The proposed annexation of the 30-acre McKenzie Meadows property for the site of a senior living community has become a hot issue in Sisters.
The public rhetoric has, so far, been pretty civil (though I’ve heard some complain otherwise). The private comments I’ve heard are another story. People are fired up about this.
That’s a little weird to me. Seems like an issue that could be addressed pretty dispassionately. I can easily lawyer both sides.
Pro: Sisters needs to accommodate an aging population. This is the piece of land that had the right price to make a project pencil. It was already approved for annexation by voters. It’s not sprawl; it’s bordered by schools and a shopping center.
If the project doesn’t fly, it’s just a bare piece of ground paying taxes into the city.
It’ll provide vital construction jobs and ongoing service jobs.
Con:
The jobs are speculative; we don’t know if this project is viable.
Sisters needs to focus on keeping a vital downtown core. We’ve already pushed development and economic activity out on the margins (Outlaw Station at one end, Five Pine at the other).
We already have too much inactive developable space and too much inventory; we shouldn’t add too it now.
Neither side is all right or all wrong here. There are competing visions, sure, and differing views on viability, but I don’t think any honest assessment couldn’t concede points to the other side.
But that’s not how we do things anymore. And that’s what interests me.
Sisters, like the rest of the nation, has fallen into a very divisive, hardball kind of politics. In the city council election last November PACs contributed significant amounts of money to campaigns, for the first time in Sisters’ history.
The school local option campaign drew in a lot of cultural baggage from well outside the school district — attitudes toward public education in general and toward taxes and government in general — that shaped peoples’ attitude toward a strictly local measure.
This annexation issue has brought out some pretty strong language regarding various peoples’ integrity, character and motives. Again, that’s all been private and/or anonymous so far, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it go public during and after the city council’s decision on Thursday night.
What it shows me is that Sisters is not much different than anywhere else in the USA right now. People are quick to take sides, quick to think the worst of each other and feel increasingly threatened by people who think differently than they do.
I guess this is nothing new. Certainly the fight over the sewer system got pretty nasty.
But there seems to be something meaner in the air these days, an ill wind that pushes into the cracks between people and drives them farther and farther apart until disagreements are irreconcilable differences.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The long memory of veterans
Jeff Spry did a nice piece in this week’s Nugget profiling Harold Mulligan, a former Sisters resident who is still active in Sisters veterans groups. Mulligan is a Pearl Harbor survivor and he saw a lot more action in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
Jeff’s story closes with a quote that I found very striking:
“Mostly at night when sun goes down is when it bothers you most. The older you get, the worse it gets. There's a lot of nights lying awake.”
That sounds a lot like my uncle, now 91 and living in Arizona. He was an infantry captain in Italy during the war. I know little of his service because when I was young and we lived in Southern California, he never talked about the war.
I do know that he saw a lot of heavy combat in very rough terrain and that it was a bad experience for him.
My dad visits him a lot and now, he says, after decades of almost complete silence on the subject, the war is almost all my uncle talks about.
What particularly preys on his mind is the young 18-year-old replacements sent into the lines at night. Many times, the Germans would mortar the Americans’ position overnight and these kids would be wounded or killed before they ever fired a shot. Before anybody even knew their name.
My uncle keeps coming back to that. He’s lived a long life. Those kids had theirs cut short. That kind of thing gets to you.
Those memories reaching their long fingers across decades of time are not uncommon, I’m told. “The older you get the worse it gets” is common. It’s not unusual for decades of silence to be broken by an intense focus on wartime experiences.
“Stereotypically normal,” says a friend who works with veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
That’s why groups like those that have recently come into being in Sisters where veterans assist one another are so important. Veterans who have a hard time dealing with their memories need to be around people who have shared similar experiences, who know how it feels.
And my friend in the field will tell you, there’s a whole new generation of men and women who are going to struggle with “a lot of nights lying awake.”
