They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

– Martin Niemöller (c. 1937) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Actually, there is some question as to just exactly which religious, ethnic, political, or social groups were in the original quote, since Niemöller himself seemed to change the quote as needed for different groups that he was speaking to. Over the years, we have heard this used many times in the media, in the movies, and on television. A wide variety of groups have been mentioned in this context over the years.

The point is that, even though there is no threat of Nazi’s going around and committing genocide today, there are those in this country who would be tempted to do so if the opportunity were available. In today’s world, the threats are in intolerant political and religious groups that feel that anyone unlike them deserves to die. (And if you don’t believe me, look in the comments section of articles in any major metropolitan newspaper today.) Today’s targets may be less traditional: Hispanics, Muslims (or any non-Christians), homosexuals, and so on. Sadly, the same concerns that Niemöller had in 1937 Europe are similar to the concerns I have about the United States in 2010.

In 2010, it is moderately unsafe to be a Muslim or gay or Hispanic in America. If you look around, there are not a whole lot of us who are speaking out for the rights of these and other groups who do not meet the “conservative right-wing” definition of “normal”. Frankly, I am ashamed that more of us do not step forward and defend the rights of our friends and neighbors who fall into these groups.

It is really easy to stand aside while our neighbors are figuratively (and literally, in some cases) beaten up. It is easy to just nod and go on with our day when some people threaten the rights of others. After all, they are not coming after me. But we really need to start defending the basic rights of all of our neighbors. By the time they decide to come after me, there may be no one left to speak up.

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We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

Yeah, that one. Anyway, I’m thinking about the fact that during the course of the song, there are a LOT of events from the 1950′s and 1960′s and 1970′s and 1980′s that get mentioned. Then I get to thinking like this: That if you knew something about all of the people, places, and events that are mentioned during the song, you would know quite a bit about popular US history. Or, you would have a lot of trivia locked up in your noggin.

Anyway, just for fun,  I thought I would share a list of all the events mentioned in the song.  How many ring a bell for you?

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye”

Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien, Phu Falls, “Rock Around the Clock”

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, “Ben Hur”, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo

Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

“Wheel of Fortune”, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore

So, how many did you get?

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Now that this minor detail is out of the way, I need to tell you about something that I feel rather strongly about.  The new year is 2010.  That is pronounced TWENTY-TEN.  I know that most of us have not been calling the last few years twenty-oh-nine and so forth.  We have used two-thousand-and-nine.  Yes we have.  But now that it is 2010, it is time to get this right.

I understand that the year after two-thousand was two-thousand-and-one.  I said it that way too.  Do you know why?  Because Arthur C Clarke wrote a book in 1948 that was later turned into a movie.  You know the one.  2001: A Space Odyssey.  It was good enough that we all called the year two-thousand-and-one.  And that’s OK.  But it is time to grow up now.  The year 2000 is not some futuristic date in the future anymore.  It is so ten years ago now.  It’s time to say it right.

This year is twenty-ten.  Next year will be twenty-eleven.  It is so much shorter and concise than the two-thousand-and-ten that I keep hearing people say.  We have been using it already.  Every reference to the 2010 Olympics (coming to Cascadia!) has been twenty-ten.  When we speak of the upcoming Olympics in London and in Rio de Janerio, they have always said twenty-twelve and twenty-sixteen.  In most future references to these dates, we have tended to use twenty-something, rather than two-thousand-and-something.

We should also follow the conventions that we have always used.  I was born in nineteen-sixty-two, not nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-two, nor in one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-sixty-two.  Why did we change?

You don’t believe me?  Well, here are some dates that you learned in school:

• The year of US Independence?  Seventeen-seventy-six.
• Just to be equal, the Creation of Canada?  Eighteen-sixty-seven.
• Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock?  Sixteen-twenty.
• Columbus “discovered” “America”?  Fourteen-ninety-two.
• World War II?  Nineteen-forty-one.

So why shouldn’t the year coming up be pronounced twenty-ten?  Oh, wait.  Do we think it is different in years divisible by ten or something?  Then how about this (if you were really paying attention in school):

• Leif Ericson and the Vikings really discover America?  Ten-oh-five.  1005.  Back in school, we never said one-thousand-and-five.  Ten-oh-five.

