Opinion B8
|
THE DAILY HERALD
|
WWW.HERALDNET.COM/OPINION
|
Editorial Board Josh O’Connor, Publisher Peter Jackson, Editorial Page Editor Carol MacPherson, Editorial Writer Neal Pattison, Executive Editor
SUNDAY, 06.29.2014
IN OUR VIEW | AUG. 5 PRIMARY ELECTION
Endorsements: trust but verify In the coming weeks, the Herald editorial board will interview and recommend candidates for Washington’s August 5 primary. It’s a short-hair-pulling, subjective process. Over the years, the board has pushed a few characterchallenged failures (not intentionally, mind you), a reminder that judgment is a tested value, not a campaign slogan. There’s no substitute for individual-voter research, especially with a primary smack in the middle of roadtrip and gas-barbeque season. Congressional primaries are particularly critical. “Journalists mostly ignore them, except when a scandal-ridden incumbent is defeated,” writes the
Brookings Institution’s Elaine Kamarck. In Washington, the evaluation gold standard is the Municipal League of King County, which has no Snohomish County equivalent. Volunteer-candidate investigators dedicate weeks to answer character-related unknowns such as “Is the candidate trustworthy, reliable and candid?” The Herald editorial board’s recommendations are closer to silver. We ask tough questions and attempt to disentangle the campaigner from the elected poobah. In 1984, future Washington Gov. Booth Gardner lamented that he couldn’t just apply for office. Except for the money raising — an obscene, soul-deadening exercise in
cold-calling strangers — campaigns are a useful gauge of patience, stamina and listening skills, all essential qualities to serve in public life. To every interest group, and print media is an interest group, there’s an agenda. A legislative candidate will be greeted with shock and awe if she declares that her first priority will be to zero-out tax breaks that benefit Washington’s anemic newspaper industry. “Candidate X is a spirited and backbone-ish type,” we’ll write. “We encourage her to avoid the Legislature and dedicate her time to local politics, which better aligns with her priorities.” While we aim to be fair, we are not a representative crosssection of a demographically evolving Puget Sound area. We
are all white, privileged and college educated. Still, we slouch toward balance, and prioritize candidates who work hard and think for themselves. The editorial board appreciates imagination, truth tellers and those who tamp down clichés. However much we embrace “working families” and Northwest values, we long for specifics. Poll-tested applause lines will be met with marginalia, “X can’t put it in his own words” followed by hangman doodles. Public life is thankless, process-heavy work, but it remains a noble calling. To paraphrase theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, we prefer idealists without illusions over realists without a conscience. But judge for yourself and then vote.
a real penalty is leveled, don’t expect any relief. To the Gray Family of Lake Stevens who wrote in about the revelers thinking of dogs before they set off their bombs ... wishful thinking! I’m sure many of them own dogs, and if they don’t think about their own pets, they surely don’t care about yours or mine. Consideration and empathy are not part of their thought process. We’ll do as we always have done ... pray for rain!
as the rise of consumerism and buying on easily-begotten credit did lead to a time of great economic growth, but this growth was temporary, as others have said, this conveniently fails to mention the little thing that happened after the Roaring 20s. You know the Great Depression? And who, pray tell, was in office at its beginning? Herbert Hoover, a hands-off capitalist. And who was in office at its end? Franklin Roosevelt, a economic liberal who ended the Depression in 1940. Also, who was in office during the sub-prime housing crash? Bush, whose policy of anti-regulation led to economic ruin. Who was the last president to have a surplus under their administration? Bill Clinton. Need I say more?
