Happy Friday,
Here’s some stuff you might like.
Cedars
If you live in Bend, like I do, you tend to spend a lot of time driving mountain passes to access the population centers of Oregon for business or to see friends, family or to wait impatiently inside Nordstrom Rack while my wife shops for what I swear to you is an eternity every time. Friends, I have lived more eternities in Nordstrom Rack than I can count.
But I digress. Driving the pass is not something we particularly enjoy, because it has become a little too familiar, despite the surrounding natural beauty for which we here in Oregon are spoiled. Attendant to that familiarity is a kind of subconscious cataloging of the small towns one drives through – the gas stations that sell kratom, whatever that is, and all-year Christmas stores and pizza joints and scooter stores and mills with spinning saw blades out front.
And, of course, sometimes one stops. When I was a senior in high school, my history teacher, his wife and I stopped at a restaurant called Cedars, in Detroit, while en route to Salem for a statewide history trivia contest that was like Jeopardy except quite a lot more nerdy. I won’t forget that day, or Cedars, because I was hanging with adults who were not related to me or parents of any of my friends and it was like I was one of them. It was cool. Each of the countless times I’ve driven by Cedars since, I’ve thought of that day.
This week, Cedars burned to the ground, as did much of the rest of Detroit, and entire other towns and substantial portions of towns in the river valleys on the western flank of the Cascades. I hope the people of Idanha, Mill City, Blue River, McKenzie Bridge, and, farther south, Talent and Phoenix, know that we travelers could not love your communities like you did and do, but we share a very small portion of your loss. For what is familiar becomes dear.
A nightmare
Read this story if you need a reason to hug the people you love, and don’t require a dry eye. It’s an exquisite piece of journalism by Capi Lynn of Salem’s Statesman Journal about one man’s desperate attempts to reunite with his family as fire ripped through their community, near Lyons Oregon on the Santiam River.
Rebelling against oneself – Oregon’s pretend revolutionaries
Early Sunday morning, Kristina Naryan, the legislative director for Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek (D, no, really, really REALLY D – Portland) was among a large group of people arrested for allegedly interfering with a police officer after police declared a riot in downtown Portland. Police say people in the crowd threw fire bombs at them, and refused to disperse when repeatedly ordered to do so.
Now, who knows whether Naryan gets charged or convicted, and she remains innocent until proven guilty, of course. But let’s just assume for the sake of this chat between us that she was in fact part of a crowd that, putatively, was protesting the death of George Floyd, or perhaps police violence against black people generally, and which refused to leave the premises after the police told them to leave. Here’s an account of my thought process upon reading the story linked above:
1. Well of course the Oregon House Speaker’s senior staffer was arrested in a riot in downtown Portland. I assume there are (electric) busloads of Democrat capitol staff deposited in downtown Portland nightly. Dog bites man.
2. Wait just a second, she’s a senior staff person for probably the most powerful legislator in Oregon. Legislators are uniquely imbued with the power to write laws. Almost all laws bearing upon police behavior, from the potential criminal charges against cops, to the laws that allow public employee unions, including police unions, to protect from discharge or demotion state actors who have acted improperly, are state laws. As a senior advisor to a powerful legislator, Naryan more than almost any other Oregonian who is not a legislator, can affect public policy regarding police behavior, if she wants.
3. Did Naryan, possessed of a passion to change some stuff, try to talk to her boss about changing the objectionable laws, or institute new ones, before she protested about the alleged injustice of the legal and political regime over which she and her boss preside? That the Democratic Party has, in Oregon, presided over for decades? If she really wanted to effectuate change, it seems her time would be better spent in the office, working on legislation, rather than on the streets of downtown Portland.
4. It is reasonable to presume that Naryan’s focus was not, in fact, to change the laws relating to police behavior, because she had far more efficient means than being one of many protesters of making any such changes given her highly elevated access to the legislative system.
5. So, then, the million dollar questions: What was the real target of her protest? The system of which she is a prominent part? Did she quit her high-ranking and presumably well-compensated taxpayer-funded job in disgust before protesting against the system she has helped to create?
6. Those who created and operate the system have convinced others, and even themselves, that they really truly want to tear that system down. But there’s always a reason to protect their part of the system. And when the entire system is their system, nothing changes, including their professed dissatisfaction with the system.
On the future of public education
Oregon State Representative and former school board member Cheri Helt advocated in an op-ed this week for allowing kids, particularly kindergarten through third grade kids, to attend school in person. It’s an argument with which I am obviously sympathetic, and thus find quite convincing (funny how that works). One part in particular, though, caught my eye.
Helt writes, “For all of us who care about public education – this is an existential moment. If we don’t lead, act and change – moms and dads, grandparents and guardians will rightly take matters into their own hands. They already are – forming private pods, moving to more home-schooling and sending kids out of state to attend school. This is happening now.”
In other words, Oregon’s public school system is endangering its existence in its pre-Covid form by refusing to teach kids in person. Every other service provider one can think of – even dentists who actually work in people’s mouths and daycares and camps that involve large numbers of kids under the supervision and instruction of adults – has figured out how to provide service in spite of Covid. The public school system, darn it, just can’t figure it out for some reason.
After Hurricane Katrina wiped out large portions of New Orleans, closing schools for sustained periods, that city decided not to go back to its horrendously failing regular public school system. Instead, they reopened with an entirely charter school system.
Oregon’s schools were better than New Orleans’ schools, but they were still quite bad in comparison to other states, especially in high school graduation and other key metrics. Teachers unions and their hand-picked elected officials have given Oregonians a chance and a reason to evaluate the efficacy of the education system, and to experience other models. If real change is to come to Oregon schools, that change will have to come organically from voters who are dissatisfied with what we have and had. Oregonians are dissatisfied and should seize this moment to demand change that puts kids ahead of the adults who profit from education.
Nineteen years
Nineteen years ago, September 11, 2001, I got up early to go for a run before law school classes began at U of O. When I got back to the house, my friend Brad called me to tell me to turn on the news. Like you, I did. And for months after, there were American flags all around Eugene, yes that Eugene.
Today, as we live through a host of crises from the pandemic to the violence in America’s cities to the fires wiping out lives and livelihoods across the West, the unity and determination of the American people post-9/11 seems very distant. Our current crises, with the possible exception of the fires but don’t hold your breath, are dividing us, not uniting us. It is hard to think of things, today, that do unite us, at least politically and it sure seems like everything’s political.
But it is worth remembering that in the 1970s, during and in the wake of the Vietnam War and massive urban unrest, it seemed impossible that Americans would ever again stand as one on anything. But they did, on 9/11 and on a host of other things. We are now, again, in an age of turmoil and division, but history tells us, 9/11 tells us, that it will not forever be so.
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Have a great weekend!
Jeff Eager
jeff@eagerlawpc.com
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What I do:
EagerLaw PC – A business and real property law firm in Bend, Oregon.
Insite LGA Corp. – A campaign consulting, strategic communications and local government monitoring firm.
Waste Alert – Local government monitoring for the solid waste and recycling industry.