Letters, letters, letters

The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer's name, address and phone number. Letters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor. The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.

To the Editor:

My daughter Mary forwarded this letter to me from an Afghani-American. It illustrates some key points of understanding needed to analyze the political and social situation in his native country. Please consider printing one or two paragraphs from this letter in your paper. Thank you.

Rick Slavkovsky

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there.

So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even he government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.

When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."

It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.

A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.

Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed.

Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.

It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants.

That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.

If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.

Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

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To the Editor:

Are we at war?

My two cents: I somehow find myself driving slower, sometimes not even 55. I get better gas mileage. It seems like a lot of others are also -- the highway pace seems a little slower.

Maybe our petty urge to get there sooner (a way of saying, "my time is more valuable than yours") has been put in perspective. That gas bill we pay, very indirectly supports those who would make us cower.

In 1802 Thomas Jefferson formally declared war on the Barbary Coast pirates -- not a nation. Thus there is a precedent for war against a non-national group.

I will point out that a majority, possibly even a great majority, of Muslims and Arabs do not think ill of the U.S. They don't even consider these terrorists to be Muslims, but something more like cultists.

I hate talk of war.

But it appears a war has been brought to us. But it is not all of Islam or all of the Middle East or all of the Arab or Persian or whatever ethnic group, but a tiny minority.

I do believe that this moment will be, like the assassination of the Archduke of Austria, the defining moment that we say, "Here WWIII began" -- if not Armageddon.

Gary Bickford

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To the Editor:

Considering the events of the past week, my letter last week was "majoring in minors," to put it musically.

This week, I would urge all news media to concentrate on what is really important about the bombings. Please, please, show the people's pain! Flood us with images and sounds of the tortured hearts of those who have lost loved ones. Let their tears engulf us all and melt our hardened hearts.

Perhaps the terrorists will then realize they hurt the wrong people -- innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the oppression they suffer.

That is the real error -- the futility -- of terrorism. The popular book about the prayer of the Old Testament's Jabez misses the main point of his prayer: the last phrase, "that I might not cause pain."

The reason Jabez was "more honorable than his brothers" was that he earnestly tried to cause others no pain. Let us all adopt that motto, especially now in this painful chapter of our history.

Let us avoid retaliation against innocent Arab-Americans. Let's not repeat the hurtful discrimination we waged against Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Let's even cut our neighbors and fellow workers some slack. Let's behave honorably.

Now is the time to put into daily practice the arm-bracelet motto: "What would Jesus do?" (He didn't hurt; he healed.) May it not be a powerless clich». Let's use it as a life-altering guide to daily human interaction.

June Forsyth

* * *

To the Editor:

I had an occasion to be driving through the city of Redmond the day after America was attacked. What a beautiful sight it was.

There were hundreds of American flags on both sides of the street all through the downtown area.

What a great show of support and patriotism to the City of New York and the entire nation. Then today as I drove around the City of Sisters I saw very few American flags both in the business area and in the residential areas.

Come on Chamber of Commerce, business owners, city officials, and the rest of our citizens of this community, let's get with it. Our country is under attack and we need to show our support.

Granted there were a few flags flying but nothing like what we saw in Redmond. We have all those new light posts with space to attach flags, lets use them now.

Sincerely,

Bob Schouten

* * *

To the Editor:

If a tree fell in Sisters and nobody heard it would it actually have fallen? Ask seven stumps outside of the Monson Building that used to be old growth forest÷now gone.

Their crime? They happened to be situated on land that people now want to park cars on -- something their leathery seed coats could not have anticipated 50 years ago when life burst through them and surged upward.

Oh, but the town where this miracle then occurred has been growing, too. Burgeoning. No, booming. It's hard to hear the sound of trees falling against the din of unending traffic, the cries of tenants and customers eager for modern conveniences like pit stops and parking spaces.

So the hum of backhoes and the smoke of chainsaws in the morning here in Sisters have become more familiar sights and sounds these days. Apparently, the town needs more Quickie Marts and fast food joints. More hotels, more gas pumps. It needs these even more desperately than that for which, over on the sunless side of the Cascades, it remains best known -- trees.

These days tree-cutters need work more than the corporate refugees who flee here in increasing numbers need sage-laden oxygen (They won't know what they're missing anyway when it's gone.)

And parking -- Oh , yaaah. Locals and visitors agree we need more spaces to "tie our steeds up to" in this Old Western town. "Trees'll just haveta come down, I reckon."

"Yup, trees'll just havta come down÷," men at work conclude grimly with a snap of the red suspenders and a knowing, chiseled grin.

And so the little town that, sadly, was once a virtual Ponderosaland, some place where a madcap seed could spring up willy-nilly and grow, with the sweet passage of seasons, into a landmark, and that randomness might even be considered glorious to some, goes on. Silently. Seamlessly. Making no primeval sound.

