I had appointed an active Democratic Club member in November 2012 to attempt to find other members who would volunteer to be club officers for 2013 and 2014. I had made it clear that I would not serve another two years as the club’s chair. If nobody would step forward, then the club might cease to exist. At the December 2012 club meeting my recruiter announced that no one wanted to be the chair. “All right then.” I guess this is the club’s last meeting” I said, or words to that effect.
“Nobody asked me,” a voice spoke up, from a new member. He and his wife had attended the November meeting and had joined the club afterward. Yes, he would do the job. “Then you’re the chair starting January,” I more or less said. So much for nominating candidates and then having a vote. Nobody objected. I was off the hook.
The new chair was an ex-forester, an extreme liberal I would soon find out.
I wasn’t done writing letters to newspaper editors. So much was wrong with the state of our country due mostly to Republican Party self-interest and right-wing media gas lighting. Fracking for natural gas was now the supposed solution to oil and coal CO2 emissions (never mind the methane gas that was released).
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My wife and I recently attended the movie “Promised Land” at our local theater. Matt Damon plays the role of an up-and-coming sales representative of a large natural gas corporation intent on obtaining leases on property owned by poor, small-town farmers. Growing up on an Iowa farm, Damon’s character had seen how the inhabitants of his rural community had suffered after the local Caterpillar factory had ceased its operations. He is empathetic toward the people he seeks to persuade. Profit from your good fortune, he advises. Permit my corporation to frack the subterranean rock beneath your property to reach your natural gas. Opponents point out what fracking does to the land, livestock, and drinking water – scare stories spread by environmentalists, Damon’s character wants to believe; probable facts she should ignore, his female co-sales worker, dependent on her income, has decided.
I left the theater reflecting on certain truths.
Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
We are all so willing to tolerate a widespread threat to safety and health if we are not ourselves inconvenienced.
This attitude held by many: If profit is to be had, it’s no skin off my nose if I benefit and you get hurt.
How do you feel about liquid natural gas being piped to and exported from Portland and Coos Bay? About coal trains from Montana passing through Lane County? About tar sand oil from Canada being pumped to Texas through the Keystone XL pipeline?
How about global warming? The end of human existence as we have known it?
Printed January 16, 2013, in the Siuslaw News
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Always aggravating is the Fox News loyalist who believes that we deluded liberals need to be educated as to the real facts.
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It annoys me to read letters to the editor written by people who continue to live in the Fox News bubble, especially now when the Republican Party has brought our country to its knees and will cause yet greater adversity by rendering Congress inoperative.
Jerry McCall (letters, March 3) blames President Obama for what ails us.
Yes, we are back to paying the higher payroll tax, but that is because Congressional Republicans refused to permit its continuance when the so-called “fiscal cliff” agreement was reached.
Yes, gas prices are up, but how can the president be blamed for that? Ah, Sean Hannity, master purveyor of false clarifications, says so.
Yes, “slow growth, limited consumer spending, high unemployment and shrinking paychecks have all contributed to the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.” (Obama again!) Job flight overseas, the destruction of labor unions, the benefits of accelerated worker production going to top corporate management while worker wages drop below 1990 levels: these are outcomes of corporate policy that maximize profits by maximizing reduction of costs.
Mr. McCall also wrote: “Maybe Obama should rethink his plan in his second term and get Americans back to work …” How? Do what House Republicans demand? Tea partiers want to destroy the federal government. Republicans not bat-guano crazy march to their corporate pay-masters’ drummer. Any extreme measure to thwart representative governance is fair game.
Republicans, we aren’t as callous and dim-witted as you think.
Printed March 8, 2013, in the Register-Guard
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The editor removed “not bat-guano crazy” from the letter. The following letter appeared four days later.
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I applaud Harold Titus of Florence for his wonderful letter in the March 8 Register-Guard.
I am positively fed up with the governmental “anchor” called the Republican Party. A recent editorial page cartoon was right on the money. It showed President Obama climbing a fiscal cliff, and attached to a rope tied around his waist was a dangling elephant. How appropriate.
The Republican Party has been nothing but an albatross around Obama’s neck since he took office. Isn’t it time to at least try to support him, help get this country back on track, and stop the “us-vs.-them” attitude?
