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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2014
N.G. Osteen 1843-1936 The Watchman and Southron
THE SUMTER ITEM
H.G. Osteen 1870-1955 Founder, The Item
H.D. Osteen 1904-1987 The Item
Margaret W. Osteen 1908-1996 The Item Hubert D. Osteen Jr. Chairman & Editor-in-Chief Graham Osteen Co-President Kyle Osteen Co-President Jack Osteen Editor and Publisher Larry Miller CEO
20 N. Magnolia St., Sumter, South Carolina 29150 • Founded October 15, 1894
COMMENTARY
For all our woes, there are some good things, too This column first appeared on Oct. 1, 1989, in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo.
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he old Gamecock city is pretty well wrecked from the unwelcome guest who stole into our midst at 2 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 22, a day that will live in infamy in Sumter County history. Hugo came too quickly, at up to 109 mph, and stayed entirely too long. He definitely exceeded the speed limit as he blew in during the dead of night. What ironies attach to this particular hurricane. Thirtyfive years ago (almost), another hurricane whose name started with an “h” — Hazel — struck the coast of South Carolina. But, Hazel was kinder and gentler to the inland areas of our state as she spun around the coast wreaking havoc on Myrtle Beach, Surfside Beach and Garden City. The latter is now history after Hugo, a tangled rubble, while Myrtle Beach, Surfside, Pawleys Island and Litchfield Beach weren’t exactly spared. Pawleys, for example, lost
100 homes, officials estimate. Summer Academy, one of the island’s oldest homes, was among the casualties. No longer arrogant, Pawleys is just plain shabby. Here at home, we have a few things to be thankful for, besides the one reported death due to the hurricane. The Opera House is still standing, although the clock tower is missing a clock. In the midst of the twisted trees in Memorial Park, the new bandstand Hubert D. sparkles with Osteen Jr. hardly a blemish. Swan Lake lost a number of trees but seems to be reasonably intact. Sadly, the Brown Chapel, once the main sanctuary of First Baptist Church on East Liberty Street, was demolished by Hugo. Other lovely landmarks of Sumter, such as the Brick Church near Dabbs Crossroads, were badly damaged. The destruction to these
beautiful old edifices is like tearing a page out of a history book and tossing it to the winds. When the shock of all this destruction gradually wears off and we begin returning to normal, whatever that may be, we’re in for an even greater shock, and that is the loss of our trees and forests. Sumter is going to look entirely different without the comforting shade of its magnificent oaks, pines and dogwoods. Our skyline will be stark and forbidding, like a scene from a World War II battleground, until the broken and uprooted trees are removed, and then it will only be bare. The trees that are left, we should cherish. In the meantime, after the appropriate interim of feeling sorry for ourselves and bemoaning our fate, we should begin putting things into perspective. Think about the people of London during World War II and the destruction, deprivation and loss of life they had to endure while Nazi Germany tried to bomb that ancient city back to the stone ages. Thousands died,
and many thousands more lost their homes during the Blitz. And that went on for months. We, by contrast, had to endure one night of terror, and while the aftermath is depressing, we probably won’t see another Hugo in our lifetimes. Small consolation, but we should be thankful for that somewhat comforting thought. And think about, too, how kind people have been to one another. Crises such as killer hurricanes can bring out the worst in some people, but those who behaved badly during this one — the looters, the price gougers, the careless drivers, the insensitive and indifferent — were the exception rather than the rule. Most of Sumter showed genuine care and concern for their fellow man, extending themselves in endless variations of neighborliness and thoughtfulness, many going above and beyond the Golden Rule. As we’ve had to function without the normal creature comforts, such as water and electricity, we’ve found out
how flexible we can be. I discovered how to operate an electric generator, for example, and since I live in the country, I’ve also adjusted to using the woods as a “facility,” along with a shovel and a roll of toilet paper. For those of us in the boonies, it’s back to nature in its rawest form until the CP&L crews rediscover us. Life goes on. Sumter and its neighboring counties have been roughed up by old Hugo. But in the midst of all this turmoil and destruction, we relearn the old lesson of how interdependent we are, how a helping hand during an emergency might not be such a bad way to conduct ourselves when things are less critical. We find, in the aftermath of Hugo, how much we need each other — friends, family, strangers alike. We’ve all been hurt in some way; yet we should realize the pain and disruption can forge a bond out of adversity and make all of us stronger — and better. Reach Hubert D. Osteen Jr. at hubert@theitem.com.
NOTABLE & QUOTABLE ‘MOST RELIABLE TRUTH TELLERS ARE DESPERATE PEOPLE’ In “The New Bureaucratic Brazenness,” Peggy Noonan writes that “official arrogance is the source of public cynicism.” Read it online at www.wsj.com: We’re all used to a certain amount of doublespeak and bureaucratese in government hearings. That’s as old as forever. But in the past year of listening to testimony from government officials, there is something different about the boredom and indifference with which government testifiers skirt, dodge and withhold the truth. The only people who seem to tell the truth now are the people inside the agencies who become whistleblowers. They call a news organization, get on the phone with a congressman’s staff. That’s basically how the Veterans Affairs and Secret Service scandals broke: Desperate people who couldn’t take the corruption dropped a dime. What does it say about a great nation when its most reliable truth tellers are desperate people?
