Saw It in the Weekly

There was a thank you letter in the Oct. 2 Weekly for a lost earbud our club [Coil and Diggers Club of Lane County] found and returned.

Because of the letter, we were contacted by a man who saw the letter, who had lost his father’s 1951 gold class ring, and we found it for him on Oct. 15

Thank you for running the letter.

Larry Orr

President

Coil and Diggers Club of Lane County

Add to Giving Guide

Center for Community Counseling has been providing low cost mental health counseling to low income, uninsured or underinsured people in Lane County since 1978. Our unique model features volunteer licensed therapists as well as masters and doctoral level interns offering individual counseling, DBT groups, men’s groups, grandparents raising grandchildren group, anger management skills building, pet loss groups and mindfulness. We do not bill insurance and we have a client focused approach with no set time limit on sessions.

We do not receive federal or state funding and rely on foundations and individual donors to provide these services. 

Center for Community Counseling is at 1465 Coburg Road, Eugene, OR 97401, 541-344-0620, CCCEugene.org.

Deborah Saunders

Executive Director

Center for Community Counseling

More Nonprofits to Give to! 

Thank you for putting together a list of nonprofits to give to this season! Here are a few of my favorites that I’d love to see included:

Adventure! Children’s Museum
CASA of Lane County
CLF Network
Head Start of Lane County
Ophelia’s Place
Pearl Buck Center
ShelterCare
Springfield Education Foundation
Whole Earth Nature School

Rylie Gryczko

CLF Network

Selective Sanctuary

The proposed panhandling ban in Eugene is not about public safety. It is about power, optics and who is deemed worthy of visibility in public space.

Eugene has long claimed the mantle of a sanctuary city. Sanctuary, however, cannot be a slogan that shifts with political convenience. What we are witnessing now is a slow erosion of that promise, shaped by the agenda of whoever holds power at the moment. When laws are crafted to push poor people out of sight rather than address root causes, sanctuary becomes conditional, not principled.

This moment should concern all of us. History teaches that human rights rarely erode all at once. They fray at the edges first. Criminalizing survival behaviors is a canary in the coal mine. Today it is a person asking for help at an intersection. Tomorrow it is another group deemed inconvenient.

We cannot loudly oppose ICE raids, deportations, and federal overreach while remaining silent as our own city targets neighbors living outside. Moral consistency matters. Human dignity does not change based on housing status.

Eugene can do better. Sanctuary must mean everyone, or it means nothing.

Sarah A. Koski

Eugene

Amazon is NOT a win!

Coming from Portland this weekend, I counted eight semi-trucks heading north on I-5, and 10 smaller vans heading  South from Salem, all with the Amazon logo. All I could think was WTF! Are we to become totally dominated by this one company that wants to supply us with everything, at the lowest common denominator for the products, and the lowest wages for all who work for them? They don’t care about any of us, just our money!

Why should Eugene subsidize and provide prime “clean industry” space, more filled-in wetlands, creating more particulate pollution and massive traffic problems on 99 West? If you go to Jerry’s, you already know that you can’t get in, and you can’t get out! Imagine another 2,000-plus vehicles a day on 99W.

Amazon would destroy all the living-wage jobs we already have in Lane County delivering their crap, including the U.S. Post Office and many local delivery companies, and replace them with their low-wage, no-benefits and transient option! Do we really want to do this? I say no! Contact your city councilors

It’s time to make some noise, folks, or we can just look the other way and let this happen. Your choice!

Robin Bloomgarden

Eugene

Yes on Amazon

I support the Amazon warehouse project.

I’m a lifelong true-blue liberal. I get why people hate Amazon. Capitalism run amok, small businesses forced out, terrible working conditions like urinating in water bottles to stay on the line, etc. I agree with all of the criticism.

But, for lack of a better term, yada yada. 

We live in the real world where Amazon exists and lots of people in Eugene use it. Sadly, the ship has sailed. If you want to fight capitalism, you’re going to have to aim much higher. 

