The BulleTin • Friday, april 30, 2021 A5
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Beat COVID-19 by
getting vaccinated
T
here is a way out of COVID-19 surges. Get vaccinated.
Plenty of vaccine is available. The supply keeps rolling in.
If you’re 16 and older, get your shot. Please, get your shot.
It’s the best shot we have of bringing this under control.
Who the virus is striking in De-
schutes County has shifted. There’s a
very high concentration of the new
cases among younger adults and
teens.
Deschutes County health officials
believe it’s at least partially related to
people gathering and not wearing
masks.
Vaccination rates also play a part.
In Deschutes County, the vaccina-
tion rate is as high as 90% for people
75 and older. Among people ages 20
to 24, it’s only at about 25%. Some
of that disparity is related to the way
the vaccination program was rolled
out.
Most young people are able to
recover from the virus much more
easily than older people. But when
they get it, they can spread it. It also
might get nasty.
County health officials pointed
out in a briefing to Deschutes
County commissioners on Wednes-
day that 1 in 5 previously healthy
young adults weren’t back to normal
14 to 21 days after testing positive.
Some experience months of debili-
tating symptoms, such as fatigue and
fuzzy thinking.
Michael Johnson, a senior data
scientist for the St. Charles Health
System, told commissioners that the
news is not all bad. The proportion
of people with COVID-19 being hos-
pitalized has declined by about 40%.
There are, though, two unfortu-
nate caveats. The severity of condi-
tion for those who are hospitalized
has ticked up. And of those hos-
pitalized with COVID-19 in the
St. Charles Health System, about
10% die. That’s been a fairly consis-
tent mortality rate throughout the
pandemic, Johnson said. It’s unset-
tling. As of Wednesday there had
been 78 COVID-19 deaths at the
hospitals in the system.
The county has only experienced
very few of what medical profession-
als call breakthrough cases. That’s
when somebody who was vacci-
nated gets COVID-19.
Three patients who were vacci-
nated in Deschutes County had se-
vere enough COVID-19 cases they
ended up in the hospital. They were
quite elderly, Johnson said, and none
died.
With allergies kicking in this
spring it can be difficult to figure out
if a cough is COVID-19 or allergies.
First of all, if you are worried, don’t
listen to editorial writers, call your
health provider. But there are a cou-
ple things to remember: body aches,
chills, fever and loss of sense of taste
or smell are indicators it might be
COVID-19. If you ever have short-
ness of breath that is not due to a
chronic condition, call your doctor
or 911.
Starting next week, the county is
going to start to ramp down its mass
clinic at the Deschutes County fair-
grounds. Vaccines will still be widely
available at other clinics put on by
the county, at Mosaic Medical, at
pharmacies and more.
Want to get vaccinated? Have
questions? Go to deschutes.org/
covid19vaccine.
You can also call the county health
department at 541-699-5109. They
are happy to help.
And by the way, the county still
needs volunteers to help with vac-
cination clinics. Volunteer to help
them help us all.
Don’t wait in line at
the DMV; go online
A
great breakthrough is that
starting next week many Or-
egonians won’t have to go to
the DMV.
You will be able to do things like
renew your driver’s license online.
A new license will then be mailed to
you. The program is scheduled to
begin on May 5.
If you are one of those people who
haven’t been able to get an appoint-
ment at the DMV, this could be the
answer. And by taking some of the
load off the DMV offices, it should
help those who do need to visit an
office.
The Legislature does seem likely
to extend a grace period for driv-
ers whose licenses have recently ex-
pired. And the federal government
has also pushed out the deadline for
REAL ID to 2023. REAL ID licenses
will be one of the few forms of li-
censes acceptable for doing things
such as boarding a flight or going to
a federal facility.
Go to oregon.gov/odot/dmv for
more information.
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
Douglass for Bend schools
I’m writing to offer my strong en-
dorsement for Carrie McPherson
Douglass in her reelection campaign
for Bend-La Pine School Board. I’ve
worked in education with Carrie for
over a decade. Simply put, Carrie has
the wisdom, tenacity and effectiveness
we need on the school board.