After all, the Bush clan dragged us into this hole, and I think Obama deserves the respect and support from all of us to help to fix it.
Bruce A. Smith
Eugene
Printed March 12, 2013, in the Register-Guard
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What House and Senate Republicans, in essence, were declaring: Oh my gosh! The federal debt! We are [once again] doomed! We must cut entitlements! (Now that the Dems are in charge) We must stop their unbridled spending! We are the party that is fiscally responsible! GOP! GOP! Remember that! (We blame, do not own)
More fodder for letter writing.
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In a recent column Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made an excellent analogy to emphasize how dishonest the Republican Party’s argument is about cutting spending to reduce our annual federal deficit. He compared the Bush administration’s fear mongering about “weapons of mass destruction” with the current prevaricators of fact that proclaim how dire our financial footing will become if we don’t immediately cut, cut, cut!
To achieve their entirely unnecessary objective – overthrow Saddam Hussein – the Bush/Cheney team had to scare the daylights out of the American people and enlist as stenographers the mainstream press. We are seeing now the use of the same tactic: frighten the not particularly well-informed public into believing that slashing social programs and wrecking further havoc with how government attempts to protect the majority and regulate the amorally powerful is completely necessary.
With national attention diverted to this false crisis, public groundswell for a vital jobs stimulus that would require the closing of tax loopholes and special deductions for large corporations and the wealthy remains shackled.
I watched today a 6 minute video put together by Daily Kos entitled “Wealth Inequality in America Illustration.” Please Google this and see for yourself what our political protectors of America’s 2 percent have wrought. And what sequestration, debt ceiling hostage taking, and threats to close down the government are designed to make worse.
Printed March 9, 2013, in the Siuslaw News
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Our new chair was proving himself to be a far left zealot.
He kept sending to the members via email a seemingly unending series of ultra progressive literature. We can do our own reading about issues, fellow. You are insulting us, I was thinking.
Also, he was maintaining a somewhat hostile attitude toward our state house representative, Caddy McKeown, and our state senator, Arnie Roblan. Both were moderate Democrats. Both were high-quality human beings. He didn’t know them and, seemingly, didn’t want to. I e-mailed to him positive personal information about Arnie Roblan. The zealot did not acknowledge having received it.
At the April club meeting, Caddy McKeown was answering questions from the people attending. One man, clearly a rabid Republican, was lambasting her. Our leader was seated in the back row of chairs. I looked at him from a distance. He was smiling, enjoying what he was hearing and seeing. So this is what we are going to have to suffer for two years, I thought.
We in Florence had an election coming up in May. One of the races was for three seats on the Board of the Port of Siuslaw. The Democratic Club supported a slate of three individuals, one of whom was Nancy Rickard, a club member and one of my good friends. I agreed to make phone calls to registered Democrats and non-party affiliated residents. The position of board member was considered a non-partisan office.
When you make canvassing phone calls, you find that a lot of residents are not home. Their answering machines asked you to leave a message. Mine was pretty much like this. Hello, my name is Harold Titus, a local Democrat here in Florence, asking residents to vote for Nancy Rickard for board member of the Port of Siuslaw. I know her personally. We couldn’t have a better person on the Board. Thank you.
I spent a good three hours one day making calls and leaving messages. Late in the afternoon I received a phone call from the Siuslaw News editor. She warned me that a woman from Dunes City (10 miles south of Florence) was irate about the phone message I had left on her machine and that I should expect to receive a phone call from her. Maybe a half hour later I received the call.
She informed me that the Port of Siuslaw Board race was non-partisan and I was making it partisan because I had identified myself as a Democrat. She felt strongly about keeping partisanship out of election campaigns. I was doing a terrible thing. (Never mind that all but one Port board member were strongly partisan and “good-old-boy” Republicans and their policy actions definitely reflected that) She wanted to know how I had got her phone number. “Off a list of Democrats provided me by the Nancy Rickard campaign,” I answered. I explained that such lists were available for sale to people running for public office. She didn’t like that either.
She issued another complaint or two. I thought that I had managed to wait her out without being rude. She ended the conversation then with a threat. She would look into having me sued.
I decided afterward that I had had it with door-to-door and telephone canvassing. No more of it. I have held to that intention. I entered the month of May disgusted with zealot Democrats, not knowing what would really set me off at the forthcoming May club meeting.
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