A8 THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Time may be
up for Oregon’s
state song
D
oes Oregon need a new state song?
State Rep. Jack Zika, R-Red-
mond, is among legislators spon-
soring a bill to change it. The bill
he is a sponsor of — House Bill
2329 — directs the secretary of
state to develop a public process
for coming up with a new one.
Another bill, House Concurrent
Resolution 11, just rewrites the
existing lyrics to the song.
Let’s start with the lyrics:
“Land of the Empire Builders,
Land of the Golden West;
Conquered and held by free
men, Fairest and the best.
Onward and upward ever, For-
ward and on, and on;
Hail to thee, Land of the He-
roes, My Oregon.
Land of the rose and sunshine,
Land of the summer’s breeze;
Laden with health and vigor,
Fresh from the western seas.
Blest by the blood of martyrs,
Land of the setting sun;
Hail to thee, Land of Promise,
My Oregon.”
Zika’s bill says the lyrics “are
entrenched in racism, that fail
to recognize the suffering of Na-
tive people who were forcibly re-
moved from this state and that
fail to recognize the pain and suf-
fering of Black people who were
subject to exclusion laws target-
ing Black people.” And it says the
process to select a new one “is to
be inclusive to people of all back-
grounds, races and ethnicities
who call Oregon home.”
The proposed new lyrics from
HCR 11 are:
“Land of Majestic Mountains,
Land of the Great Northwest;
Forests and rolling rivers,
Grandest and the best.
Onward and upward ever, For-
ward and on, and on;
Hail to thee, Land of Heroes,
My Oregon.
Land of the rose and sunshine,
Land of the summer’s breeze;
Laden with health and vigor,
Fresh from the Western seas.
Blessed by the love of freedom,
Land of the setting sun;
Hail to thee, Land of Promise,
My Oregon.”
If Oregon is going to change
its state song, we like Zika’s ap-
proach better. Let’s see what Or-
egonians can come up with. The
suggestion in HCR 11 is just one
idea. The Legislature should open
up the process to the public, not
just decide based on one sugges-
tion that only modifies the lyr-
ics. Tell your legislator what you
think or write us a letter to the
editor.
Does Hernandez issue
help women speak up?
O
regon needs an honest di-
alogue about sexism in the
workplace. Firings and res-
ignations of abusive men are a start.
The planned resignation of state
Rep. Diego Hernandez, D-Port-
land, over the weekend may have
been just a step ahead of Hernan-
dez becoming the first legislator
expelled from the Legislature.
An independent investigation
released in January found he ha-
rassed and created a hostile work-
place at the state Capitol for three
women.
The investigation of Hernan-
dez began in May 2020. House
Speaker Tina Kotek urged him
to resign that same month and to
get help — before the investiga-
tion was complete. That may seem
premature, though Kotek was the
supervisor of one of the women
whose relationship with Hernan-
dez was investigated.
The investigation seemed to
take too long. Nine months. That
seems too long for the women,
Hernandez and voters. During
that period, Hernandez won re-
election. Why did it take so long?
In part, it took two months for
Hernandez to turn over docu-
ments. Hernandez ended up dis-
puting the investigation’s findings.
He had just filed a lawsuit against
the Legislature for $1 million.
Then he resigned.
If Hernandez got what he de-
served, did the women? The state
Capitol is not a big place. Will they
get frozen out of some jobs or take
a hit to their careers? Does this
incident inspire women to come
forward or keep silent about what
they believe is harassment?
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
My Nickel’s Worth
Abbott and the Green New Deal
I haven’t had a really good laugh
out loud over the past year until I
heard Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican
of Texas, slam the Green New Deal.
The crisis in Texas has shown that
the state’s existing power structure was
never designed or upgraded properly
to deal with the possibility of extreme
cold weather.
I can’t surmise if he thinks his con-
stituents live in such a misinforma-
tion bubble that they don’t realize that
the Green New Deal is a climate pro-
posal, a House resolution passed last
year (H.RES. 109) and not actual leg-
islation. It is unconscionable that an
elected official would lie so blatantly
to his constituents at a time when
many millions are without electricity,
water and running low on food.
— Barbara Craig, Bend
We need more trails
I don’t believe that permits, restricted
access and fees are necessary to limit
and disburse crowds on hiking trails.
I have lived in Central Oregon for
30 years and hike two to four times a
week all year. During my time here,
the population of Bend and Deschutes
County more than quadrupled, but
the U.S. Forest Service, to my knowl-
edge, has not added any new hiking
trails in the Cascades and national for-
est. Rimrock Trail trailhead parking
has been improved, but hiking trails
existed already. Some trails were actu-
ally closed off during that time and ac-
cess to some was made more difficult.
Taking into consideration that in
addition to population growth we also
have hordes of tourists using the hik-
ing trails, it should not be surprising
that trails are very crowded without
addition of new hiking trails.
The Bureau of Land Management
has done a much better job. It has
added quite a few new hiking trails, so
crowds are minimized. As residents,
we are paying the price for population
growth and tourism growth with di-
minished quality of life!
— Hanne Madsen, Bend
‘The Great Gatsby’ and now
I recently read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
“The Great Gatsby,” a novel set in the
mid-1920s. Toward the end of the
story, Nick Carraway, the narrator,
makes the observation about some
characters he’s come to know.
“They were careless people. …
They smashed up things and crea-
tures and then retreated back into
their money or their vast carelessness,
or whatever it was the kept them to-
gether and let other people clean up
the mess they had made.”
Have we experienced this over the
last four years? What do you think?
— Toni Clifford, Redmond
BLM was right to raise fees
As an environmentalist and fiscal
conservative I applaud the Bureau of
Land Management for raising access
fees on the Deschutes and John Day
rivers to cover their cost to manage
the program.