Unlike her opponent, Carrie has
been a leader through the pandemic.
As chair of the Bend-La Pine board,
she’s helped shepherd us through the
COVID-19 crisis, working tirelessly
to ensure Bend-La Pine was the first
large district in Oregon to safely re-
open schools.
Unlike her opponent, Carrie has
the professional experience needed
to lead from Day 1. She’s been a
teacher, school system leader, and is
co-founder and co-CEO of a national
education nonprofit that helps school
boards in cities across the country im-
prove public education.
Unlike her opponent, Carrie can’t
put more than $25,000 of family
money into her campaign, and she
doesn’t live in an 8,000-square-foot
home in the Highlands.
Carrie was born and raised in Bend
and graduated from Bend-La Pine
Schools. Carrie’s opponent moved to
Bend in 2018 from the Bay Area and
has no professional experience in ed-
ucation.
This election matters. Carrie is the
right choice. That’s why Carrie has
such strong support from Bend-La
Pine teachers, parents and commu-
nity members. Please show the special
interests backing Carrie’s opponent
that the Bend-La Pine board isn’t for
sale.
— Ethan Gray, Bend
Provide adequate parking
This will be the first time I’ve writ-
ten a letter to an editor. This idea of
removing the requirement for devel-
opers to provide adequate parking for
residents is absurd because it lacks
forethought and proper planning.
Yes, this has been tried in many
large cities in the U.S. I wonder how
that has worked out. In one neigh-
borhood I know of in Concord, Cal-
ifornia, residents living with reduced
parking availability have been forced
to walk home in the dark after work
because they had to park blocks away
from their homes. They have risked
parking in red zones and in other
people’s reserved spaces out of des-
peration, sometimes finding their cars
towed the next morning.
This idea places the cart before the
horse. Provide reasonable access to
public transportation. Provide safe
walking and biking routes (not like the
bike lane on the Bend Parkway, which
is dangerous, littered with bike-un-
friendly gravel and almost entirely un-
used, in my observation). First, doc-
ument a measured increase in use of
these alternatives, then approve your
reduced parking requirement.
Please think this through, council-
ors, before you vote.
— Elizabeth Warnimont, Bend
Republicans are back to slow
Republicans cut a deal on April 15
to get representation on the redistrict-
ing committee by agreeing to stop
slowing things down or walking out
as explained in The Bulletin: “Deal
gives GOP more redistricting power
to speed up bills: Democrats have
agreed to give up an advantage in re-
drawing the state’s political districts
for the next 10 years in exchange for
a commitment from Republicans to
stop blocking bills in the Oregon Leg-
islature with delay tactics.”
Now, Republicans are back to their
old tricks, asking for the reading of
all bills. Slowing down the work of
the Legislature is so hurtful, and your
promise lasted only 13 days!
As for the reason, no one likes the
shutdown, but if we keep complain-
ing instead of complying, we will keep
going around the same cycle over and
over again. The graphs in the April
29 Bulletin show the surge in cases in
Deschutes County plain as day. The
reason: “if we don’t act now, doctors,
nurses, hospitals, and other health
care providers in Oregon will be
stretched to their limits.”
Figure it out! This is needed to stop
the surges and protect health care sys-
tems. Stop being a bunch of babies and
maybe start encouraging people to
get vaccinated. Most of all, get back to
work. The business of the state of Ore-
gon is what you were elected to work.
Your antics may please your base, but it
will lose you the thinking person’s vote.
— Tom Kelley, Sunriver
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Voter turnout is low on purpose; be prepared for more suppression
BY JON GRINSPAN
Special to The Washington Post
I
n the debate over restrictive new
voting laws, many have warned
about what President Joe Biden
called “backsliding into the days of
Jim Crow.” But there is a stronger, sub-
tler parallel: the deliberate discourage-
ment of working-class voters, around
1900, by wealthier Americans scared
that “hordes of native and foreign
barbarians, all armed with the ballot”
would replace them at the polls.
This nearly forgotten panic caused
a century of low turnouts.