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
■■BORDER CHILDREN
They’re refugees, not immigrants About the children crossing our southern border. If you are a person of any age with a lifespan of exactly how long you can bear the suffering of starvation and sickness until you die painfully and surely, and you hear even a rumor of someplace to go where you might hope for any amount of relief from this, you are not an illegal immigrant. You are a refugee. If you are a person who would intercept the children amongst these refugees and send them back to that certain suffering and death, you are a monster. All the rest is rhetoric. Politically convenient or not, we are one world. Our continued descent into new age, high-tech, international savagery can only be brought to heel at the pace we learn to accept that natural truth. Harold R. Pettus Everett
■■FIREWORKS
Unregulated ones very toxic I have always been somewhat amazed by the disconnect in parents who freak out if their children eat an inorganic candy gummy worm but on the Fourth of July go off to the reservation and buy illegal fireworks full of toxins. That acrid smoke lingering around the launch site has a variety of nasty, mutagenic and cancer -causing metals and chemicals that your kids are breathing lungfulls. The illegal fireworks from the reservation come from China, and the contents are not regulated. The chemical content of regulated safe and sane fireworks is monitored and even those produce aerosol metals when they burn. Metals such as barium, copper and strontium add colors to the flame of fountains and exploding rockets but do not combust and the tiny particulates are in the smoke. Because of the tiny size of the metals they go deep into your lungs. All of these are shown to cause health issues even in small amounts when inhaled. Also, a lot of these chemicals are soluble in water and so imagine the toxic surge in local lakes as hundreds of pounds of fireworks end up polluting the lake. And we wonder where the frogs went. The menu of toxins in illegal fireworks from China is huge. Here are just few of them. Arsenic, strontium, barium nitrate, polychlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans, lead dioxide, mercurous chloride, perchlorate — ammonium and potassium.
Have your say Feel strongly about something? Share it with the community by writing a letter to the editor. You’ll need to include your name, address and daytime phone number. (We’ll only publish your name and hometown.) We reserve the right to edit letters, but if you keep yours to 250 words or less, we won’t ask you to shorten it. If your letter is published, please wait 30 days before submitting another. Send it to: E-mail: letters@heraldnet.com Mail: Letters section The The Daily Herald P.O. Box 930 Everett, WA 98206 Have a question about letters? Call Carol MacPherson at 425-339-3472.
Do you really want your children inhaling this stuff? Stay away from unregulated illegal fireworks and help keep your family and your local waterways safe and healthy. Rob Sandelin Snohomish
■■FIREWORKS
Sadly, bans don’t stop outlaws I have bad news for Mr. Rekola, who recently wrote in to commend the new fireworks ban going into effect in Lynnwood next year. It won’t make a bit of difference. You see, Everett has had the ban for years and it is like a war zone from one end of the city to the other. When people are spending $500-600 at Boom City to get their fireworks, a $124 fine if they are even caught and cited (very unlikely) is just the cost of doing business. Until
Richard Wilson Everett
■■ECONOMY
Accurate history is instructive In response to the letter, “Will we allow capitalism to work?”: There are several things I’d like to clarify. To begin, the post-World War I Depression happened due to two main reasons; one, many people lost their manufacturing jobs, as war goods were no longer needed, and two, there were 4,700,000 Americans who had just returned from the war and were in need of a job. These two factors led to the post-World War I depression, not “Wilson’s hostility towards the U.S. Constitution.” The writer further criticizes Wilson for creating the federal income tax and The Federal Reserve. Well, what other way can America get her income? The days of import and export taxes are long dead, and being the world’s police isn’t a cheap occupation. Further, it was Lincoln, during the Civil War, who created the first income tax — not Wilson. He is right to dislike the Fed, as it gives billions to corrupt investment banks; money which would be better spent on education and infrastructure, but hindsight is 20-20. Then the writer goes on to talk about how the Roaring 20s were brought about by good old laissez-faire capitalism. This is somewhat true,
Henry Reed Edmonds
■■FOOD
