Sisters resists self-segregation

The Economist this week published an interesting piece on the increasing self-segregation of American society.
It seems that Americans are increasingly sealing themselves off in communities made up almost exclusively of people just like them in a phenomenon one sociologists dubbed The Big Sort.
We’re not talking about racial segregation here, though that’s a part of it. The phenomenon is one of social and political self-segregation.
“Because Americans are so mobile,” The Economist notes, “even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbors leads over time to severe segregation.”
The problem with this is that “Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views.” It’s not just living in enclaves where everybody has pretty much the same outlook; they tune into TV and radio that suits their beliefs, read only what they already agree with and nobody around them challenges it. Views in an echo chamber become more and more extreme.
That’s no way to live, no matter what your values. That kind of “safety” is a slow death.
We’re lucky in Sisters. This community, while it is not ethnically diverse, has a broad cross-section of people with a variety of backgrounds, beliefs, and values. And we rub up against each other at community events, in restaurants and at the Post Office. We argue with each other in Letters to the Editor.
I know several people who are close friends, despite being polar opposites in politics and in many of their social attitudes.
That vibrancy is at risk, though. I talk to many people on both ends of the political spectrum, on either side of the cultural divide, who are increasingly intolerant of hearing from people on the other side.
Monocultures aren’t healthy in forests or in human communities. We are blessed to have a vibrant town here. Let’s make sure it stays that way.
Jim Cornelius, Editor

Guns in America

The anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination earlier this month brought forth a lot of remembrances from people who knew RFK, people who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Sirhan Sirhan pumped three .22 caliber bullets into the Senator at close range.

The most compelling and poignant interview I heard was with Pete Hamill, a writer whom I admire deeply. He noted that in America, a disturbed man with a grievance can always get a gun with which to take out his anger on a human target.

That got my attention. See, I was out shooting while I listened to the interview on OPB.

I've been an avid shooter since I was about 10 years old. There were no guns in my household; it wasn't something I learned from my dad. I was drawn to firearms all on my own, partly from an interest in history and partly from the sheer enjoyment of the art and skill of shooting well.

I've worked in the firearms industry. Now, I shoot probably three or four times a week — mostly small-caliber rifle and clays with a shotgun. I do a little bird hunting, but I'm more a shooter than a hunter. I have a couple of revolvers and shoot them well, but they play a distant third fiddle to the rifle and shotgun.

The shooting sports have brought me hours of enjoyment — enjoyment that I am now sharing with my nine-year-old daughter who is turning out to be a fine shot with both a rifle and a bow.

Firearms have also brought me a modicum of protection. I have been in two armed confrontations with dangerous men, both of which ended without shots being fired. I was glad to have been armed.

And yet...

And yet...

Hamill is right. We've seen it in political assassinations, we've seen it in school shootings, we've seen it in rampages at the mall. A madman can always get a gun with which to enact his madness.

I support the Second Amendment and believe in the individual right to keep and bear arms. But we've got to do a better job of restricting access of those who are menaces to the innocent.

I'm going to buy a new rifle next week. It'll be an easy process. Maybe it's too easy.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Gay marriage — pushing the hot button

The California Supreme Court just stuck its thumb down on one of the hottest hot buttons on the American cultural landscape. By declaring a referendum banning gay marriage unconstitutional, the court opened a floodgate and today hundreds if not thousands of gay couples surged through it.

A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage will almost certainly be on the November ballot in California, just in time to add a culture war twist to what will already be a contentious presidential election. It will probably pass, too, inaugurating yet another round of wrangling over this issue, which arouses strange passions.

A large majority Americans oppose gay marriage, though a sizable plurality are okay with civil unions. This seems very strange to me. You're okay with gays having the same rights as married couples, as long as you don't call it marriage.

Uh... okay. Why?

I've never understood the visceral reaction of so many people to the notion of gay marriage. It strikes me as a very definite "none of my business" situation.

I've heard all the arguments. It undermines the institution of marriage. How? Will my marriage be affected by Steve and Dave getting married? Not as far as I can tell. And it's pretty clear that heterosexuals have done just fine on their own undermining the sanctity of the institution. About half of marriages end in divorce, so it's not like the institution is in great shape anyway.

Marriage is about procreation and protecting children. Really? So childless couples shouldn't be married?

Homosexuality is a sin. Nope. Sorry. Off limits. We don't base laws on theological concepts of sin, otherwise we'd be arresting gluttons at the ice cream parlor and stoning adulterers (heterosexual underminers of the institution).

