Who is Running Things?
Thanks to the Weekly’s Slant column (11/13) reminding readers that both the LCC faculty and classified staff unions are still without contracts and need our support. This context is important to understand what is currently going on there.
Additionally, I would like to add further context: This is a battle over who really runs our community college. Is it the president and her administrative staff, or is it the elected school board of directors?
Ideally, it is both of them working collaboratively to make the best decisions together. The elected board that represents the public sets the direction, and their key employee, the president, implements that direction. This is how our public education system is designed to work.
But what happens if the president — or at the K-12 school level, the superintendent — has acquired so much power that the board needs to fight back, to no longer rubber stamp whatever the administration wants?
Witness the upheaval in the Springfield School District. I believe it is the same dynamic at play. Some board members are pushing back against the trend toward administrative authority and seek the balance that is needed. And the sparks are flying. The status quo can be ruthless defending that status quo.
The chief administrator of our community college and in our public school districts must understand that they work for the board who works for us.
Larry Lewin
Eugene
Preserving the Natural
Thanks to the recent Local and Vocal column “Preserving Natural Features” (EW, 11/6). We want to confirm our appreciation for what Northwest Land Conservation Trust has enabled us to protect our property in Walton.
Many people falsely believe a trust restricts you in every way regarding your property. But you are the one who makes those decisions now and for all the future of your property. You are the one who writes your own trust with the excellent and professional help of the folks at NWLCT. For example, some of our property had been clearcut prior to our purchase and is now “reprod” where fir trees are planted five to eight feet apart.
One of our goals is to return that portion into a natural, healthy and diverse forest. So our trust includes the ability to thin that section and replant other species, to return to wider spacing and more diversity. We may use that cut wood for our use only, but not sell it. But most of the 80 acres will be left untouched (except for maintenance of our trail system).
As we age with the possibility of having to sell, we wanted to set in stone the incredible health of this land (the trees, the animals, the birds, the coho salmon) and the consequential healing and renewal that our visitors experience.
Working with the volunteers of NWLCT has been a continual blessing, especially since we can trust the protection of this land beyond our lives. We encourage you, if you have a bit of property, even just 10 acres, to consider creating a trust for the future with NWLCT.
Hal Palmer and Tonia Blum
Walton
Amazon Restoration
I want to take a moment of appreciation and acknowledgment to all the folks working on the Amazon Creek restoration project. It’s been wonderful to witness the incredible change of scenery as I bike by each day. Big shoutout to the folks doing all of the digging and moving and trudging through water, now on frigid mornings, and even on Saturdays! You’re doing an amazing job and the creek area is looking so good! Many thanks!
Sophia MacMillan
Eugene
Don’t Feed the Birds
I love trips to the Alton Baker duck ponds and seeing the mallards, wigeons and Canada geese all together. I understand the desire to feel directly connected with the animals and bring them treats. But the local pond is not a petting zoo! I know we want to have special moments with the grandkids or our dates, but it is directly harming the local waterfowl. Feeding them bread or crackers can give them a condition known as angel wing, an unnatural bend of the wing and affects their ability to fly.
Even “safe” treats like frozen peas do harm by disrupting their natural feeding behaviors and pattern of migration. Wild life is exactly that — wild. Please respect the signs and appreciate the birds from a distance.
Lucy Feuerborn
Eugene
Shameful on Both Parties
I appreciated the letter “Symbolism over Safety” by Curtis Taylor (EW, 10/23), highlighting the hypocrisy of some citizens regarding Flock cameras. At this time, they clearly help the police round up the baddies without invading the goodies’ privacy. As Taylor pointed out: the police need all the help they can get, including ours.
As for another letter — “A Lefty and Proud” by Michael Peterson (EW, 10/30) — having lived through the same era as he, I have come to the same conclusion. My parents were friends with both Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, having given the former a donkey as a gift in the 1960s. Hopefully, it lived and prospered, which is more than I can say for the extreme poverty and homelessness that one quarter of Oregon’s population experience. After much thought, the sad state of affairs we now find ourselves in is due to Democrat leadership navel gazing for the last 40 years while the other party used those 40 years to fulfill its mission. Shameful.
