Page 4 - Reedley Exponent E-edition 5-17-18

The Reedley Exponent A4 Thursday, May 17, 2018 Editorial & Opinions
Serving “The World’s Fruit Basket” since 1891
A Mid Valley Publishing Newspaper
Founded March 26, 1891, in a two-story building on the corner of 11th and F streets, by A.S. Jones
Fred Hall — Publisher
In my OPINION
Jon Earnest — Editor
Chris Aguirre — Sports Editor Felicia Cousart Matlosz — Panorama Editor Budd Brockett — Editor Emeritus
QUOTE
“I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in 20 minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.”
— Lord Brabazon (1884-1964)
How can the state of California, in good faith, spend $1 billion in taxpayer money on an unprecedented expansion of MediCal to in- clude people who are not even legal residents? That’s a question which is going to need asking because California Senate Democrats are pro- posing the additional spending for next year’s budget. That’s a little bit like breaking into your neighbor’s house and expecting to be fed dinner! Once again, they will turn to the only source available for funding such adventures, and that would be the taxpayer.
Roses available for veterans’ graves at Reedley Cemetery on Memorial Day
Fred Hall
The annual Memorial Day cer- emony at Reedley Cemetery is less than two weeks away, and the Cpt. Joe F. Lusk II Memorial Foundation is planning another tribute to veterans.
For the first time, the foundation is getting involved with the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation to provide a single long-stemmed rose on the head- stones of local veterans for the holi- day. Since this is Reedley’s first year partnering with the Memorial Day Flower Foundation, the Lusk Founda- tion will be limited to 250 roses.
Susan Lusk said that the founda- tion is asking the public to come to David’s on Saturday, May 26, or Sun- day, May 27, to pick up a free rose for one of their loved ones who has served in the military. You can take the rose to the cemetery and place at on the grave headstone of a loved one who was a veteran.
The roses can be picked up at Da- vid’s,1034 G St. in downtown Reedley, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 26 and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on May 27. Lusk said those wishing to help more vet- erans can make a donation to the Cpt. Joe F. Lusk II Memorial Foundation. The foundation’s mission is to bridge the gap between the financial support the government provides wounded veterans and the reality of their needs.
Lusk said donations can be left at David’s when roses are picked up.
The annual Memorial Day cer- emony will begin at 10 a.m. Monday, May 28, in the veterans area in the southwestern portion of the cemetery. Members of community groups will lay wreaths in front of the unknown soldier memorial.
•••
Mark your calendars (or smart-
phone schedules): Reedley High School and Immanuel High School graduations fall on the same night — Thursday, May 31. Reedley High’s cer- emony begins at 8 p.m. in the football stadium while Immanuel’s graduation runs from 7 to 9 p.m. inside Reedley Mennonite Brethren Church, 1362 L St.
Orange Cove High School has this year’s Friday night slot, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. on June 1 in Titan Stadium. The school will have its Sober Grad celebration from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Sat- urday, June 2, at Adventure Park in Visalia.
Meanwhile, Reedley Middle Col- lege High School will see off its third graduating class on Wednesday, Jun. 6 from 8 to 9 p.m. at the Reedley High School Performing Arts Theatre. Also on Wednesday, June 6, Dunlap Lead- ership Academy’s graduation takes place at Reedley High’s PAT from 6 to 7 p.m.
•••
As for the Reedley College Com-
mencement on Fri-
day, May 18, there’s
an important
change: the cer-
emony begins an
hour later, at 7 p.m.
While it makes for
a later start to cele-
bration for the new
graduates, it does
spare supporting
family members and other attendees the uncomfortable late afternoon set- ting sun. The graduates in their caps and gowns also catch a little bit of a temperature break.
Friday marks the fifth and final Reedley College Commencement for Sandra Caldwell, who is leaving her position as president this summer. As soon as her responsibilities at RC and the Madera and Oakhurst Community Centers are finished, she’ll depart for her new job as executive director of the Wyoming Community College Commission.
There will be special memories for the 700 students to be presented with associate of arts and associate of science degrees. Another 1,020 stu- dents with receive achievement of certification.
Parking is free, but the pubic is advised to arrive early to secure a closer spot.
Not to be outdone, the California Energy
Commission — an appointed, unelected board — has, by stipulation, mandated that by the year 2020 all homes constructed in California must have solar panels. This is to satisfy some arbitrary standard, set by the state, for an unreasonable, unattainable percentage of renewable energy being utilized.
Ask anyone and they will tell you that California is already in the middle of a housing shortage which is becoming a crisis, and we already have the most expensive housing in the nation.
Item one and item two are at complete odds with each other. By enacting number one — the additional health care — we add one more goody to the magnet that draws and encourages hundreds of thousands of illegals to enter the United States. That alone places greater strain on the housing situation, and one winds up with the horrendous homeless camps in cities like Los Angeles and San Fran- cisco because these low income — or no income — people can’t afford housing here in the Golden State to which they are lured because of so many government handouts. At the same time, thousands of California taxpayers are giving up on high housing costs, high cost of living, high taxes to support those the state deem worthy of care and have decided to move to a friendlier locale out of state.
