I love it when two important competing values run into each other at full throttle. It forces me to take a stand.
The Oregon legislature, with encouragement from sheriff’s across the state, is moving to close records of who has a concealed handgun carry permit. Journalists and other advocates of open records are crying foul.
They argue that such records should be open, that the public has a right to know who has a permit to carry.
Privacy rights advocates and gun owner lobbies say it’s nobody’s business and opening the records could actually detract from the security of the people who get carry permits for protection.
I am philosophically and professionally inclined to side with the open records folks. I believe in sunshine, that actions of public agencies should be transparent to public scrutiny.
Yet I am also a believer in a broad private sphere, that individuals should have the widest possible latitude to conduct their lives as they see fit.
On this one, I come down on the side of privacy. The issuing agencies — sheriff’s departments — are obligated to issue a carry permit as long as a person qualifies. The government action here is merely affirming a right presumed to exist.
The right to carry belongs to the individual and is his or her choice in the private conduct of his or her life. Such an action doesn’t require the kind of scrutiny that, say, the actions of the city council or school board might.
What they do is our business because they work for us. Not so in the case of the carry permit holder.
Arguments that say you should have a right to know whether or not your strange-acting neighbor is armed are just bogus. If your neighbor is whacky enough to consider him dangerous, you should consider him dangerous regardless. It’s also doubtful that he’s gone to the trouble to obtain a carry permit.
Concealed carry is a private act, lawful and appropriate for those who choose it and they should be left alone, without prying eyes of those with axes to grind.
Public officials and agencies should have their actions subject to public scrutiny; private individuals should not.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Hideout
Michael Phelps takes a bong hit at a college party and pretty soon everybody in the world knows it.
It’s symbolic of the world we’re now living in, where the zone of privacy has shrunk down to nearly nothing. With cellphone cameras, cheap, small digital recorders and videocams, anything anybody does or says just about anywhere can be instantly disseminated via Youtube and other such media literally across the world.
Now, folks who live in small towns like Sisters already kinda know what that’s like. It doesn’t take long for news to travel in Sisters — and sometimes to get distorted out of all recognition as it goes.
A friend once told me that it was a real pain to be a single woman in Sisters because you can’t just have a cup of coffee with someone without the whole town knowing about it — and asking the inevitable questions.
Of course, it has ever been thus. The coconut telegraph has existed since there were coconuts and that’s a long, long time. Only a couple of generations ago, big cities were made up of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else and their business.
But new technology has amplified the small town effect beyond anything we’ve ever known.
What’s strange to me is that more and more people seem to be inviting the loss of their own privacy. Revealing intimate details of their lives to the whole world on Facebook and other social networking sites. Chattering about the minute details of their day-to-day on Twitter (why?).
Maybe it’s all just about making a connection. Maybe it’s just an attempt to assert the very fact of existence.
I am fully aware of the irony of bringing this up on a blog, by the way. A blog that I’ve spent way more time on this week than usual — and more than I’m comfortable with.
It all seems a little oppressive to me, even as I get caught up in it, mostly through my work. Much as I love my small town, I like to get away from it from time to time — kind of an anti-Cheers. I want to go where nobody knows my name and they couldn’t care less whether I’m there or not. The woods or some strange city. Nothing feels better to me than being out of cell phone or e-mail contact, just to disappear for a while.
But the rising culture seems to be fundamentally opposed to that, to be driven to 24/7 plugged in status. In a wired world, it’s hard to find a hideout.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
It’s symbolic of the world we’re now living in, where the zone of privacy has shrunk down to nearly nothing. With cellphone cameras, cheap, small digital recorders and videocams, anything anybody does or says just about anywhere can be instantly disseminated via Youtube and other such media literally across the world.
Now, folks who live in small towns like Sisters already kinda know what that’s like. It doesn’t take long for news to travel in Sisters — and sometimes to get distorted out of all recognition as it goes.
A friend once told me that it was a real pain to be a single woman in Sisters because you can’t just have a cup of coffee with someone without the whole town knowing about it — and asking the inevitable questions.
Of course, it has ever been thus. The coconut telegraph has existed since there were coconuts and that’s a long, long time. Only a couple of generations ago, big cities were made up of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else and their business.
But new technology has amplified the small town effect beyond anything we’ve ever known.
