The Weekly Way (5/28/21)
The builders of Oregon clearly had the sense that they had been part of creating something important, something better for the future.
Joe Beach is editor and publisher of the Capital Press, and editor of The Other Oregon magazine. He is temporarily editing The Oregon Way.
Every Memorial Day since we came to Oregon, my wife and I make a trip to Salem’s Pioneer Cemetery to pay our respects to people who made the trip before us.
When we were kids in the Midwest, it was common for families to visit the graves of loved ones over the holiday, and to take a moment to remember those who had fallen in service of their country. Being so far away from home, we decided to revive the tradition and pay tribute to our own dead by honoring strangers.
Pioneer Cemetery is on a gentle, East-facing slope that affords a nice view of Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson on a clear Spring day. As the name suggests, the earliest graves are the resting place of those who made the long trek on the Oregon Trail.
It is a surprisingly diverse and egalitarian place. The graves of the early territorial and state officials, prominent businessmen and the merchant class are mingled with those of tradesmen and their families, soldiers, laborers, emancipated slaves and Asian immigrants.
Walking among the graves provides time for quiet contemplation.
I can’t help but be struck by the graves of the pioneer families. Many of the stones give compelling accounts of the daring deeds, great successes and tragic calamities that defined the age.
One epitaph proudly proclaims the deceased “A Builder of Oregon.”
Much about the pioneer days has fallen out of favor. History is messy and complicated — made ever more so by rapidly changing sensibilities.
But the dead of Pioneer Cemetery lived that history in real time. They left all that they had known behind to come here, and they clearly had the sense that they had been part of creating something important, something better for the future.
Builders of Oregon.
We live our history in real time, too. We should take care not to spend so much time looking back and trying to reconcile the past that we neglect to look ahead and build something better for the future.
To ponder: What challenges does your community face?
To read:
Rich Wandschneider describes the live-and-let-live culture in Wallowa County, a place referred to as the end of the road.
For 45 years, from bookstore days to tenures in the non-profit world, two terms on a school board, and 35 years of newspaper columns, I’ve held a mostly liberal line. But I've made fun of my own kind often enough, and tried to be honest with the people I meet and the ideas I promote to have made friends who mostly vote the other way. “Mushy hearted” conservative Wallowa Countians have stepped up to promote school bonds, form an arts council, and host Vietnamese and Laotian refugees when that was the need.
We seem to be able to coexist in our end-of-the-road county in the end of the road state. It’s our history.
This week we featured two posts from two students in University of Oregon Professor David Frank’s class at the Clark Honors College. Nathaniel Olds makes a case that the willingness to listen is the key to being heard in political discussions.
I have heard people of all political persuasions in my hometown, at my university, and in my state demonize those who disagree with them, refusing to listen to what they are saying. I’m sure you have heard this as well. And this phenomenon is rising across Oregon and the country at large. Importantly, this wasn’t always the case.
Many of us do not express our ideas because we are afraid that we will not be heard. By respectfully listening to others, we can begin to create a space where ideas can flow in all directions, and where we will be heard as well.
And Tamir Eisenbach-Budner explores the role Facebook and other social media platforms have in polarizing the American public.
. . . it is no longer possible to consider Facebook a neutral platform that simply reflects the will of its users. It exerts its own will, which drives polarization, in the name of its advertising-based revenue model. Given that one in two Americans get their news from Facebook, not to mention other social media websites, it is no surprise that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.”
We all need to pressure social media platforms to take more responsibility for their role in this crisis and to immediately implement solutions to remedy it. Otherwise, all Americans, like my conservative counterpart and I, will continue to struggle to find common ground.
Former Portland Commissioner Steve Novick wants Oregon governments use their buying power to promote “smart gun” technology — guns that use fingerprint recognition or other technology to ensure that only the legal, original buyer of the gun can fire it.
Three years ago, I wrote a piece for the Portland Tribune suggesting that cities, counties and states should band together and announce that as of a date certain in the not too distant future, they plan to buy only smart guns for law enforcement officers, and will buy from whoever first makes reliable smart guns commercially available. Having a guaranteed market, as opposed to a hypothetical market, might lead at least one manufacturer to overcome its fear of the NRA.
As far as I know, no Oregon legislators or mayors adopted that idea. I guess I wasn’t very persuasive. But I figured I’d give it another try … now that the same general idea has been adopted by farsighted political leaders in places like Toledo and Cincinnati. Now, Oregon politicians don’t have to take the lead; they just need to take up what you might call the “Ohio Challenge.”