Guest Commentary

What have you done for your local parks, rivers and wildlife recently? Not much opportunity to help? Here's a perfect chance for you to do something truly meaningful for these things we all cherish. In November, you can vote “yes” on Measure 76.

This October, Human Dignity Coalition of Bend will present their 9th annual Drag Show fundraiser. Shortly after last year's fundraiser, I wrote Jenni Peskin, Director of HDC, arguing that the “drag” theme was inappropriate, and asked that her organization discontinue that theme. Clearly my argument had no effect. What follows is the text of my letter to Ms. Peskin:

Last week, the Source Weekly published an article, “Green Machine,” that asked if Central Oregon had the capacity to support two land use advocacy organizations. As Executive Director of one of those organizations – Central Oregon LandWatch – I'm writing to express confidence that it does.
As I told the article's author, Anne Aurand, and as LandWatch and 1000 Friends of Oregon have discussed with each other, our real challenge is how to articulate our unique but overlapping messages and missions to the larger community and help people understand the benefits of each.

The number of new U.S. Army recruits who are high-school dropouts soared during the Bush years, peaking at 29.3 percent in 2007. The economic collapse made life easier for military recruiters. “Only” 17 percent of soldiers who joined in 2008 failed to graduate from high school. But high unemployment hasn't resulted in enough new high-quality soldiers and sailors.
Recruit quality is important. Uneducated or incapable soldiers are less likely to do well operating high-tech equipment. And they're more likely to do stupid things, like beating up, robbing and raping civilians in U.S.-occupied territories.
The U.S. military is bigger than ever. But it's becoming dumber. It's also getting meaner: in 2008 one in five recruits received a “morals waiver” because they had a criminal record, including felonies. “The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous 'operations tempo'–soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight,” reported Slate's Fred Kaplan in 2008.

The winds of change are blowing through the Oregon Badlands Wilderness, the newest addition to the fully protected wild lands of Oregon. It's been just over a year since the Wilderness Act took effect, protecting forever this high desert jewel of 30,000 acres, so near to, but yet so far from, the metropolitan area of Bend.
The center of the Badlands Wilderness is located about 14 miles from the center of Bend, but the contrast is startling, once you head out on the trails, or off trail, to some of the unusual volcanic formations and lava flows that prolifically stud the landscape. As you hike farther from the trailheads that surround the Badlands on the north, south and east sides, solitude, serenity and silence offer a respite from the noise of the small city we Bendites call home. Out here in the wilderness, surrounded by thousand-year-old juniper trees, you can hear and see the feathered and four-footed inhabitants that call the Badlands home.

Almost three years ago, I heard a lecture by Mary Wood, a University of Oregon law professor. She talked about the narrow window of opportunity we had to respond to the devastating effects of greenhouse gases and the impact on the future of our planet. I had to do something.
While I knew full well it was against the rules on Awbrey Butte, I did not know the ramifications that the simple benign act of hanging a clothesline would create. I naively thought that others would clearly see the sensibility and understand that doing the right thing for all living things took precedence over following 25-year-old rules.

When Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced the Horse Heaven and Cathedral Rock Wilderness Act into Congress, they were responding to the widespread public support for protecting these two areas. This includes the support from a diverse group of stakeholders including the Northwest Rafters Association, the Redmond Chapter of the Oregon Hunters Association, county governments, the neighboring landowners and numerous conservation organizations. With the increasingly partisan nature of politics these days, it must be refreshing for our members of Congress to see disparate parties come to the table with an idea that solves multiple problems for diverse stakeholders and creates a new wilderness area in the process.

While the city of Bend projects deficits of $21 million in their general fund over the next six years, they squander millions of dollars on Trojan Horses like their preposterous Urban Growth Expansion Plan (UGB) and the unmitigated disaster at Juniper Ridge (JR). Both of these projects contain tons of proverbial goose poop fresh from Drake Park, but the city says prepare to dig deeper because these Trojan Horses are mired in quicksand and will require additional millions of your money before they're finished.
TROJAN HORSE # 1: The UGB
The city of Bend submitted its ludicrous, half-finished 1,500-page proposal one year ago in a simulated 12K-gold-plated binder with brilliant color graphics believing that Oregon would be enamored with the cover and ignore the fine print. But low and behold, some bored bureaucrat at the Department of Land Conservation & Development (DLCD) smelled something “fowl” and opened the darned thing up for a peek. (Whew!)

Regular Bulletin readers know that the paper's almost comically conservative editorial page has been waging a campaign against the Bend-La Pine School district's arrangement with the Central Oregon Environmental Center, a local non-profit, to put on an environmental education program in local classrooms. This past week, Editor in Chief John Costa chose to take direct aim at one of the Environmental Center's defenders, former city councilor Peter Gramlich, who circulated an e-mail sharply criticizing the paper's editorial board. Prior to the editorial, Costa traded e-mails with Gramlich and in one of those he told the former city councilor that he would “present” Gramlich's letter as part of the paper's response. As far as we, or Gramlich, can tell, he didn't. Instead he opted to quote snippets of it in his Sunday column, a sort of weekly ombudsman piece in which Costa holds forth on the state of the newspaper and often answers critics. Those familiar know that the column is basically a monologue that acts like a strong sedative on the paper's collective readers. But those who did manage to soldier through Costa's spirited defense of the paper this week got the usual clap-trap about the intellectual integrity of the editorial board. What they didn't get was a full reading of Gramlich's original letter.

I can't put the book down and I can't stop talking about it. Let me share with you one of my favorite quotes from Evan Wolfson's Why Marriage Matters, America, Equality and Gay People's Right to Marry:
“It was so cool,” said Gabriel, thirteen, who served as the ringbearer, after standing in line overnight with his parents. “I always accepted that 'Yeah, they're my moms,' but they were actually getting married. I felt thick inside with happiness. Just thick.”