Organic-grown best for workers A recent article compared organic and conventionally grown produce, implying that there is not much difference. One factor that seems to be left out of the equation — the health and safety of those who grow the food — both in the U.S. and around the world. Those workers are the ones who may be exposed to large amounts of toxic chemicals. When you buy food (as well as clothing, household items, etc.) stop and consider the welfare of those who helped produce it. Check out the organic products in your local supermarket, visit the SnoIsle Natural Foods Co-op on Grand Avenue in Everett, look into the “Ethical Choices” store on Colby Avenue in Everett for fair-trade coffee, chocolate and gifts from around the world. Together, we can make a difference. Nancy Salvadalena Everett
Great Conciliator and a bygone era
W
ASHINGTON — When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., went to the Senate floor Thursday afternoon to announce the death of Howard Baker, his words recalled not just his revered predecessor but an earlier, worthier cohort of American politicians. “Sen. Baker truly earned his nickname, the Great Conciliator,” McConnell said. “I know he will be remembered with fondness by members of both political parties.” McConnell was right on both counts: Baker, the former Senate majority leader who died Thursday at age 88, was a master of compromise. Like others of his generation, the Tennessee Republican put country before self and party when he served in the Senate from 1967 to 1985 and then as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. He came to prominence during Watergate by asking these immortal words of a president of his own party: “What did the president know, and DANA MILBANK when did he know it?” But eulogizing Baker as the Great Conciliator — an echo of Henry Clay’s sobriquet, the Great Compromiser — was a curious choice by McConnell, whose recent actions have given no indication that he views conciliation as a virtue. McConnell’s partisan screeds delivered on the Senate floor and his reluctance to negotiate — traits mirrored by his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid — and his record number of filibusters have set the tone for the current era of dysfunction in U.S. politics. Though just 17 years apart, Baker and McConnell represent entirely different generations of American leaders. Baker, born in 1925, was at the tail end of the G.I. generation that survived the Depression, won World War II, triumphed in the Cold War and built the United States’ economic might. McConnell, born in 1942, was just ahead of — and for practical purposes part of — the baby boom generation that wrecked our politics over the past 20 years. The current leaders’ failure was on prominent display in the Capitol last week. The day before McConnell spoke, House Speaker John Boehner, another boomer leader, was acknowledging the death of conciliation. Boehner announced his plans to sue President Obama over his use of executive orders — a rejection of any vestigial hope of compromise. Generational boundaries are inexact. McConnell, Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi are all, technically, the last of the silent generation, though their uncompromising, values-based politics are closer to that of the boomers they lead. Obama, though technically one of the last boomers, is in his detached leadership more representative of Generation X. But if the dates are fuzzy, the damage the boomers have done to our politics becomes clearer. Boomers inherited a system based on compromise and sacrifice — and they gave us the current standoff. They received a United States victorious in the Cold War and atop the world economy — and they gave us the Iraq War and the Great Recession. They are the parents of the first generation in U.S. history — the millennials — to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. “Boomers are the scorched-earth, values-driven generation,” said Neil Howe, who with William Strauss chronicled the recurring patterns of generations in the United States. “They invented the culture wars and they’re taking it with them as they grow older, which is this complete polarization and gridlock.” That’s not to malign this entire generation of Americans, which has dominated the culture for decades and expanded the frontiers of civil rights. But “in terms of politics, actually building things, boomers are clueless,” Howe told me. Contrast that with Baker’s generation, shaped by suffering and war. “The politics of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was informed by ‘we are all in this together’ and ... at the end of the day we shake hands and find a pragmatic solution,” said the Pew Research Center’s Paul Taylor, author of a new generational study, “The Next America.” Gen X — my generation — is ill-equipped to fix the boomers’ mess. Alienated and individualistic, we don’t have faith in institutions or in our ability to change them; like Obama, we react to events. Happily, the millennials may have a better shot at fixing things when they get older. Unhappily, history suggests it will require a crisis. It was, Howe notes, “a generation like this (the boomers) that took us into the Civil War, and it was a generation like this that took us into the Great Depression.” War soon followed the 1852 death of Clay, the Great Compromiser. Let’s pray that the passing of the Great Conciliator’s generation, and the disastrous reign of the boomers, doesn’t end in such misery.