Voter participation hasn’t always
been lousy in America: Although for
the past century it has averaged just
56% of eligible voters in presidential
elections, in the second half of the
1800s, an average of 77% of voters
turned out, and often exceeded 80%.
And participation didn’t always cor-
relate with wealth or education. In
our own time, Americans who did
not finish high school vote at less than
half the rate of those with a postgrad-
uate degree. But in the late 19th cen-
tury, poorer voters predominated.
This was still a deeply flawed de-
mocracy, bigoted when it came to
race and gender, but it was surpris-
ingly inclusive across class, boasting
a diverse working-class electorate of
native-born and immigrant voters.
Election days mobilized farmhands,
butchers and streetsweepers — what
Teddy Roosevelt called America’s real
“governing class.”
Meanwhile, the wealthy stayed
home, repeating the mantra “a gentle-
man never votes.”
Those gentlemen finally targeted
working-class politics in the Gilded
Age, fearful about talk of unions,
strikes, maybe even socialism.
Though often hailing from old abo-
litionist families, Northeastern elites
began to argue in the 1880s and ’90s
that they were the new enslaved peo-
ple, with an impoverished, immigrant
electorate as their masters. The Man-
hattan economist Simon Sterne com-
plained (ridiculously) that “our better
class voters, in our larger cities, are as
much disenfranchised … as any plan-
tation negro was anterior to 1860.”
Often, the well-to-do complained
that working-class voters lacked edu-
cation, but at a time when only a pros-
perous minority could afford to finish
high school, let alone college, the class
implications were obvious. These at-
tacks rejected the principle of equality,
as when a writer in The Washington
Post complained that the ballots of “il-
literate foreigners … count as much as
those of college professors.”
The historian Francis Parkman
hissed that “an invasion of peas-
ants” was drowning the republic in a
“muddy tide of ignorance.” Democ-
racy, he asserted, was perpetuating
the notion that “the weakest and most
worthless was a match, by his vote, for
the wisest and best.”
This fight took place as Southern
states were stealing the vote from
African Americans. After the mid-
1870s, America began to backslide
from the principles of equality and
majority rule nationwide. In the
three-quarters of the country outside
the South, however, “reformers” could
not simply disenfranchise their lower
classes. But perhaps, they schemed,
they might make participation unap-
pealing enough to discourage turnout.
Under the guise of “good govern-
ment,” reformers targeted the three
pillars of working-class democracy:
the saloon, the rally and the bal-
lot box. Saloons had served as party
headquarters, intellectual salons and
even polling places for poor voters.
By shutting them down on Election
Day, “reformers” stifled a key institu-
tion. And by introducing permit re-
quirements for demonstrations, they
helped quiet the noisy rallies that had
once energized public opinion.
Most important, states passed new
registration laws and literacy require-
ments, moved polling places into un-
friendly neighborhoods, and most
employers stopped letting their work-
ers take time off to vote. Authorities
switched from the tradition of casting
color-coded ballots in a public box
— to private voting with dense, text-
heavy, government-printed “secret bal-
lots.” None of these changes amounted
to anything like the brutality of Jim
Crow, but they were enacted with what
one pastor called “the secret cause” of
ending “unqualified suffrage.”
Turnout crashed, falling by nearly
one-third from the 1890s through the
1920s, until fewer than half of the eligi-
ble were voting. It fell especially among
populations who were poorer, younger,
immigrants or African Americans.
Election Day in the 19th century was
a holiday. In the 20th century, it re-
quired literacy, identification papers,
education, leave from work and, most
of all, the confidence to move through
elite-dominated political spaces.
The harm to turnout lasted for a
century. While the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 fought racial discrimination in
voting, the discouragements preventing
low-income participation have never
been addressed. In 2020, heated voter
turnout reached 66% for the first time
since 1900. But it’s as if this new engage-
ment triggered some automatic alarm,
and we’re met with renewed talk about
purifying the ballot.
This history shows that even small
discouragements can do grievous
harm to participation. And it reminds
us that we should be prepared for
such suppressions to continue, until
Americans can accept the basic prin-
ciple that there is no such thing as an
“inferior type” of voter.
e e
Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History.