Last week, a tree fell in Sisters -- its humble majesty unnoticed in the place where ancient roots had unserendipitously lodged and grown. "Two feet to the right or left and we could have left it," but no matter÷ If plants do actually talk, you may have heard it moan.

No longer far enough from "The Valley" to safely house the disappearing treasures of another time and place in Oregon. "Stumps Don't Lie," and these seven tell us that the ponderosa pine is an endangered species even here÷if it dares to stand where Sisters means to grow.

I've heard a few old-timers say recently, "Well, I've just been feeling like the town has changed so much around me and, I don't know, but it feels like it could just be time to go."

Tread lightly, then, when leaving, and please don't make a sound.

Sue Spillane-Bramlette

* * *

To the Editor:

After the football game last Friday night, I accompanied my freshman daughter to her first high school dance. I stuck around to see what it was like.

What I saw sickened and dismayed me.

The lights were turned off except for flashing strobes which fleetingly exposed students crammed together on top of raised platforms dancing so close that their bodies touched. The music was so loud that I had to shout to carry on a conversation and the band playing was one that uses profanity in its lyrics. Several girl students were very inappropriately dressed. The scene to me was reminiscent of a strip joint or nightclub.

I found my daughter and took her home; I was concerned for her safety -- and not only her physical safety.

I plan to properly bring my concerns to the next school board meeting; however, the board does not meet for nearly another month. In the meantime, am I alone with this issue? Do other parents know what these dances are like? Do they care?

My daughter has started off high school with a very positive educational program -- the Freshman Academy appears to be successful, her teachers are dynamic and inspiring, the work is sufficiently challenging, and she looks forward to coming every day. What was going on at the dance in the cafetorium at night seems so out of sync with what was going on in the classrooms during the day.

I feel this isn't right and sends a message to our teens that values are subjective rather than true in all circumstances. I for one would like to open some discussion on this matter.

Sue Anderson

* * *

To the Editor:

I have found three knapweed infested lots within two blocks of my home. Knapweed is considered a noxious weed and there is a mention of it under the Sisters nuisance ordinance.

Two of the lots are at Cedar and Washington. The lot behind Subway and Rhino Realty owned by Richard Carpenter, and the lot behind the video store recently purchased by someone I don't know.

The third lot is between Larch and Cedar streets on the North side of Squaw Creek on the dirt portion of St. Helens Ave.

The Leithauser lot across from the Post Office that Ron Lees complained about last year is nearly clean because I told Judy Gillam's kids about it and they weed whipped that lot before the knapweed flowered.

I am sure that there are other knapweed infested lots in town. I want to handle the lots by my home first.

The right of way next to my home has a nasty infestation, I am clearing it.

Bruce Berryhill

* * *

To the Editor:

Thanks to The Nugget from "Knute" and me.

It's never easy to let go of your dog. But sometimes life changes make it necessary. It is made so much easier by having some peace of mind that the dog has found a loving home.

I had decided to place an ad in The Nugget and hope for the best. Knute's a handsome two year old male chocolate Labrador. When I called The Nugget I was surprised to hear, if I gave him away at no cost they offered a service. I could run the ad two weeks free.

Being a skeptic by nature I asked the person I was talking to why. Her answer was "we like animals."

Within one day Knute had found a home. He now lives on 1-1/2 acres in Sisters. He shares the place with an 11-year-old female chocolate lab.

Although Knute is trained, he could use some more manners. Maybe you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but an old dog can teach a young dog lots of new tricks.

He's also inherited a 14-year-old mistress, who is a dog enthusiast, and her mother, who not only adores labs, but puts chocolate labs at the top of her list. So Knute has found his home.

When again I remarked on the generosity of this service the woman I talked to said, "not everyone knows about it."

That's an additional reason I am writing this letter. If others, like I, have to go through this agony of breach, this is the best way I know to make it happen.

Thanks,

from "Knute" and Mary Dempcy

* * *

To the Editor:

This is to express my heartfelt thanks to Bill Peck, Commander, VFW Post 8138 and to Dave Culver and Reece Richardson for responding on a moment's notice to assist me in the Color Guard part of the ceremony prior to the football game on Friday night.

The starting ceremony, and another at halftime, was the school's (and all who were present) way of remembering our dead and missing in the recent terrorist attacks on targets inside the continental limits of the United States of America.

We are proud to be military veterans, proud to be Americans, and very honored to be asked to have a part in their ceremony.

I also want to thank Tom Salgado for his able and willing assistance in getting the gear together and to the football field on time. He is always faithful.

On behalf of the Sisters Veterans Group,

Phil Chlopek

Commander, Lee Morton Memorial Post 86, American Legion

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To the Editor:

On behalf of the Sisters Kiwanis Food Bank and its clients throughout the community, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the pastor and congregation of the Sisters Community Church.

Their most recent and on-going donations to the food bank enable us to provide the needed support to the many families and individuals in our community. Thank You.

David Hiller

Sisters Kiwanis Food Bank