So, with all of this precedent, would it be too difficult to start saying the date correctly as twenty-ten?  Every time I hear it said the other way, it just makes me think that the speaker doesn’t know how to say it right.  So, please say it right.  Twenty-ten.

And, happy new year!

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Ivar Feeding the Seagulls

Ivar was a folk musician and entertainer who made the big time with his seafood restaurant.  He was well known throughout his life for the puns he made and the pranks he pulled.  He was just gutsy enough to try anything for publicity.  It was said that he did not break the law, but he didn’t always follow it, either.  In the end, his exploits were always either harmless promotion for himself or his business, or some sort of giving back to the city that he grew up in and loved.  Even after his passing, the company for which he was the “flounder” kept his edgy attitude for marketing.

So this September, when the company announced that they had found some underwater billboards that had been placed around Puget Sound in the 1950′s to advertise to a potential underwater audience, Seattleites had the right to be skeptical.  A  few prominent people were in on the joke, like Bob Donegan, president of Ivar’s and Seattle historian Paul Dorpat, who among other projects, has written a book about Ivar Haglund.  When he told the Seattle Times that he had some evidence that the billboards could be legit, there was some cause to believe that the story could be true.  Unless you were not familiar with Haglund’s life and the Ivar’s culture.

This week it came to everyone’s attention that the story really was a hoax, and that the billboards had been “found” in the spot where they were placed not long before.  Everyone had a laugh, and everyone chuckled that Ivar himself would have done something like that.  Also, everyone went down and had a cup of chowder at Ivar’s.  Their sales of the famous soup quadrupled during the faux promotion.

That is to say, everyone had a laugh except for longtime Times reporter Erik Lacitis and his editors.  He felt duped that a noted historian had “lied” to him for the record.  Times Executive Editor David Boardman says he was distressed that Paul Dorpat, the respected Seattle historian and first vice president of HistoryLink.org, had given legitimacy to the fake billboards even though he knew otherwise.  He was going to review whether Dorpat, who had written a local history column for the Times since 1982, should continue to do so, since he had given incorrect information to another Times reporter.

My response to the Times on this matter is to get a life!  You were given a taste of Seattle’s past to write about, and another small chapter was written in the Ivar’s story.  The Times writer had even written the story giving the facts but expressing that it was likely some sort of stunt.  The actions of Dorpat are the result of a 71-year-old man who had spent a lot of time researching Haglund and was not beyond wanting Seattle to relive some of the past.  He and Ivar’s president Donegan get an A+ in my book for simultaneous creativity in marketing and creativity in presenting local history.  Thank you for the bit of fun.  And shame on the Times for not seeing this for what it is.  Fun.

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We thank those people for their service, for doing the right thing to protect us, no matter what the circumstances.  The reasons for their sacrifice have been clear in some cases.  In other cases, the political expediency of the campaigns that they were involved in were not quite as clear.  The political story that surrounds their sacrifice does not diminish the thanks and the honor that these souls deserve.  For whatever reason they were sent to serve us, their service is worthy of our honor.

On this day when we celebrate and thank those who have put themselves in harm’s way, I would like to make a request of our governments.  I would like to request that our governments think very carefully about the safety of our troops when they make their decisions to continue to send them into the path of harm.  Canada has already made some good choices in removing their troops from the current skirmishes where it is not clear that the needs there are worth the sacrifice.  The United States still needs to look harder at what we are using our military for.

We have historically stepped in when other people have been harmed.  We can argue that we need to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect those who live there from harm.  We can also argue that we need to continue to fight in those places to keep harm from reaching our shores.    I’m pretty certain that the average citizen here doesn’t get enough information in their news to make an educated decision on these matters.  I would insist, however, that our leaders who are privy to this information look at all of their options before continuing to place out troops in harm’s way.

We certainly have many options for dealing with these areas.  Are we really unable to deal with these enemies in a timely manner?  Do we really know who the enemy is?  Is there a way to work smarter and not harder to get things to a conclusion?  Have we really used enough diplomacy as an alternative to military might to solve that region’s problems?  Should we be asking other countries for diplomatic assistance rather than military assistance to get the job done?  Have we really looked hard at what solutions exist that do not invilve putting more of our sons and daughters into harm’s way?