They should use the same policy
on cattle grazing as they do for people
who want to access our Wild and Sce-
nic Rivers. Last I checked, the BLM
received $1.35 per cow per month to
graze and despoil the habitat along
these rivers. BLM’s cost to adminis-
ter the national grazing program was
closer to $20 per cow per month. Why
are we subsidizing the degradation of
one of Oregon’s most precious eco-
nomic and wildlife resources? Why
are cows treated better than people on
our wild rivers? At least charge graz-
ing fees that approximate the cost to
administer that program. In the future
they should also consider a fee to pay
for the restoration work necessary to
preserve the wild and scenic values.
— Craig Lacy, Bend
Homeowners need space
I am writing to strongly object to
some of the housing solutions pro-
posed by Karon Johnson, land use
chair for the Old Farm District neigh-
borhood association, in her letter
published by The Bulletin on Friday
Feb. 12. Her No. 1 solution “Elimi-
nate single family detached houses,” is
a great idea only if you want to cover
every inch of buildable ground with
apartments. There are lots of exam-
ples of what this looks like.
Ms. Johnson states “The 6-foot
separation between single family de-
tached houses is a waste of space.” I
disagree. We are not lab rats being
jammed into cages or convicts living
in cells. Even Johnson admits people
need green trees and space. Person-
ally, I don’t want to hear my neigh-
bors making love on the other side
of my bedroom wall in the middle of
the night.
—Dave Stalker, Bend
Letters policy
Guest columns
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What 500K COVID-19 deaths mean a year after their projection
BY DAVID VON DREHLE
The Washington Post
T
he data spread like Soviet-era
samizdat, the secret anti-pro-
paganda writings used to pass
from hand-to-hand in the USSR
among brave souls hungry for the
truth. Participants in a webinar or-
ganized by the American Hospi-
tal Association had downloaded a
shocking presentation by U.S. ep-
idemiologists. They applied their
knowledge to the novel coronavirus
spreading from provincial China.
The material spread through a rap-
idly expanding circle of dismay — a
virus warning gone viral.
This was a year ago, February
2020. The number of U.S. deaths at-
tributed to the virus was zero. (Later,
investigators would discover that at
least two American victims had been
killed by the middle of that month.)
Of all the data in the presentation,
one slide stood out, driving the ap-
palled circulation. James Lawler, an
epidemiologist at the University of
Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha
— one of the centers of U.S. Ebola re-
sponse — had run the numbers and
projected that the novel coronavi-
rus could kill some 480,000 or more
Americans in the coming year.
Half a million people dead. It bog-
gled the mind: Could it be true?
What if it were?
That would be more Americans
dead than the military members who
were killed in World War II. It would
approach the equivalent of every-
one living in Wyoming. A thousand
deaths a day would not come close to
half a million. I have no way of prov-
ing this, apart from my own memory
of the mood of a year ago — when
crowds thronged another Mardi Gras
and plans were ripening for another
lusty spring break — but I don’t
think 1 American in 10 imagined
that such a grim reaping lay ahead.
Now a year has passed, and more
than 494,000 Americans have died
of complications from COVID-19.
The novel coronavirus is likely al-
ready multiplying inside the unlucky
person fated to be the 500,000th to
die. Lawler’s projection a year ago,
launched like a rocket in that fateful
webinar, has come to ground pre-
cisely on target — a chronicle of half
a million deaths foretold.
This terrible number is full of
meanings. Unpacking them all — ex-
amining them, learning from them,
arguing over them — will take some
time. Certainly, the number says
something profound about arithme-
tic. If the virus kept spreading as it
was observed to spread and killing
as it was known to kill, then math
would do the rest, grinding away at
human lives until the full number
was reached. Lawler was no vision-
ary; he was a man willing to face the
arithmetic without flinching.
To change a mathematical out-
come, one needs to only change an
input. Clearly, we failed in the effort
to do so. All the pleading and argu-
ments of pandemic politics did not
alter the variables of Lawler’s compu-
tation; too little was done to slow the
spread or lessen the lethality. As a re-
sult, the forecast came fatally true.
So from the rock of arithmetic
comes another meaning. The num-
ber 500,000 represents a choice —
though people might disagree over
exactly what was chosen. Some
chose not to believe in the number.
The belief that COVID-19 deaths
are exaggerated is sufficiently wide-
spread to be the Lie of the Year for
the publication PolitiFact. As dis-
turbing as that is, it might not be
worse than the other choice: a deci-
sion by society that all those deaths
were acceptable.
We were warned. Lawler and oth-
ers provided projections that came
true again and again, bringing us
to the half-million mark like clock-
work. Despite these warnings, some
number of employers did not make
their workplaces safe; some num-
ber of families refused to defer their
reunions; some number of revelers
chose not to keep a safe distance or
wear masks. On some level, some
number of Americans looked at the
forecast of a half-million fatalities in
a year’s time and embraced it, rather
than change their routines to alter
the arithmetic.
The same is true of many other
countries, should that be a consola-
tion to you.
Finally, the number contains
oceans of grief. For the loved ones
of the dead, ignoring or denying
the number is not an option. The
COVID-19 toll is not some huge and
faceless mass; it is the accumulation
of 500,000 specific individuals, each
with a name, a way of laughing, a
favorite song, a life story. Many of
them were elderly, but the elderly
are grieved. Many of them were in
poor health, but the infirm can be
missed. The pain has a peculiar qual-
ity, sharpened by the very facts of the
pandemic: funerals that could not be
held; wakes that could not be con-
vened; hugs that could not be shared.
An average of 1,370 per day. An
average of 57 per hour. Approxi-
mately one per minute, every minute
of a miserable year.
e e
David Von Drehle writes a twice-weekly column
for The Washington Post.