Kim Kelly
Eugene
Flock Can Work
The public has real concerns about violations of privacy with Flock cameras, but surely these can be addressed through contractual means with the company. It is a real crime-fighting tool. The person who embezzled from the Weekly and skipped the state was found in Ohio via the Flock cameras in that state. Why not use the cameras to follow ICE and report their movements to the public in real time so they can be avoided?
Carlos Barrera
Eugene
Act For Change
Regarding “Fall of the Myth” (EW, 11/13), I have never read such a completely irrational, illogical disorganized mess of confusing “victim” scree in my life, unless it was reading JD Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye as an adult, after thinking how much I enjoyed it in high school. However, Salinger was a recognized author.
If there was any organized thought or points to be made in that random collection of words, I missed it, as I would guess the same conclusion was reached by most who attempted to make any sense of that word salad (Do you folks read these articles prior to publication?) This “diatribe” appeared to be drenched in victimness, with the ubiquitous “they” appearing throughout, with no definition of who the “they” are. “White” people? What concrete steps have you, the author, taken to change anything? A podcast? Accomplishes nothing, especially if it’s anything like this column — empty.
We live in a democracy, which requires participation by its citizens, something I have noticed increasingly missing since I attended the protests of the ’60s and ’70s, with exceptions for Donald Trump’s first inauguration, “Occupy Wall Street” and the more recent protests occurring since things have become so bad for everyday Americans who re-elected this clown-thief.
Change happens when we act for change. We gather, we march, we write or call our representatives and senators and demand it. We need to collectively act more frequently.
Marc LaPine
Cottage Grove
Editor’s Note: Not only do we read columns and guest viewpoints before publication, we fact check them. Alas, we also publish things we disagree with — like this. See more letters we agree and disagree with online at EugeneWeekly.com.
ONLINE EXTRA LETTERS
No Permit Required
I appreciate Scott Zarnegar’s participation in the recent No Kings march (EW, 10/30), but wholeheartedly disagree with his assertion that the lack of a permit caused problems. The first No Kings march had a permit, yet I witnessed a chartered bus forcing its way through the crowd, as well as a car backing into a packed intersection. Police were absent in both situations.
Permit or not, angry and frustrated motorists will always be a threat. There’s simply not enough police to be everywhere. It’s up to march organizers and most importantly, march participants, to maintain safety. And across the country, we did this: seven million people peacefully marched without serious incident!
Erica Chenoweth’s groundbreaking research on opposing authoritarian regimes indicates that engaging 3.5 percent of the population in nonviolent civil resistance is critical. While millions of people marching in the streets with a permit is valuable and important, it isn’t civil resistance. Marching without a permit is a small step in that direction.
While we can sometimes work with city government and police, we don’t need permission every time we march in our streets. We must activate our slack and dormant political muscles to practice civil resistance. With our numbers, our determination and nonviolent discipline, we can restore our democracy. We must.
Chuck Areford
Eugene
Failing to Prioritize Our Well-Being
SNAP benefits, aka food stamps, is a form of government assistance to provide low-income households with a means to purchase nutritious food, improve health and well-being and alleviate poverty. For the month of October and November, millions and millions of families have been robbed of their snap benefits.
Families who heavily depend on SNAP have been abandoned by the government and robbed of their benefits, leaving families in poverty in the dark. What might be the cause for such a dramatic withdrawal in the government’s assistance…a war? Maybe huge amounts of national debt? Or how about even an economic depression?
Although I never believe, in any situation, that someone in the United States, or anywhere for that matter, should go hungry, I do think these might be situations in which it makes a lot more sense for government assistance to be limited than what the reality of the current situation is. The reality of our current situation is that political figures have struggled to come to an agreement on how to fund the government.
Our politicians have failed to prioritize the well being of our citizens, and for that, millions have gone hungry. As a country, we must prioritize the people of our nation, rather than the pride of old rich people in politics.
Juan Mercado
Eugene
The Bracelet Speaks
“WWJD” was a popular bracelet and message that encouraged the wearer and anyone who saw it to stop and think about what Jesus would do in modern situations. Unfortunately, the modern events we see transpiring before our eyes seem to be things Jesus would have abhorred.