I have a clear separation in my mind of the politics of war and the sacrifice of the troops who have kept us safe over the years.  I feel I can criticize our leaders for their role, while thanking our service members for theirs.  On this Veterans Day, we should honor the troops, present and past, as much as we can.  If we are leaders who have the power to do so, we should honor them by getting them out of harm’s way as soon as is practical.  Do not increase the numbers we have in the Middle East, Mr Obama.  Bring as many of them home as soon as possible.  Make that decision today.  Do it today.

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Proponents had based their support of the taking of rights from their fellow citizens by stating that their own religious beliefs did not condone gay marriage.  Those against the measure believe, as I do, that any adult should to be able to marry any other adult that they love and want to spend their lives with.

One major argument for upholding this ill-passed measure was that it was the “will of the people” that some adults should be prohibited from marrying other adult that they choose to be their mate.  Yes, we have established that the measure did pass a vote of over half the voters.  I would like to share some other examples of how a majority of the people denied the rights of a smaller group of people, in the name of “the will of the people.”  Among them:

• White people in Oregon were not permitted to marry Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, or Native Hawaiians until 1951.  In the timeline of history, this is fairly recent.  White Californians could not marry Blacks, Asians, or Filipinos until 1948.  It was “the will of the people.”
• In 1963, California Proposition 14 passed a constitutional amendment that restored the right of a landlord or home seller to refuse to rent or sell a home to “colored” customers.  This was passed in response to a recently passed law to stop racial discrimination.  Although the amendment was invalidated by the US Supreme Court in 1967, the passage of the original proposition was “the will of the people.”
• In Oregon, The original State Constitution prohibited blacks from living, voting, or owning property in the state.  This provision was not repealed until 1926.  Until the 1960′s, African Americans could only live in certain neighborhoods in Portland.  Why?  It was “the will of the people.”
• In 1922, with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan and the Masons, Oregonians passed a ballot measure that required children to attend public schools, and specifically prohibited their attending Catholic schools.  The anti-Catholic groups wanted to eliminate Catholic education.  It was passed by a majority of voters that year.  Although the US Supreme Court nullified the new measure in 1925, clearly this discrimination was “the will of the people.”

There are of course plenty of examples all over the country where a majority of voters have voted for discrimination.  This is all too recent history.  I am sure that in the relatively near future, cooler heads (and likely the courts) will see this as simply another form of discrimination.  Eventually, we will have equal rights for all.  Eventually, right will win over wrong.

In the meantime, I am ashamed for us that we do not learn from our history and that times never seem to change.  Forgive me if I am not easily swayed when someone argues that some new law is “the will of the people.”  Sometimes, the people are mistaken.

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The day that the Seattle P-I published it’s final newsprint edition forever on Tuesday, I admittedly had a fairly emotional reaction to the whole thing.  In fact, it took me until the next day to actually open it up and read it all.  Then I started to get curious:  Why did I feel that way?

I can (an will in the near future) talk about the future of newsappers and journalism in Cascadia.  My story today is about losing or taking for granted the things that we see every day.

I’m sure that my attachment to the Seattle P-I has a number of sources.  The P-I was the paper that I read and subscribed to while living in the Seattle area.  the P-I is the paper where I have read all of the news stories that shaped my life.  My personal political leanings are better represented by the P-I than my the Seattle Times.  I delivered the P-I to homes in my neighborhood as a youngster, back in the day when the paper was delivered by a kid on a bicycle riding around the neighborhood every morning.  Now, the P-I is gone.

I have always presumed that the P-I (and the Times for that matter) would be there forever.  I presume that The Oregonian (my daily paper today) will also be there forever.

When I look back now, I presume a lot of institutions would last forever.  They have lasted my lifetime, and the lifetimes of those before me:

• There are always ferries in Puget Sound.
• The Pike Place Market is always there.
• Portlanders always shop at Fred Meyer.
• Ivar’s will always sell me fish & chips.  And red chowder.
• We will always have fun at the Seattle Center.

But times are changing, and not just in ways that they would have changed before:

• Department stores The Bon Marche and Meier & Frank have been replaced by Macy’s.
• Newspapers are disappearing.
• TV and radio stations are no longer as much the local face of the city.
• The Sonics have disappeared from the Seattle Center.