What’s strange to me is that more and more people seem to be inviting the loss of their own privacy. Revealing intimate details of their lives to the whole world on Facebook and other social networking sites. Chattering about the minute details of their day-to-day on Twitter (why?).
Maybe it’s all just about making a connection. Maybe it’s just an attempt to assert the very fact of existence.
I am fully aware of the irony of bringing this up on a blog, by the way. A blog that I’ve spent way more time on this week than usual — and more than I’m comfortable with.
It all seems a little oppressive to me, even as I get caught up in it, mostly through my work. Much as I love my small town, I like to get away from it from time to time — kind of an anti-Cheers. I want to go where nobody knows my name and they couldn’t care less whether I’m there or not. The woods or some strange city. Nothing feels better to me than being out of cell phone or e-mail contact, just to disappear for a while.
But the rising culture seems to be fundamentally opposed to that, to be driven to 24/7 plugged in status. In a wired world, it’s hard to find a hideout.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
When the ax comes down
The budget ax is on the neck of Sisters schools.
With a cut in state funding looming due to the economic recession and a projected decline in enrollment, the Sisters School District is looking at a shortfall in the neighborhood of $300,000. It could be worse than that; it’s not a good bet to hope it will be better.
If local option goes down at the polls, that shortfall balloons to $1.3 million in what school board chair Chris Jones describes as “a perfect storm.”
Wielding the budget ax is a trickier business than it seems on the surface.
It’s not easy to size public education to fit a declining student population at a given time, at least not while maintaining viable class sizes. You can’t cut enough teaching positions to backfill a hole created by a significant decline in enrollment — you’re still left with a big deficit in per-student funding (we delve into the numbers in a page 1 story on this subject in this week’s Nugget).
The schools are also saddled with almost $1 million in educational mandates, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandated food and transportation services.
Mandated means you can’t cut ’em, even though the money to pay for them is shrinking.
It makes for a complicated and unpleasant job for the school board. The board will start prioritizing cuts next month and they are looking for public input. Start here. What would you cut to make up $300,000? More?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
With a cut in state funding looming due to the economic recession and a projected decline in enrollment, the Sisters School District is looking at a shortfall in the neighborhood of $300,000. It could be worse than that; it’s not a good bet to hope it will be better.
If local option goes down at the polls, that shortfall balloons to $1.3 million in what school board chair Chris Jones describes as “a perfect storm.”
Wielding the budget ax is a trickier business than it seems on the surface.
It’s not easy to size public education to fit a declining student population at a given time, at least not while maintaining viable class sizes. You can’t cut enough teaching positions to backfill a hole created by a significant decline in enrollment — you’re still left with a big deficit in per-student funding (we delve into the numbers in a page 1 story on this subject in this week’s Nugget).
The schools are also saddled with almost $1 million in educational mandates, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandated food and transportation services.
Mandated means you can’t cut ’em, even though the money to pay for them is shrinking.
It makes for a complicated and unpleasant job for the school board. The board will start prioritizing cuts next month and they are looking for public input. Start here. What would you cut to make up $300,000? More?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Friday, February 6, 2009
Fightin’ words
Maybe it’s a sign of the times.
There seems to be a lot of fightin’ words being flung around out there.
Yesterday, a man called The Nugget and was verbally — unpleasant, I guess I’ll say — to the woman who runs the front desk. Of course he wouldn’t identify himself. He’s upset about local option and he doesn’t like me. Fine on both counts. But to lay it on somebody who has nothing to do with either issue? Not cool.
A couple of times recently I’ve heard people I like and respect let their passion curdle into nasty and unfair attacks on people they disagree with.
Then we’ve been treated to the audio of actor Christian Bale going off on a Director of Photography on the set of the new Terminator movie. His foul-mouthed tirade wasn’t about correcting a problem, it was about humiliating a colleague. I doubt my wife is the only one to vow: “I’ll never see one of that guy’s movies again. That’s totally uncalled for.”
Most seriously, last Friday a 16-year-old youth’s “mouthing off” led to a punch to the head and a fall to the concrete that put the 16-year-old in the hospital and on restricted activity for weeks and left his 14-year-old assailant in deep trouble.
Words are powerful and words that are meant to wound, belittle, humiliate can lead to big trouble. No, you can’t bludgeon somebody in the head because his words cut you — especially in school. But who would have blamed the guy at the receiving end of Christian Bale’s tirade if he’d laid the actor out on the floor?