SOCIAL MEDIA SITES SELLING OUR INFO FOR PROFIT From a summary (by Ellen Slavitz) of the book “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,” by Robert W. McChesney. Read it online at http://bit. ly/1oHQ5t2. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo. We believe they exist to make our lives more convenient, more interesting, more fun. According to Robert W. McChesney, these Internet marvels are the products of carefully designed operations that enable a small number of corporations to earn huge profits, while providing the public with less and less value, service and information essential in a democratic society. McChesney explains how government, guided by teams of handsomely paid lobbyists, has enabled a cartel of huge corporations to own and control the Internet, much like a tiny number of companies have come to dominate the wireless and cable industries. Large players have gobbled up small and medium sized Internet ventures, eliminating competition and ensuring maximum profits and control. McChesney details how Internet companies earn enormous profits through sophisticated methods of collecting personal data, which is then sold to advertisers. Every
Google search or Facebook “Like,” every Web site visit is monitored, accumulated, and monetized for advertisers. “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold,” says one of McChesney’s sources. Google, Facebook, and similar sites may have started as useful technological innovations but have quickly transformed themselves into businesses that sell our personal information for enormous profits.
PROTECT YOURSELF AFTER PERSONAL DATA BREACH In “Ways to Protect Yourself After the JPMorgan Hacking,” New York Times reporter Tara Siegel Bernard writes, “The numbers are shocking: Personal information from 76 million households may have been compromised as part of the cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase.” Read it online at www.nytimes.com: The intrusion compromised the names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of those households, and can basically affect anyone — customers past and present — who logged onto any of Chase and JPMorgan’s websites or apps. That might include those who get access to their checking and other bank accounts online or someone who checks their credit card points over the web. Seven million small businesses also were affected. While nobody knows what the hackers are planning to do with the data from JPMorgan — if anything at all — privacy experts say the biggest risk is that the thieves will try to extract more sensitive information from affected consumers. “It would give the thief a call log of who to victimize, but that in and of itself is not enough to steal someone’s identity,” said Matt Davis, a senior victims adviser at the Identity Theft Resource Center. “That is the silver lining there.” There is no evidence that account numbers, passwords, user IDs, dates of birth or Social Security numbers were compromised, according to the bank, nor did the bank suggest that customers change their passwords. “I think it is always good practice to regularly watch your accounts,” said Trish Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman. “That is just good financial hygiene.” Notable & Quotable is compiled by Graham Osteen. Contact him at graham@theitem.com.
A Bell-ringer in New Jersey
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RINCETON, N.J. — Every 36 years, it seems Jeff Bell disturbs New Jersey’s political order. In 1978, as a 34-year-old apostle of supply-side economics and a harbinger of the Reagan Revolution, he stunned the keepers of the conventional wisdom by defeating a four-term senator, Clifford Case, in the Republican primary. Bell, a Columbia University graduate who fought in Vietnam, lost to Bill Bradley in the 1978 general election, but in 1982 he went to Washington to help implement President Reagan’s economic policies that produced five quarters of above 7 percent growth and six years averaging George 4.6 percent. Will Bell, now 70, is back. He won the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Cory Booker, 45, the Democratic former mayor of Newark who last October won a special election to serve the last year of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s term. New Jersey last voted Republican for president in 1988; in 2012, Barack Obama carried it by 18 points; it has not elected a Republican senator since 1972. Booker, who has raised more than $16 million, is a prodigy at siphoning money from Wall Street. Bell is running this year’s most penurious Senate campaign, having raised and pretty much spent about $300,000. Yet Booker’s lead is only in the low double digits — 13 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Because Bell speaks incessantly about the dangers of fiat money and the wisdom of the gold standard, some people dismiss him as a one-issue candidate whose issue is an anachronism. He calls this “chronological snobbery”: The gold standard is a bad idea because it is an old idea and because the economics pro-
COMMENTARY fession opposes it. Besides, his supposed single issue (actually, he has many) is the declining value of money, which affects everything. His audiences, he says, are not just disgusted by today’s feeble economy, they are puzzled by it. Bell wants to alert the nation before the government again has to pay 4 percent interest on its borrowing, thereby adding, he estimates, $400 billion to the deficit. He is running because “something substantive ought to be offered before the 2016 cycle.” Booker, who is ignoring Bell, just as Case did, has a better résumé (Stanford, Oxford, Yale Law School) than reputation. His liberalism is as conventional as his eccentricity is disturbing. He is a fabulist (he has been called “the Garden State’s Mother Goose”) given to asserting as facts various self-aggrandizing figments of his imagination. A senator is 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of America’s governments, so senatorial elections rarely alter the nation’s trajectory. Here, however, is why this one matters: Cory Bookers are many, predictable and fungible; Jeff Bells are few, idiosyncratic and invaluable because they look at familiar things in unfamiliar ways and leaven politics with new agendas, such as restoring the Federal Reserve’s single mandate to preserve the currency as a store of value. New Jersey has not rejected an incumbent senator in a general election since 1942. Next month, it should begin doing so, at least every 72 years. George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com. © 2014, Washington Post Writers Group
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY? Send your letter to letters@theitem.com, drop it off at The Sumter Item office, 20 N. Magnolia St., or mail it to The Sumter Item, P.O. Box 1677, Sumter, SC 29151, along with the writer’s full name, address and telephone number (for verification purposes only). Letters that exceed 350 words will be cut accordingly in the print edition, but available in their entirety at www.theitem.com/opinion/letters_to_editor.