Given enough thought, I’m sure the lists could go on and on.  Feel free to add in the comments institutions that will be here forever, or that we thought would be here forever.

The point is that life is ever changing.  Perhaps this is a function of getting old, but I am now seeing things disappear that I thought I would never see gone.  Seattle’s daily newspaper is one of those things.  In a way, part of our life has disappeared.

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My first recollection of hearing the name Martin Luther King was in April 1968, but not in the way you night think.  I was in kindergarten that year, and usually caught the school bus home at lunchtime.  On this particular day, all of the classes at school were let out at noon that day.  We were told it had something to do with events surrounding Martin Luther King, but at the time, I really did not know the significance of the events.  Simply, he was important enough to warrant half a day off.  In retrospect, the early dismissal was a response to getting us all out of the way of potential harm from civil unrest.

As I grew up in Seattle, then Portland, then Seattle; racism was not at the forefront of my mind.  I understood that some of the people around me had different skin tones.  But, despite the fact that my father was a bigot and a racist, his views did not particularly affect me.  While he did make comments frequently that suggested that those who were not white-skinned were somehow lesser people, he had some wild views on other subjects, too.  So I tended to rely more on my own observations about the folks around me.  Whether we be white or black or something else, we were all people living the same sorts of lives as each other.  I was blissfully ignorant of the depth of racial discrimination around me.

I have Dr. King to thank for the ability to be blissfully ignorant of discrimination as a youngster.  Enough work had been successfully done to that time that the outward signs of discrimination, for example the signs pointing to “black facilities” and “white facilities” were mostly gone by that time.  I was not taught to be a racist (as I had learned to take most everything my father said with a grain of salt), so was unaware that this was something that the predominant culture in America at the time had done.

At age 14 I entered high school in Seattle and was exposed for the first time to a large number of peers who were “not like myself.”  The Seattle School was in it’s third year of a mandatory busing program to integrate the schools.  My racist father thought this was this the worst thing to ever happen.   I was attending the high school that I would have attended anyway, so never had to deal with the cross-town commute.  I attended Roosevelt High, a school where a significant percentage of the families (living in areas like Laurelhurst and Windermere) were much more well to do than our own.  While I had friends of all economic backgrounds, I can say that many more of my friends were in the same lower-middle-class type of family as myself.  My group of friends had as much to do with connecting with those who lived on my street and who’s families did the same activities as anything else.

About one-third of our student population that year lived in the area served by Garfield High.  While there were also some very upper-class families living in the area served by that school, the school was also in an area with a great number of economically disadvantaged families in Seattle.  Since busing was done based upon racial profiles, and since many African-American families living in the area were in a lower economic class than the families in our neighborhood, there were different experiences going on there.

While I did have some friends among those that were bused into the school, the number was lower relative to the total number of kids I regularly hung-out with.  I do not believe that this had anything to do with race, as race really wasn’t something I was thinking about at that time.  The fact still remained that I was more likely to be around the kids that lived in my neighborhood and had done the same things in the same neighborhood that I lived in.  In other words, while we all went to school together, I was closest to the kids who were still in the neighborhood after school.

I remember there was a lot of teaching going on, both in school and in the media, with messages like “all people of all colors are the same” and “we all just need to live together peacefully” and things like that.  Since our parents and teachers had all very recently lived through a period of high racial tension and a life of overt racism, they wanted to ensure that we were the first generation to happily live together.  Since I had never considered racism before, nor had I though to actively discriminate against anyone, it all seemed pretty silly to me.  Tolerance seemed obvious to me, and many of my peers, simply because had been exposed to relatively little intolerance to that point.  We were the first generation being taught that we needed to become tolerant, that really hadn’t lived through widespread overt intolerance.

I had friends of all races in high school.  We intermingled in class with no real issues.  The fact of the matter, though, was that ultimately the kids who I knew the best were the ones that lived in my own neighborhood and walked the same way home from school.  That doesn’t mean that racial integration was a failure.  We needed it at school to learn that there was an issue at all.  Our parents needed it to learn that all families of all races needed to work together.