Hopefully, we are better now at helping folks get through those long nights than we used to be.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Jeff’s story closes with a quote that I found very striking:
“Mostly at night when sun goes down is when it bothers you most. The older you get, the worse it gets. There's a lot of nights lying awake.”
That sounds a lot like my uncle, now 91 and living in Arizona. He was an infantry captain in Italy during the war. I know little of his service because when I was young and we lived in Southern California, he never talked about the war.
I do know that he saw a lot of heavy combat in very rough terrain and that it was a bad experience for him.
My dad visits him a lot and now, he says, after decades of almost complete silence on the subject, the war is almost all my uncle talks about.
What particularly preys on his mind is the young 18-year-old replacements sent into the lines at night. Many times, the Germans would mortar the Americans’ position overnight and these kids would be wounded or killed before they ever fired a shot. Before anybody even knew their name.
My uncle keeps coming back to that. He’s lived a long life. Those kids had theirs cut short. That kind of thing gets to you.
Those memories reaching their long fingers across decades of time are not uncommon, I’m told. “The older you get the worse it gets” is common. It’s not unusual for decades of silence to be broken by an intense focus on wartime experiences.
“Stereotypically normal,” says a friend who works with veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
That’s why groups like those that have recently come into being in Sisters where veterans assist one another are so important. Veterans who have a hard time dealing with their memories need to be around people who have shared similar experiences, who know how it feels.
And my friend in the field will tell you, there’s a whole new generation of men and women who are going to struggle with “a lot of nights lying awake.”
Hopefully, we are better now at helping folks get through those long nights than we used to be.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The electronic leash
I hate my cell phone.
I don’t like the feeling that I can be tracked down at any time, anywhere. Sometimes I feel like the damn thing is like one of those electronic surveillance devices they slap around your ankle when you’re under house arrest.
But I don’t know how I got along without one. It makes my job so much easier. Journalism is about 80 percent phone calls, and I don’t have to be chained to a desk to make them. My cell phone makes me more productive.
Come January, I’ll have to get a hands-free device to use it in the truck. Oregon, like other states is trying to crack down on cell phone distractions while driving. This may be a cosmetic effort. There’s evidence that it’s the talking itself that is the big distraction, not holding the phone (though dropping your cell phone in the car prompts an almost instinctive move to grab it instead of paying attention to the road. That’s a crash waiting to happen).
Somehow I doubt that the new Oregon law will be stringently enforced, which makes it kind of moot. The urge to use the phone is too strong unless the consequences are huge.
Maybe they should be, especially for texting while driving. In Britain, texting while driving is a serious crime and if you hurt somebody, you will go to prison. It’s treated more or less like drunk driving.
Cell phones are here to stay until they are supplanted by some more sophisticated technology. That means we’ll have to put up with people yakking on their phone in the grocery line and other annoyances.
Texting habits will cnt 2 dstry wrtn eng lng LOL.
But maybe it’s a good idea to make the roads communications free zones. At least ban texting and enforce the ban with strict penalties. Nobody can argue that texting while driving isn’t a big public safety concern (can they?).
As for cell phone use, I try to be good about that, but I’m probably bad as everybody else. After all, I have a GOOD REASON to be using the phone in the car.
I’ll do the hands free thing in January, though I’d rather take that damn thing (and yours, too) and chuck it out the truck window at 80 mph.
Wait. That’s illegal.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Why we do stupid things in the outdoors
Last Saturday, a young woman from Bend left Devil’s Lake Trailhead at 1 p.m. intending to summit both South and Middle Sister.
She was totally unprepared for being out after dark, even though she left with only about 5-1/2 hours of good daylight left. She had no emergency blanket or rations.
The 20-year-old is a runner and obviously very fit; she did something like 25 miles in rough terrain in the dark to get to Three Creek Road, where a woodcutter found her the next morning and gave her and her dog a lift into town.
A few months back, an experienced ultra runner got lost in the canyons and chapparal of San Diego County on a “short” training run. She was missing for days and nearly died. She copped to the fact that she had been in a hurry to get her training in and violated her own pre-run routine and emergency preparation.