We live in a culture that shields people from accountability for their words. Everybody on the Internet is 10 feet tall and bulletproof. They can lurk in cyberspace and spew invective with no consequences.
(I realize that we’re indulging the same sort of thing on this blog — it’s the nature of the Internet. That’s why the comments are moderated).
There’s a lot of really angry people out there, feeling powerless as the world seems to spin out of control. Maybe it feels good to lash out, maybe it makes some people feel big for a moment to make someone else feel small.
But I suspect that ain’t really so, at least not for long. I’ve never felt good afterward when I’ve let my temper get the better of me and used my skill with words as a weapon. It’s not right and it’s not healthy for anybody.
Some people seem to just live that way and I hate to imagine what it must be like. It can’t feel good stewing in your own bile.
Maybe Christian Bale could tell us, but I’m not interested in anything that guy has to say.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
There seems to be a lot of fightin’ words being flung around out there.
Yesterday, a man called The Nugget and was verbally — unpleasant, I guess I’ll say — to the woman who runs the front desk. Of course he wouldn’t identify himself. He’s upset about local option and he doesn’t like me. Fine on both counts. But to lay it on somebody who has nothing to do with either issue? Not cool.
A couple of times recently I’ve heard people I like and respect let their passion curdle into nasty and unfair attacks on people they disagree with.
Then we’ve been treated to the audio of actor Christian Bale going off on a Director of Photography on the set of the new Terminator movie. His foul-mouthed tirade wasn’t about correcting a problem, it was about humiliating a colleague. I doubt my wife is the only one to vow: “I’ll never see one of that guy’s movies again. That’s totally uncalled for.”
Most seriously, last Friday a 16-year-old youth’s “mouthing off” led to a punch to the head and a fall to the concrete that put the 16-year-old in the hospital and on restricted activity for weeks and left his 14-year-old assailant in deep trouble.
Words are powerful and words that are meant to wound, belittle, humiliate can lead to big trouble. No, you can’t bludgeon somebody in the head because his words cut you — especially in school. But who would have blamed the guy at the receiving end of Christian Bale’s tirade if he’d laid the actor out on the floor?
We live in a culture that shields people from accountability for their words. Everybody on the Internet is 10 feet tall and bulletproof. They can lurk in cyberspace and spew invective with no consequences.
(I realize that we’re indulging the same sort of thing on this blog — it’s the nature of the Internet. That’s why the comments are moderated).
There’s a lot of really angry people out there, feeling powerless as the world seems to spin out of control. Maybe it feels good to lash out, maybe it makes some people feel big for a moment to make someone else feel small.
But I suspect that ain’t really so, at least not for long. I’ve never felt good afterward when I’ve let my temper get the better of me and used my skill with words as a weapon. It’s not right and it’s not healthy for anybody.
Some people seem to just live that way and I hate to imagine what it must be like. It can’t feel good stewing in your own bile.
Maybe Christian Bale could tell us, but I’m not interested in anything that guy has to say.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
Thursday, February 5, 2009
A disturbing piece of news...
There was a major spike in suicides in the Army in the month of January (see story here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/05/army.suicides/index.html).
We may be looking at the jagged tip of a very big iceberg here. Soldiers are dealing with multiple deployments and the stresses that causes. PTSD is a serious issue for many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Add to that severely reduced prospects coming out of the service due to a tanking economy and there’s a recipe for trouble.
The folks I know who work with veterans say the coming years are going to be tough ones and whatever help can be given is welcome.
If you are interested in getting involved locally, contact Central Oregon Veterans Outreach at centraloregonveteransoutreach@yahoo.com. Visit http://mypeoplepc.com/members/jackdiamondback/centraloregonveteransoutreachinc/index.html.
We may be looking at the jagged tip of a very big iceberg here. Soldiers are dealing with multiple deployments and the stresses that causes. PTSD is a serious issue for many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Add to that severely reduced prospects coming out of the service due to a tanking economy and there’s a recipe for trouble.
The folks I know who work with veterans say the coming years are going to be tough ones and whatever help can be given is welcome.
If you are interested in getting involved locally, contact Central Oregon Veterans Outreach at centraloregonveteransoutreach@yahoo.com. Visit http://mypeoplepc.com/members/jackdiamondback/centraloregonveteransoutreachinc/index.html.
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