Pessimistic Politics: Oregon's Bubble has Popped

One of the worst things in life is coming up with a good retort after the fact. Matters are made even worse when the subject of the argument was something worth discussing, such as reasons to go to war with Iraq (current comeback: “Because I said so!”). Finally, after two years, nine months, and four days, I’m making my snap back at my old high school’s newspaper.

I have enough material about my high school, Clay High, to write a book, but for this column, I’ll focus on the school newspaper, the Eagle. The Eagle staff consisted of students who wanted to get their feet wet in journalism by writing their inevitable embarrassing pieces in a non-consequential environment and get them out of the way before stepping into the real world.

I’m not claiming to have been much better back then, but the audience of my work mostly consisted of the English teacher demographic. The Eagle featured the cream of the crop in high school journalism, including reports that didn’t reveal much in the way of new information or arguments about anything, quotes from people who should never be quoted, satire that consists of the writer telling the audience plainly to do the exact opposite of what they should do in real life, in list form, comics that appear to have been drafted by Scott Adams himself, during his infant period, and two-person dialogue columns that were, to put it diplomatically, grating as a dull knife on a chalkboard.

But the paper was entertaining back then, and the staff did work pretty hard on putting it out into circulation. I saved many of the issues, even though I could care less about what the class pretty boy was doing during a photo shoot for the drama club’s rendition of Kiss Me Kate.

While I’ve done an impeccable job of criticizing the Eagle’s decisively sanitized literary endeavor, there is one article that has stood out in my mind since the day I read it, an article that outraged me to a point where I knew I would have to counter it on a wide scale some day.

The March 2001 edition of the Eagle featured the usual stories about school activities, superficial politics, and watery humor columns. The most outward distinction was a front page article about shaken baby syndrome, a response to a tragic incident where a student’s baby was shaken to death by the baby sitter. Buried in the paper was a small fluff column that should have gone unnoticed, and for the majority of the readers, probably did, but instead turned out to contain the most distressing and ungrateful opinions I’ve ever encountered from a whiny high school suburbanite.

The article, entitled “Oregon in a Bubble” [available here], written by Nikki Coe, stated that the city we students lived in was completely sheltered from the “real world", where drugs and violence exist everywhere, even under beds. She goes on to explain that parents should teach their children about how bad the world really is, or else they will be beaten and left dangling off of flag pole in a rather undignified position if they set one foot out there.

Miss Coe obviously had her reasons for thinking that the safe living of Oregon is not exactly a good thing, but she comes off as being radically exaggerative, imprudent, and unthankful. My first counter-point of her article was the strongest: why shouldn’t we want Oregon safe?

Indeed, Miss Coe was right to say that Oregon is a safe town. A person can walk down a street at night and come home with all of their pieces. A person can leave the house and be reasonably certain all of their stuff will be there when they get back. A person can walk through a store and not be accosted by some religious nut that’s convinced that everyone is going to Hell. Actually, the last one is not really true, but two out of three isn’t bad.

The point is, why should we be made to feel bad that Oregon is a safe place? Is it so wrong that we, as a community, have achieved a secure city where we don’t fear for our lives? Is it so horrible that we have what cities in our own nation wish they could have: I sense of peace?

Apparently so. Miss Coe’s article not only comes off as unappreciative, she also seems to berate Oregon for not being like the real world, that we should be equally as bad as everyone else. Her stance comes off like it would be much better to import drugs and violence from other places, or our children won’t be prepared to live productive lives in an earthly nightmare. Shame on us for being happy and safe! How dare we be civilized! Let’s bring in the evil so we won’t screw our kids up!

Oregonians should henceforth feel terrible because they live in Pleasantville, where there are no drugs or violence, people are friendly, everyone expresses excitement or astonishment with words like “golly” and “gee”, and holding hands equals third base. Sure, they can feel as terrible as they want, but it’s pointless, since Oregon is not actually like this.

A flaw in Miss Coe’s reasoning is that she neglected to mention that robberies do happen, cars do get broken into, and people do hurt others. Illegal drug usage is present among the students; I’ve seen it myself. In fact, there was a drug operation that was shut down by the police around the time the article was written. A child molester terrorized the community less than five years before. And who could forget the very small percentage of female students who walked around school pregnant (case in point: the cover story of that Eagle was about a high school student who lost her baby)? Oregon is a relatively safe place to live, but it is not without its problems and vices, just like anywhere else. I’m not sure if these problems weren’t enough for Miss Coe, but I think that one public crime is ideally too much.

How is it that children had no idea what was going on in the world? Miss Coe must have fallen into a deep sleep whenever mention of Columbine popped up. Clay High was put under tighter security as a result of these tragedies, especially by the time this article was written, and she still claims that we are protected from the outside world? Oregon is the last place anything bad would happen!

That’s probably close to what people thought in Columbine. I only hope no one wrote a similar article the day before that incidence occured.

Students are obviously aware of what is out there. Granted, knowledge and experience are two different animals, but to say that lifelong Oregonians will stumble out into the world, blissfully ignorant and smiling, only to have the smog burn their eyes, get beaten over the head with a lead pipe, have their wallet stolen, and wake up in the back of an alley, suddenly feeling like they lost something less tangible and having a craving for heroin is an insult to the intelligence of humankind. And I am well aware that Miss Coe is part of humankind.

Finally, where is she getting this stuff? Doesn’t she live in Oregon too? How does she know that all of children who grow up in Oregon and leave the city are basically three-legged antelope in a cheetah-infested savannah? Did she have a friend who grew up in Oregon, set out, and then, after sustaining fatal injuries from the real world, gasped out a final message to Miss Coe, telling her about Oregon’s peaceful environment was a death warrant for its citizens? Could it be that Miss Coe’s friend was just an idiot?

So, to summarize the points that I got out of this article:

1) Oregon is a peaceful, perfect chunk of Heaven, where the worst illegal thing that happens is rainfall on a picnic.

2) The rest of the world is quickly going to Hell, and you should feel horrible that your town isn’t doing the same.

3) Everyone in Oregon will die the moment they leave the town, with the exception of Nikki Coe.

Miss Coe may have had an argument that was understandable and justifiable, but she ultimately shot herself in the foot when she decided to present this case in a fluff column in a high school newspaper. The end result was a baseless rant that would sooner cause people to defect from her side than take it. It doesn’t matter, though, since basically everyone who read that article is in the “real world” by now, and are probably dead anyway.

Pointless final counter-point: Selmek and I both grew up in Oregon. He was fighting in Operation: Iraqi Freedom, and came back in one piece. I’m sure war-torn Iraq is just like Oregon.