Why do capable people do such dumb things, things that risk their lives and the lives of those who turn out to rescue them?
A book I read recently has some great insights into this phenomenon, which happens over and over and over again. It’s called “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why” by Laurence Gonzales.
There’s a lot to this book and any thumbnail necessarily gives it short shrift, but one of the basic points is this: The mind creates “emotional bookmarks” based on strong positive or negative experiences. Our mind goes to those when we make decisions and the emotional feedback we get overrides our rational mind, our good sense.
In the case of highly trained and capable athletes, the emotional bookmark flags the great feeling they get from their training, which can be downright addictive (in the chemical as well as the emotional sense). The desire to get out there and do the run, the trek, the climb, overrides the rational caution flags: it’s too late to start; I don’t have my emergency kit together; I’m not sure of the route.
We are all susceptible to this phenomenon; people whose skill and fitness have got them out of trouble in the past even more so than the average bear. We all like to think “Man, I’d never do anything that STUPID,” but the truth is, you just might, if the emotional bookmark grabs you hard enough.
There’s a lot in the book about the kind of mindset that gets people through survival situations, but the most important lesson in “Deep Survival” is to be aware of the tricks we play on ourselves that get us into those situations in the first place.
Slow down. Recognize when your desires — to just get out there, to make it to that peak, to try to beat the dark to get past that one last drainage — are letting you slide into a dangerous situation.
It’s important to understand that it’s not about smart/stupid. “I’m too smart to do that” is the kind of hubris that leads to unexpected trouble.
Great book; recommend it highly. Combine it with Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and you get a much better understanding of the interplay between thought and emotion that can literally mean the difference between life and death.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
She was totally unprepared for being out after dark, even though she left with only about 5-1/2 hours of good daylight left. She had no emergency blanket or rations.
The 20-year-old is a runner and obviously very fit; she did something like 25 miles in rough terrain in the dark to get to Three Creek Road, where a woodcutter found her the next morning and gave her and her dog a lift into town.
A few months back, an experienced ultra runner got lost in the canyons and chapparal of San Diego County on a “short” training run. She was missing for days and nearly died. She copped to the fact that she had been in a hurry to get her training in and violated her own pre-run routine and emergency preparation.
Why do capable people do such dumb things, things that risk their lives and the lives of those who turn out to rescue them?
A book I read recently has some great insights into this phenomenon, which happens over and over and over again. It’s called “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why” by Laurence Gonzales.
There’s a lot to this book and any thumbnail necessarily gives it short shrift, but one of the basic points is this: The mind creates “emotional bookmarks” based on strong positive or negative experiences. Our mind goes to those when we make decisions and the emotional feedback we get overrides our rational mind, our good sense.
In the case of highly trained and capable athletes, the emotional bookmark flags the great feeling they get from their training, which can be downright addictive (in the chemical as well as the emotional sense). The desire to get out there and do the run, the trek, the climb, overrides the rational caution flags: it’s too late to start; I don’t have my emergency kit together; I’m not sure of the route.
We are all susceptible to this phenomenon; people whose skill and fitness have got them out of trouble in the past even more so than the average bear. We all like to think “Man, I’d never do anything that STUPID,” but the truth is, you just might, if the emotional bookmark grabs you hard enough.
There’s a lot in the book about the kind of mindset that gets people through survival situations, but the most important lesson in “Deep Survival” is to be aware of the tricks we play on ourselves that get us into those situations in the first place.
Slow down. Recognize when your desires — to just get out there, to make it to that peak, to try to beat the dark to get past that one last drainage — are letting you slide into a dangerous situation.
It’s important to understand that it’s not about smart/stupid. “I’m too smart to do that” is the kind of hubris that leads to unexpected trouble.
Great book; recommend it highly. Combine it with Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and you get a much better understanding of the interplay between thought and emotion that can literally mean the difference between life and death.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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