Your Voice: Jan. 10, 2024

Dear Community,

As a volunteer serving meals over the years, I feel compelled to straighten out any misperceptions about the role of Community Meals during the current closure of St. Vincent de Paul Service Center on W. Third St. (This is not St. Vinnie’s, which is the thrift store on W. Ninth St.). Community Meals, Inc., is a guest (as is Bread and Blessings, which is a breakfast program) using the St. Vincent de Paul meal site to cook and serve meals every Friday through Sunday.

While The Dalles City officials and the SVDP board negotiate the issues at hand, Community Meals, Inc., has made a commitment to NOT let another challenge interrupt our unbroken record of never missing the serving of a meal every weekend for more than 40 years.

During an emergency session this week, an anonymous donor provided the funds needed to quickly purchase $10 meal cards at local fast-food establishments for our meal guests. We will continue with this plan, handing out the cards at the Lewis and Clark Festival Park each weekend.

This unexpected closure and change of venue will leave the vulnerable population we serve even more at risk for increased suffering. It is a well-known fact that limited food sources and hunger can trigger already unstable mental illness.

If you are so moved to help us to keep providing this basic human need of food, please send your donations to Community Meals, PO Box 555, The Dalles OR 97058. We feed all, without judgment, who come to us hungry. We serve with smiles and warm hearts.

For more information, please contact Chris Zukin at czukin@meadowoutdoor.com or zukin@charter.net or 541-993-1792.

Colleen Ballinger, Volunteer for Community Meals, The Dalles

Protect DACA

Shortly after taking office in 2016, President Trump decided to remove the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, created to protect eligible young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and to provide them with work authorization for temporary, renewable periods.

Many DACA recipients work in professions such as healthcare, business, and education. They contribute billions to our economy every year. They are our neighbors, friends, and family. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, blocked the administration's plan in June of 2020. Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. Here we address only whether the administration complied with the procedural requirements in the law that insist on 'a reasoned explanation for its action.'" Fast forward to 2024. If Mr. Trump is elected president, he plans to dismantle DACA. In a Nov. 11 interview, Stephen Miller, adviser to the former president, told the New York Times staff that Trump will try again to end DACA, and with a new 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court, using the procedural requirements with a reasoned explanation, he and the administration could be successful.

The lives of many good people, who came here as children and have lived here all their lives, will be tragically upended if Trump wins. We must not allow this. Please protect our Dreamers from deportation.

April George, White Salmon

Presidential limitations

I am frustrated at the debate about using the 14th amendment to deny former president Trump a spot on the ballot. His supporters say we should just let the people decide, but they also always tell us the United States is not a pure democracy, it is a constitutional republic. Well, that constitution puts some limits on our democratic choice for president. Should we allow a non-citizen to run and let the people decide? How about a 20-year-old?

One constitutional section I don’t like is the electoral college, which allows a candidate who did not get the most votes to win. But it’s there in the constitution, so I am stuck with it, just as those who don’t like section 3 of the 14th amendment are stuck with it. Would they make a deal where they ignore the electoral college and I will ignore section 3? I kind of doubt it.

I would add that in the history of the use of this clause, nobody who was denied a spot on the ballot was ever convicted of a crime first. There is no history or language that says a criminal conviction is required. Being disallowed to run for office is not a criminal punishment. The only relevant question is did Trump engage in, or give aid and comfort to, an insurrection.

Dean Myerson, The Dalles

Similar tactics

Recently Russian courts disallowed a former journalist Yakaterina Duntsova from running against Vladimir Putin in the upcoming Russian election. Also recently, the Colorado courts disallowed Donald Trump from running for president in that state and the secretary of state in Maine disallowed Donald Trump from running in that state. It looks like Maine and Colorado are using the same methods as Vladimir Putin to save our democracy

That reminds me of James Traficant, a former Democrat congressman from Ohio, who again in 2002 ran for congress from prison after receiving an eight year sentence for racketeering, bribery, and tax evasion. James Traficant received 15% of the vote.

Isaac Kinsey, Mosier

Good news

I keep seeing letters, posts and bulletins from Democrats explaining that things are not nearly as bad as they seem, it’s just the REPORTING that’s bad. I’ve tried to see how re-shaping the news would turn it from bad to good, but I still come up short:

War: Afghanistan is behind us now, but the effects are lingering. We abandoned $80 billion in military hardware, Afghan women and girls are now living in a medieval Hell, and both Hamas and Putin (coincidentally?) concluded now was the most opportune time to attack. Energy: We were 100% energy independent. Now we are dependent on countries that hate us. Democrats are fixated on horribly expensive and inefficient “renewable” sources, while banning clean natural gas and greenlighting the destruction of hydro power.