Sunday School always portrayed Jesus as the savior of children, the friend of the poor and downtrodden, the feeder of the hungry, the welcomer of refugees and those who fled abuse and violence like his own parents, the rescuer of women who were preyed on by evil men, and the voice against materialism in the name of religion and those whose greed played on the beliefs and fears of those who are impressionable and in despair.
Looking at our country’s direction, it is heading in the opposite direction of all that I was told Jesus asked of us and would be doing.
Hal Huestis
Eugene
Seeing Both Sides of the Argument
I appreciated Doyle Srader’s Oct. 16 “Local & Vocal” column, his reminder of the arrogant futility of offering help that’s irrelevant to an individual’s particular situational need, and that judgments of our struggling neighbors are rooted in an arrogance that, had we experienced whatever circumstantial crisis damaged them along the way, we would have magically sidestepped any resulting trauma and induced confusion. And that protest movements can descend into the kind of impotent, ideological echo chamber of self-validation that helped elect Donald Trump.
But, ironically, Srader then ignores his own warnings about getting lost in our adopted assumptions. No one in the “No Kings” protest movement expects Trump to look out a White House window, slap himself on the forehead in a revelation that his true purpose in life is to help others, instead of feeding his insatiable insecurity by bullying the world. The fundamental point of such protests is to stand up and refuse to be passively complicit, and to experience that we’re not alone in such refusal.
Remember Martin Niemöller’s famous warning about complicit cowardice: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Peter Straton
Eugene
Worthy of a Complaint
Having received various explanations for the removal of the drop box at the Edgewood Center, I am now told that this service is not coming back, due to lack of efficiency for the postal department and excess of convenience for customers. Pardon my sarcasm, but we have all seen the disappearance of drop boxes in various parts of Eugene, apparently due to increased internet usage. There seems to be no remedy, but I still think this decrease in service is worth a complaint.
Patricia Spicer
Eugene
The 50-Year Ball and Chain
Recently, the silliest bit of news was that Donald Trump has a great plan for new home buyers, a “50-year mortgage.” If you can even afford to buy a house at age 25, it wouldn’t be paid off until you are 75 (if you live that long), and you would pay several hundred thousand dollars in extra interest as compared to a conventional 15- or 30-year mortgage. The bottom line: You would never really own your home. How absurd. Not to mention there is already a plan available to everyone which accomplishes the same thing. It’s called “renting.”
John Tietjen
Corvallis
Keep the Resolve
They say attention is a form of devotion. Scanning the political landscape, it seems like more and more Americans are finally devoting themselves to preserving our democracy. Witness the recent election results. Voters from coast to coast resoundingly repudiated the chaos, cruelty and corruption of the current federal administration. Indeed, the election results are providing people hope that the national nightmare we’ve been living through will end sooner rather than later.
Despite these encouraging signs, we must remember that hope without resolve is just another four-letter word. So dip a toe in, folks. America needs you. You don’t have to be Gandhi or King. Just be you. You’ll be amazed at how well life has prepared you for this moment. There are hundreds of local and national groups working tirelessly to protect our democracy. Pick one and offer it your skills and resources. Infuse your hope with resolve, and let that resolve be a legacy for your children and grandchildren so they may continue this remarkable 250-year quest to form a more perfect union.
Howard Newman
Eugene
Vote
Does anyone remember when in 2018, after the Helsinki summit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met very hush-hush, with no court reporter? It was only them? That’s never been done before.
I wonder if Trump asked Putin how he held onto power all these years? Putin might have told him to close down the government, lay off federal workers indefinitely, keep chipping away at our rights and prosecute your enemies.
He is using the people’s attorney. How awful! Attacking colleges and universities who teach diversity, he’s attacking all communication systems with losing licenses for programming not favorable to him.
He’s already profited $1.8 billion since he has taken office. But the worst of the worst is taking food and other programs away from our most vulnerable citizens. How un-American can you get?
Who’s to stop him? Not the Supreme Court — they have given him unlimited powers. Not the Republican Party in Congress. They should be ashamed. We the people can stop him by voting and protesting.