It legitimizes a "deviant lifestyle." It's already broadly legitimized — otherwise the possibility of marriage would be as remote as it was in 1950. Mores change.

It opens the door to all alternative lifestyles — plural marriage or incest. This argument actually has some rhetorical force. If we extend rights to include some must we include any and all? Yet incest is taboo and illegal for compelling reasons of biology (which of course did not stop the legally and regally married of Europe from staying too close to the trunk of the family tree). Polygamy was common ages before the notion of homosexual marriage even existed; it fell out of favor for reasons of contract and inheritance, not on moral grounds.

Marriage defined as being between a man and a woman is not a bulwark against polygamy; polygamy is illegal because marriage is a contract between two persons.

And that's what this all comes down to, for me. The state should be out of the marriage business entirely. All marriages should be civil unions between two persons. Churches may define "marriage" however they choose and if it is unsound doctrine to marry homosexuals, they should not do so.

And then, instead of worrying about Steve and Dave's relationship, we can mind our own.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Gas pains and the freedom of the road

Some analysts think $4-per-gallon gasoline may be a classic “tipping point,” a moment when market forces quickly and irrevocably change people’s behavior.

Maybe.

I think in the case of gasoline a better analog is the addiction model. Have we “hit bottom?” Are we ready to admit that we are powerless over our addiction to cheap gasoline and can no longer live this way?

I’m not so sure.

Certainly, big changes are afoot. GM is moving with unusual speed for a giant corporation to jettison its fleet of gas-guzzlers — it may completely deep-six the iconic Hummer — on the belief that the increase in gas prices is permanent and may go considerably higher.

I drive a truck that gets 12.8 miles to the gallon, so I am no paragon of virtuous, upright living when it comes to gasoline consumption. I wouldn’t give it up; I need it to tow a horse trailer and it serves me well in other adventures. However, I am walking a lot more. That’s great when the weather is like it is today, a little less pleasant in wintertime. I think I’m going to have to get used to it.

It’s hard to break the addiction to cheap gas because it has brought so much to us. Yeah, yeah, traffic is a mess and pollution is a problem (though we’ve managed to reduce it by a massive amount since I was a kid growing up with stage-three smog alerts in the LA area).

But the ability for people to move freely has added immeasurably to the richness of our lives. It’s easy to forget that just a couple of generations ago, travel was out of the question for most Americans. They never ventured far from home.
When my grandfather was a kid, he took a train trip from the ranch in South Dakota to the stockyards in Chicago — and it was a major event in his young life.

Two decades later he was in a car driving from South Dakota to Southern California, part of the great exodus from the Great Plains during the Great Depression.

In just the past few decades, world travel has become accessible to ordinary people, not just the super-rich.
We don’t want to give up the freedom given by the automobile and the airplane — and we shouldn’t. But as prices keep climbing we’re going to have to. If a hurricane knocks out a refinery, if the Middle East explodes, we’re looking at $7-$8 per gallon gasoline.

I sure won’t be driving that truck much.

Drilling for more oil domestically, refining more oil, may be necessary. Oil is the lifeblood of our civilization and if we try to cold turkey it, we’ll probably die. But more drilling only postpones the day of reckoning, of which $4.50/gallon gas is but a harbinger.

It’s time to put our best minds to work on viable solutions — alternative energy sources from solar to wind, to nuclear, to geothermal to hydrogen fuel cells. We need to develop flex-fuel.

It’s no bad thing to park the car and walk or ride a bike — America as a whole could stand to get off and on. But we shouldn’t forsake the wide world granted to us by the ability to move.

We need to wean ourselves off oil, never forgetting that the black gold gave us the freedom of the road.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

America the Great

America is the greatest country in the world.

You hear that a lot. Unfortunately, that sense of America’s greatness is often defined by political partisans and used as a weapon in political and cultural battles.

That sort of abuse of the notion obscures its truth: We are indeed a great nation, founded on principles that have made the world a better place.

Over strife-filled centuries we have expanded the principle that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to include more and more people. Those inalienable rights no longer apply only to white men of property.

Yet our greatness is under threat. Not from radical Islamic terrorism; while dangerous and murderous, Islamic terrorism cannot destroy the United States.

No, the threat to our greatness comes from our own complacency. We can, and must, do better.

America should be the best in all things. We should have the best transportation system in the world. We should have the finest health care in the world available to all our citizens. We should have the best-educated citizenry in the world.
With all of those things in place, our economic preeminence would be unchallengeable.

But we are not the world’s best. Our transportation system is suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. Our health care system, while still the best in terms of research and innovation, is failing in terms of reaching the citizenry.
While we still produce some of the best and the brightest in the world, our citizenry is falling behind the rest of the developed world in most measures of education.

