Page 2
The
The INDEPENDENT, May 16, 2012
INDEPENDENT
Published on the first and third Wednesdays of each month
by The Independent, LLC, 725 Bridge St.,
Vernonia, OR 97064. Phone/Fax: 503-429-9410.
Deadline is noon the Friday before each issue.
Publisher Clark McGaugh, clark@the-independent.net
Editor Rebecca McGaugh, rebecca@the-independent.net
Printed on recycled paper with vegetable based dyes
Opinion
Remember their sacrifice
Memorial Day will be observed throughout the coun-
try on Monday, May 28. Those observances will vary in
style, with people finding their own way to honor our
heroes.
There will be many thoughtful and sincere consider-
ations of the day’s original intent – to remember and
honor those who answered the call to arms for our
country, and gave their lives in that service. Paying
tribute to those who gave all they had to preserve our
rights, freedoms, and way of life is important. The local
remembrance will be at Vernonia Memorial Cemetery,
at 11:00 a.m.
There will be flags on the graves of our veterans,
and in many towns there will be concerts, parades and
speeches. If you attend a Memorial Day parade, clap
loudly for all of those heroes, they deserve it. Also,
please remove your hat and stand in respect when the
color guard passes by; it is painful at any time to see
this simple recognition of our national symbol ignored
by so many, but especially so on Memorial Day.
Hopefully, Memorial Day also reminds us that war
should be a last resort, to be used only when all other
options have been exhausted. The impacts of war ex-
tend far beyond the battlefield, affecting people individ-
ually and nations collectively, long after the weapons
have been silenced.
Sometimes it is a necessary evil, but too often it’s
not. We should be wary of anyone who talks in a cav-
alier manner of going to war, as though it will be cheap
and easy and painless. It is never any of those things.
War drains reason out of what passes for civilization,
but the stories matter. They let us know what courage
is, and what war is. We need to listen, to pay attention
when we are told those stories, because most of us will
never know what our soldiers experience. It is simply
too easy to think that war is somebody else’s respon-
sibility. War is not glorious, it is not entertainment, it is
not a video game.
Even as we honor the dead, we must maintain hope
that humanity will some day reach a point where we
can work out our differences without having to kill each
other in the process. We must recognize the humanity
we have in common with our enemies because that
humanity is what war destroys.
Out of My Mind…
by Noni Andersen
My kitchen table is
usually cluttered with pa-
per – newspapers, maga-
zines, brochures, adver-
tisements, grocery lists,
to-do lists, letters, cards –
you get the idea. The one
element that ties together
these disparate pieces of
paper is that each results
from someone’s mind,
whether as a passing thought or as an earnest
attempt to explain something like the futures
market or how a hedge fund works.
While starting this column, I found that my
mind was about as cluttered as my kitchen table.
I couldn’t decide on one topic. Then I realized
that there is one emotion weaving its way
through many topics, and I can clear up my cere-
bral clutter by getting some of it out of my mind.
That one emotion is ANGER.
I hear and read a lot of anger, some from peo-
ple who seem to be chronically angry at life,
some from those who have specific complaints,
but direct their anger toward the wrong place.
City government is a favorite target for both
types of anger. One chronic complainer blames
the city for FEMA regulations, because the city
“doesn’t have to do what FEMA says”. Explain-
ing that failure to do so could leave city residents
without flood insurance didn’t matter, of course,
because that person is chronically angry.
A specific, understandable complaint from
many people is about our ever-increasing utility
fees, but the current council is a misplaced tar-
get for that anger. This situation is the result of
years of a head-in-the-sand approach to fiscal
responsibility. Former councils knew that utility
loans had to be repaid, but they didn’t want to
make people unhappy, so utility rates were
raised only enough to pay the interest. Now
we’re paying for that neglect – and we’re angry.
Education is what makes me angry, more
specifically, our national neglect of education. At
a time when innovation is more and more valu-
able, we are making it more and more difficult for
our children to get even an adequate education.
Higher education is needed to develop the
skilled workforce for evolving technologies, but
we are making it too expensive for increasing
numbers of people. Additionally, we are letting
the foundation of higher education crumble by
ignoring the needs of K-12 schools.
We know that:
• more classroom time is needed for children
to learn, so we are cutting days out of that time;
• crowded classes hamper learning, so we’re
cutting teachers;
• advanced math and science are needed
more than ever, so we’re limiting those choices;
• history and government are needed to un-
derstand how we got here, so we’re reducing
those requirements;
• social sciences are needed for a basic un-
derstanding of our culture, so we’re cutting most
of those classes;
• art, music and drama stimulate both creativ-
ity and intellectual development, so we’re cutting
Please see page 3