All other arguments I’ve heard against the project fail. 

But the watershed! This is not a natural area. This is an industrial area. People pretending that this is a pristine natural habitat aren’t on the level about why they oppose the project. It’s on Hwy 99 right next to the airport. The area is inhospitable to wildlife and watershed quality before the warehouse even goes in. The company has agreed to replace the watershed loss. 

Increased traffic. If you want delivery trucks off the road, you should support this project. Packages are already being delivered by Amazon. Those small trucks are already on the road. Today, big trucks bring the packages to EUG, where they are sorted and put on smaller trucks. With this facility, shipments can be flown in. Products that are popular locally can be stored at the facility, eliminating one-off shipments from PDX or wherever. 

Jobs. Companies will always overstate job creation, but there will be some jobs, which is better than none.

Paul Morgan

Eugene

ONLINE EXTRA LETTERS

The Confessions of Susie Wiles

The president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, recently told Vanity Fair that her boss governs with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

This can be taken to mean he believes he is so talented he can accomplish anything. Or he believes he has unlimited power to rule however he sees fit, or perhaps both.

The part about being super talented does not seem well substantiated by reality, given the president’s limited success in establishing world peace and his management philosophy of just firing people.

The second part about being an absolute dictator has found some success given #47’s announced intention to act like a dictator on “day one,” his manhandling of the Constitution, and his clear statement made in August 2025 during a video-taped cabinet meeting, “I can do whatever I wanna do. I’m the president.”  

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

Democrats

For months, we’ve been hearing much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left over the impending sunset of the temporary Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies and blaming Republicans. Let’s look at some inconvenient truths:

Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s euphemistically-named “Inflation Reduction Act” that contains the sunset language with zero Republican support. 

Democrats passed the ACA “enhanced subsidies” in 2021 with no Republican support, which exploded the cost of the  ACA, thus bringing the 10 year score for the program to around $1.3 trillion.

Democrats voted 13 times for continuing resolutions (CRs) during the Biden Administration.

Democrats refused to support the 2025 CR, thus leading to the longest government shutdown in history and the chaos that resulted. They insisted on repealing the sunset that they had passed into law and on stuffing the clean CR with more than $1 trillion in additional spending with the country nearly $40 trillion in debt. Republicans weren’t going to go for that.

Fewer than 10 percent of Americans are receiving medical coverage under ACA plans. I suspect that something will be done to cushion the blow of the end of the subsidies, but it will be a short-term and costly fix. The ACA has become unaffordable, as has health care coverage in general. Democrats have two solutions: destroy Donald Trump and tax the rich — but let’s ignore the massive health care and welfare fraud that has recently surfaced.

When your ACA premiums go up, how about putting the blame where it belongs?

Jerry Ritter

Springfield

Waldorf Allegations

EW’s Giving Guide (12/18) promotes Eugene Waldorf School, an expensive private school that is part of an international religious cult called “anthroposophy.”

This movement was founded by a German Nazi, Rudolf Steiner, who preached that Nordic people were superior to others, Africans were not humans and Jews should be eradicated. Steiner died before the Nazis came to power, but some of their leadership were fans of his. However, Himmler decided Steiner was a competing brand of racism so he was declared verboten. 

Steiner taught that reading in early grades interfered with reincarnation. 

Steiner claimed spirit beings were against vaccination. 

Eugene Waldorf admits, or boasts, on its website that many of their students are unprotected against dangerous diseases such as polio, whooping cough, measles, tetanus, rubella and others. As preventable, nearly eradicated diseases return due to medicine deniers, who will take care of polio victims paralyzed by paranoia?

The billionaire class funds some anti-vax BS so that people won’t mind shredding of our public health systems even while Trump and the Republican leadership were first in line to get their Covid shots. Waldorfcritics.org has extensive background. I also have excerpts at SustainEugene.org/waldorf.html.

Mark Robinowitz

Eugene