through the
night.
Virginia Heffernan is a Wired
magazine columnist and host of the
podcast “This Is Critical.”
COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020. Nearly
820,000 Americans have died from the
disease, which is considerably more than
those thought to have died during the
1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic. And
with a second winter surge well under-
way, the dying will continue into 2022.
But there is some hope as data trickle in
about omicron. Early studies out of Brit-
ain and South Africa and initial data from
U.S. hospitals support what health care
professionals have been reporting anec-
dotally for weeks — that omicron appears
less likely than earlier strains to result in
serious illness and hospitalization, espe-
cially for vaccinated people.
If the data hold, it would be a tremen-
dous relief given that omicron replicates
and spreads with terrifying speed, even
among vaccinated people. And it could
mean that the coronavirus is on the path
to a mild, endemic state that would put an
end to the pandemic.
Now, here’s where we temper this
sliver of hope with stark reality. Even if
omicron is just half as lethal (as some
data suggest) it is still quite deadly —
just not as much as we feared. And even
if it’s relatively mild for many of those
who are fully vaccinated, tens of mil-
lions of Americans remain unvacci-
nated, including children under 5 who
are not yet cleared for COVID-19 shots
and whose numbers are increasing in
hospitals.
It’s nice to have a tiny bit of good news
as 2022 begins in another round of can-
celed plans and overtaxed hospitals.
We should use this occasion to double
down on public health protections, such
as placing vaccination and testing re-
strictions on domestic air travel, and to
increase vaccination and booster shots.
The pandemic may not be over, but it’s
possible that with effort, 2022 may really
be a better, less deadly year.
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from The Los Angeles Times:
The terrible year of 2020 ended with a
glimmer of hope. While the United States
and California were in the grip of the
worst surge yet of the pandemic, the first
vaccines against COVID-19 were being
distributed to health care workers and
plans were underway for the largest im-
munization rollout in the nation’s history.
At that point, it looked like 2021 would
be the year that the U.S. got a handle on
the pandemic.
Alas, it was not to be. Too many people
rejected the free vaccinations and chose
to flout simple infection-control meth-
ods like mask-wearing, leaving the door
open for the more infectious delta vari-
ant. Then, in November, the world was
shaken by the emergence of an even more
infectious strain of the coronavirus, omi-
cron, which has quickly overtaken delta
to become the dominant strain in the U.S.
In the end, more Americans died of
CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS
President Joe Biden: The White House, 1600
Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500; 202-456-
1111; to send comments, go to www.whitehouse.gov.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley: D.C. office: 313 Hart Senate
Office Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 20510;
202-224-3753; fax 202-228-3997. Portland office: One
World Trade Center, 121 S.W. Salmon St. Suite 1250,
Portland, OR 97204; 503-326-3386; fax 503-326-2900.
Baker City office, 1705 Main St., Suite 504, 541-278-
1129; merkley.senate.gov.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden: D.C. office: 221 Dirksen Senate
Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224-
5244; fax 202-228-2717. La Grande office: 105 Fir St.,
No. 210, La Grande, OR 97850; 541-962-7691; fax, 541-
963-0885; wyden.senate.gov.
U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (2nd District): D.C. office: 2182
Rayburn Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20515,
202-225-6730; fax 202-225-5774. La Grande office:
1211 Washington Ave., La Grande, OR 97850; 541-624-
2400, fax, 541-624-2402; walden.house.gov.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum:
Justice Building, Salem, OR 97301-4096; 503-378-
4400.
Oregon Legislature: Legislative documents and
information are available online at www.leg.state.
or.us.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State Capitol, Salem,
OR 97310; 503-378-3111; www.governor.oregon.gov.
State Sen. Lynn Findley (R-Ontario): Salem office:
900 Court St. N.E., S-403, Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-
1730. Email: Sen.LynnFindley@oregonlegislature.gov
Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read: oregon.
treasurer@ost.state.or.us; 350 Winter St. NE, Suite 100,
Salem OR 97301-3896; 503-378-4000.
State Rep. Mark Owens (R-Crane): Salem office: 900
Court St. N.E., H-475, Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-1460.
Email: Rep.MarkOwens@oregonlegislature.gov