I remember one incident from early in the ninth grade that illustrates my ignorance of the subject at that time.  I had been chosen by my homeroom to be a class senator on the student council.  (Something about my having come in second place in the race for student body president in middle school the previous year.)  Anyway, one item presented was a poll that we were to take back to our classrooms.  It asked what we thought of the busing program.  I was actually opposed to it at that time, but my reasons were telling.  My comment at the time was that I did not understand why were choosing people and moving them around to integrate them based upon their race.  I went on to suggest that it would be just as valid to choose people based upon their eye color or by their shoe size.

I understand now that those comparisons were silly.  But given the date we were born, and considering the area we lived in, meaning Washington and Oregon, we had just not been as exposed to the same level of racism that we would see if had we lived in Georgia or Alabama.  Martin Luther King had got us to the point where the kids being born actually had to be taught about the existence of racism.

Now that I have grown up, I understand that even as I am approaching my 30-year high school reunion, we still have racism today.  It is truly a non-issue for some people.  But there is still enough of it around that it causes problems for many of the people around me today.  We still have a lot of work to do on eliminating the hidden racism around us — the ones who quietly discriminate based on race even though it is not spoken out loud.  There is still a lot of work that needs to be done.  The work that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contemporaries did to start us on the path of equality was a wonderful and necessary start to changing our culture for the better.

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Celilo Falls as it appeared in October 1933. Oregonian photo.

I have always been fascinated with the history of the Pacific Northwest.  There is so much that has gone on in our region both before and after the appearance of European settlers that is truly interesting.  Over the course of time, we have exploited the resources of our area, and in some ways, we have actually changed the geography of our land.  A striking example of this is a waterfalls on the Columbia River known as Celilo Falls.

For those not in the know, those who are wondering just where on the map they will find Celilo Falls, the answer is that you will need an old map.  In 1957, the construction of The Dalles Dam across the Columbia, and the resulting lake behind the dam, caused the falls to now be under the water.  This was a boon to the industry and the economy of the Pacific Northwest.  It allowed the dam to produce electricity and harness the power of the river.  It helped replace the natural obstructions to shipping and water travel down the Columbia River with easy to use navigation locks.  However, the building of the dam also covered the falls.

Celilo Falls was a traditional fishing location for those native to this area of Cascadia.  They also served as a regional gathering place for local native populations to trade goods and gather for occasions.  Besides, the falls were a wonderful natural feature, and were preferable to the dam and its fish ladders for migrating salmon.

According to the news of 1957, the US Army Corps of Engineers had destroyed the falls in a series of explosions, as a means of facilitating navigation through the area.  One way or the other, the site remains underwater.  It will remain underwater, unless someday the dam nearby is removed from the river.  That will not happen anytime soon, nor is it likely the best course of action to take.  New reports tell us that  sonar maps recently produced by the Corps of Engineers reveal an unchanged Celilo Falls beneath the waters of the Columbia River.

From the environmental standpoint, a part of me wishes that the dams in the Columbia could be removed and we could see the return of some of our hidden natural features.  Certainly I would love to see this great part of our heritage.  Many of the descendants of those who gathered around and lived near the falls would be excited to see them once again.  Perhaps our regions fish and wildlife would benefit from a restoration of the streams and rivers throughout our region.

However, the realist in me understands that, for now, we have too much to gain from leaving the dams operating on our river.  The dam provides relatively inexpensive electrical energy for our region.  As a group, the Columbia and Snake River dams provide irrigation for giant swaths of land east of the Cascades, turning this dry land into fertile farmland.  The dams allow for cheap and efficient shippig of goods up and down our great waterway.  Despite the environmental costs, the very reasons that we built this dam, and others like it, are still valid today.   I have to believe that we will not see the return of Celilo Falls or other natural features anytime soon.

On the other hand, it is great news that somewhere under the waters of the mighty Columbia River, one of our region’s natural and historical landmarks still exists.  It may or may not make a reappearance in our lifetimes.  Somehow, though, it is quite exciting to now know that Celilo Falls is still down there.  The possibility that Celilo Falls could reappear someday is something we (or our grandchildren) could look forward to.

We may not be able to see Celilo Falls.  If circumstances were such that it ever reappeared, the original activities that happened around it will not necessarily return.  But in some small way, it is heartwarming to know that this great part of our history still exists.  If it’s status does not change, our children’s children may have the opportuity to see it again.  I hope that when it does, we have preserved enough of it’s original story so that others will be able to remember.

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