Fuel Prices: We were paying around $2 per gallon. Now we celebrate when it dips below $4. Wages/Inflation: Yes, wages are up 13.6% since the pandemic, but inflation is up 17%. According to the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, the average family is spending $11,400 more for the same goods and services than they did just two years ago.

Unemployment … IS down since the pandemic, and all the “Help Wanted” signs certainly suggest there are lots of jobs out there, but is it really a good thing so many have decided it’s just too much bother to get off the couch and go to work? The Border: Democrats insist the border is NOT “open,” but when you ask what a “real” open border would look like, they don’t seem to have an answer. Crime: Democrats have actually created statistics that “prove” crime is down, but it’s not. It IS up and real flesh-and-blood people are suffering as a result. Gender Ideology: Democrats have embraced it fully and uncritically, and women and girls are paying the price.

Dementia in the Whitehouse: It is real and rapidly getting worse. I know I know, Trump is the devil and all, but still, it’s not the reporting that’s bad. It’s reality.

Steve Hudson, The Dalles

Secure the border

We have just returned from a long planned vacation to Europe. My wife, who is a legal permanent resident, had to make a special in-person trip to San Francisco to get a Schengen tourist visa, which added about $600 to our trip, not including the one-inch of paperwork required. Upon arrival in Europe, it took about two hours to go through passport control and provide documentation for our vacation. When we left, we had to “check out” of the country-passports / visa in and out verified.

Yes, we did encounter homeless there, but we did not encounter the drug-fueled homelessness that plagues our cities. We did not visit some conservative country either, but one with some limited legal drug use.

It was pleasant to see a country who took responsibility and some national pride for their borders, unlike Biden’s southern border. The left should be ashamed at what Biden allows, all Americans embarrassed. Our borders are an insult to every immigrant who came here legally as we have set a new one-month record of illegals again.

Steve Nybroten, White Salmon

Dangerous leader

Like Hitler, Donald Trump displays narcissistic personality traits — grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy, and pathological lying. His "rot in hell" Christmas postings reveal his innate rage and paranoia. Narcissists use attention-seeking charisma, charm, and braggadocio masquerading as "leadership" to manipulate and attract followers. An established fraud practitioner of the tax-evading wealthy elite, Trump pretends to value his follower’s white racial and religious interests, and plays to a populist grievance psychology.

Our country has become more secular and racially / culturally diverse, including the election of the first Black president. Fear of these trends helped lead to Trump’s presidency. Even though predominantly rural MAGA-dominated states are undemocratically over represented, with help from right wing media, less educated and socio-economically challenged Anglo-Saxon Christians fear their declining national influence, and identify with Trump’s contrived strength and contempt for any out-group “losers.” This helps them feel hopeful to return to an era of white Christian dominance in order to “Make America Great Again.”

For the MAGA Republican base — like Germany's 1930s counterparts — many Trump followers support political violence. In return for the attention to their grievances, MAGA supporters give Trump the adoration his narcissistic persona craves. The result is Trump’s cult-like savior status with the MAGA faithful, Nazis, and Christian Nationalists, evangelical-like rallies, and bombastic statements generating constant media attention. That Trump is an amoral hypocrite matters not to his followers. Trump knows he's selling the sizzle, not the steak.

Throughout history these deviants become despots. Trump praises past and present authoritarians and dictators, spouts fascist quotations and bellicose nativism and Naziesque scapegoat racism, calls his political opponents “vermin,” and accuses immigrants of “poisoning our blood.” He telegraphed intents to be a “dictator for a day,” subvert our democratic institutions, and prosecute foes for opposing him.

More susceptible to right-wing and religious fundamentalist misinformation and manipulation, the MAGA Republican base that made him possible embraces Trump’s Hitlerian “big lie” of a “stolen election,” and his authoritarian rhetoric.

By undermining faith in the legitimacy of our elections and supporting an insurrection, they’ve made themselves — and Trump — the greatest threat to democracy our country has ever seen.

Bob Yoesle, Goldendale