Infrastructure, health care, education — these are key investments in the future greatness of our nation. I’d add energy independence to the list — requiring investment both in fossil fuels and alternative fuels to achieve.

We are failing our children and their children if we do not buckle down to the job and make these investments now.

There is plenty of room for debate on the best path to get there. It’s going to require a mixture of market forces and government investment to make any of this happen. We cannot afford to spend years quibbling and sniping at each other, spending more than we can afford and neglecting the long-term for short-term pleasure and gain.

If we do not act now, we may lose the greatness that makes America, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of man on Earth.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Covering the ugly stuff

I cringe when the sirens go off, when I get the report of an accident on the highways around Sisters.

It means someone is likely hurt, possibly critically. And in this small town, it’s all too possible that it’s someone I know. (Like it or not, we are all touched more immediately when tragedy befalls someone close).

Last Monday, I came upon the wreck at the intersection of Highway 20 and Barclay Drive as I was driving my daughter to school. I pulled off the side of the road, grabbed my camera, got out of the truck and started taking pictures.

That’s my job.

A man at the scene — a man I know — approached me and berated me for being there and taking pictures. He said it was “sick” to do so, that he knew the people, that they weren’t even out of their cars.

I understood where he was coming from. I’ve been in his shoes. And I told him so. I also told him that the accident was news and it was my job to cover it and that I was going to do so. I also assured him that The Nugget wasn’t going to run photos that exploited the pain and fear of his friends.

A short time later, the man apologized for his angry reaction and we had a good conversation about the dangers of that intersection and what might be done to fix it.

That kind of thing goes with being in “the media.” You learn not to take it personally. And it keeps you on your toes. Where is the line between legitimate reporting and exploitation?

A good friend and I had a conversation some years back about coverage of accidents. She asked why we couldn’t just write about it, why there had to be pictures, images that were upsetting and painful to see. (She also admitted that they were only upsetting and painful when she knew the people in the wreck — an important point).

It’s a valid question. The answer is close to a cliché; an image has a lot more impact than a written description.
But still, is it necessary? Does it serve some valid public purpose?

What I told my friend, and what I continue to believe, is that such images brand themselves on our consciousness in ways prose descriptions cannot. And they can change what we do.

I have seen somewhere around a dozen traffic deaths and many injuries. I drive differently because of them. I approach the Aspen Lakes curve and the Suttle Lake curve with great caution because I’ve seen death there. I approach that nasty intersection assuming someone is going to pull in front of me because I’ve seen the results of just that action.

Even photos taken by other reporters have that effect. I can still see the wreckage of Steve Swisher’s pickup truck in a photo taken by another reporter. And I won’t pass a turning vehicle on the right because I remember what happened to Swisher.
I have drummed into my wife and constantly remind myself that if you drift off the right side of the highway, keep going. Overcorrect and you’ll roll or shoot into the oncoming lane.

I know this because I’ve seen it, over and over again.

My job is to let you see it, too. It’s not pretty and it’s not fun, but maybe it does a little bit of good.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Someone is going to die

Someone is going to die at the intersection of Barclay Drive and Highway 20.

What has happened there already is bad enough. there have been four major accidents, three in two years, with more than a dozen people injured, several seriously or critically. People from Sisters, our friends and neighbors, have suffered permanent, life-changing injuries.

We cannot wait two, three, four more years — or more — for the City of Sisters and the Oregon Department of Transportation to do something to improve safety at this intersection. We’re told that a plan must be completed, that funding must be found.
That kind of bureaucratic response tastes like ashes to the families and friends of the injured. Imagine telling that to the next person who is hurt there, or to a family mourning a loved one killed there.

We have known there was going to be a signal at that intersection for a decade, before the road was even completed. If there are other, better options, great. Let’s hear them.

ODOT wasted no time, effort or money putting in a passing lane on Highway 20, allegedly for safety reasons, even though no accident has been recorded on that section of highway.

The agency can certainly fast-track a project where lives are actually at stake.

Every time there is an accident at that intersection, there is an outcry for action. Then it dies down — until the next pileup sends someone to the hospital.

It is time to act. Write to Mayor Brad Boyd at bboyd@ci.sisters.or.us and to ODOT planner Jim Bryant at James.R.BRYANT@odot.state.or.us. Be respectful and courteous; these men have jobs to do and many priorities to balance and anger won’t help.

But let them know how important it is that action be taken NOW, before someone dies and the community of Sisters is left to ask why.

Jim Cornelius, Editor