Letters to the Editor: Dec. 1, 2023

Missing out

I read Starla Pointer’s story about her uncomfortable visit to Linfield with interest, because I’ve been going to Linfield at least twice a week for several years and I sit with students all around me. Also I’m certain I graduated from high school quite a while before Ms. Pointer.

I never enter the buildings full of nostalgia. I’m excited to learn about the present and future.

Never in the world would I think of the students as or compare them to “a bunch of kittens who enjoy being close like in a basket.” If I did, I would certainly be missing out!

Ann Helm

Lafayette

Back to its roots

I am a Beaver. My son is the third generation in a row to graduate from OSU and there’s a chance one of my grandchildren will continue the tradition.

I am dismayed we are losing a great coach in Jonathan Smith. Losing Smith and the PAC 12 might be a death knell for football at my alma mater.

I was very upset at first, but after really thinking about it, I decided, “So what?” College football has departed from any constructive purpose and become a money making and spending activity completely divorced from what we alumni think of as our school.

Now that it looks like college sports will become professional, it’s ludicrous to think of students being loyal to the football program, feeling that it represents their school.

So what would we lose if college sports went back to true Beavers taking on other schools’ real whatever? That really doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.

John Caster

McMinnville

Quarantine concerns

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s quarantine regulation, allowing people to be involuntarily quarantined in interim housing, in order to prevent spread of contagious disease in epidemic situations, has been reinstated by the New York court system’s appellate division.

This kind of regulation could come to Oregon. By their oaths of office, the Yamhill County sheriff and board of commissioners would then, I believe, have a duty to nullify it locally, and I believe nullification would be supported by the people.

Undcr Hochul’s regulation, health authorities could detain someone for mere exposure to a communicable disease. In the original trial before Judge Ploetz, counsel for the state admitted there was no mechanism in the regulation to compel the state to release a detained person short of a court order the affected party would have to pursue on his own.

Of particular concern to me would be regulations triggered by a state of emergency declared by the World Health Organization. That danger is soon to increase as the United States signs off on amendments to WHO’s international health regulations.

Dan Katz

McMinnville

Ruled by wealth

A study was done in 2014 by Princeton and Northwestern universities to see how responsive government is to different groups of American citizens. The study produced graphs that showed how large a percent of the group had to push for something in order for that thing to become law.

The group that includes me and anyone reading this, average Americans, were found to have under a 30% chance of getting what they wanted no matter how big or small a percent of the group wanted it. The odds were the same if 1% of us wanted it or 99%; essentially saying that what we want doesn’t matter at all.
The same study was done on the top ten percent by wealth. They started having the same 30% chance of getting what they wanted as average Americans when about 10% of them wanted something. When a large percent of the wealthy want something they get it a little over 50% of the time. When the wealthy don’t want something to become law, it only takes a very few percent of them and the chances of the law passing go to near zero.

This is the foundation of everything that’s wrong in the lives of American citizens today. It’s long past time for another reform era. The evidence of the damage this is doing to all of us is on every night’s depressing newscast. From homelessness to the inability to afford even basic items, our problems are caused by the fact that we live in an aristocracy that masquerades as a Democratic Republic.

It is time for the reformers to emerge and restore what’s been lost.

Fred Fawcett

Lafayette