Even with all the “climate change” and “global warming,” we remain one of the most beautiful states in the union and our climate is genuinely delightful almost year-round. The tunnel vision politi- cians in Sacramento have heaped on regulations, restrictions and taxes until the average earner has reached the point that they can no longer afford the overhead of living here. Ironically, the under- educated with no skills or training continue to arrive, drawn by the “milk and honey” provided by our Democrat politicians.
By the way, talking about our high taxes, what the hell happened to the last of the many water bonds we passed which were supposed to be used for increased storage capacity? So far the only use of the money has been for useless studies and surveys as well as an airplane to fly over the snowpack in the Sierras. Bureaucrats seem to have meetings to plan meetings. While real needs continue to get short shrift, the size of California government continues its unrestricted growth. I’m pretty sure we’ve all reached the point where we realize the value of growing something that already is basically useless and counter-productive.
This sorry state of circumstances only points out the apparent lack of common sense by our state government officials. We con- tinue to add to a lengthy list of freebies non-citizens can expect when they reach California, thereby encouraging them to come. Then when they get here they are under-educated and lacking skills required to add to our economy or make a decent living. Adding to the dilemma faced by all Californians is the ever-increasing — gen- erally governmentally-sponsored — cost and availability of housing.
Everything costs more here, forcing many longtime citizens and businesses to flee — yet California politicians have the lure out and seem to welcome and defend the burgeoning number of illegals who bring literally nothing to the table. Does “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary state” ring a bell? Where is the common sense in this approach to governance? It’s hard to blame the “undocumented” when they are encouraged and one sure as hell can’t blame most of California’s common sense citizens. Seems to me that the blame falls on the liberal coastal cities and the liberal politicians they elect who wind up in Sacramento with whom we are “blessed.”
But, as always, that’s only one man’s opinion.
Letters from readers
Jon Earnest
Two interrogations: Gina Haspel and Adolf Eichmann
A letter of thanks to
the ‘forces of good’
With lots of bad news we
seem to be reading lately, it is time to make a change of atti- tude and behavior. As by now you may have heard that the veterans from the Vietnam War recently suffered a major loss when “lowlife thieves” stole all our fundraising equipment at our storage bin located at the Dinuba Memorial Hall Grounds.
Well, the “forces of good” re- sponded from Reedley, Dinuba and surrounding areas. Readers sent in small and large donations to put us on track of buying all new equipment. This can be a lesson to people who are down and out. Seek help as well as help yourself to make the impos- sible very possible.
We remember our fallen brothers who left to serve in the jungles of Vietnam as young as
18 and 19 — some just out of high school and drafted. We left more than 58,000 on the battlefield. Now 50 years later, those of us who returned have raised our families and give a big thanks to God for living in cities like Reed- ley and Dinuba and having won- derful Americans citizens like you as our brothers and sisters.
Again, thanks for giving. We veterans still have lots of good work to do for the community. Come see our troops in full uni- form in a Memorial Day ceremo- ny on Monday, May 28, at Smith Mountain Cemetery in Dinuba. Then, right after the ceremony, join us for a hot dog and hamburg- er at Dinuba Memorial Hall. Our uniforms fit a bit tight and our flat 27-inch waist is gone, but our guys still love your handshake.
George Madrid, US Navy Seabee Veteran Orosi
By Brian Terrell
Guest columnist
On May 9, Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s choice for head of the Cen- tral Intelligence Agency, testified at her Senate con- firmation hearing in Wash- ington, DC. Some senators questioned her about her tenure, in 2002, as CIA station chief in Thailand. There, the agency ran one of the “black sites” where suspected al-Qaida extrem- ists were interrogated using procedures that included waterboarding. She was also asked about her role in the destruction of videotapes in 2005 that documented the torture of illegally detained suspects. Her evasive an- swers to these questions, disconcerting and unsatis- fying, are also hauntingly familiar.
In 1960, Adolf Eich- mann was kidnapped by Israeli spies in Argentina and brought to trial in Je- rusalem for his part in the extermination of millions of European Jews during Germany’s Third Reich. In his interrogation with Israeli police, published as “Eichmann Interrogated,” Eichmann stated that in the intervening years since the acts in question his own view of them had evolved and before the Senate on May 9, Haspel expressed herself similarly.
Haspel testified that while she can’t say what exactly might constitute an immoral order in the past, her “moral compass” would not allow her to obey one today, given the “stricter moral standard” she says “we have chosen to hold ourselves to.” She does not judge the actions that she and her colleagues took in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, “in that tumultuous time” of decidedly looser moral standards: “I’m not going to sit here, with the benefit of hindsight, and judge the very good people who made hard decisions.” She testified that she sup- ports laws that prohibit tor- ture, but insists that such laws were not in place at the time and that such “harsh interrogations” were allow- able under the legal guid- ance the CIA had at the time and “that the highest legal authority in the United States had approved it, and that the president of the United States had approved it.”
Likewise Eichmann was probed about his obedience when “ordered to do some- thing blatantly illegal.” In a response that augured Has- pel’s Senate testimony a half century later, Eichmann told his interrogators: “You say illegal. Today I have a very different view of things... But then? I wouldn’t have
considered any of those ac- tions illegal... If anyone had asked me about it up until May 8, 1945, the end of the war, I’d have said: This gov- ernment was elected by a majority of the German peo- ple...every civilized country on earth had its diplomatic mission. Who is a little man like me to trouble his head about it? I get orders from my superior and I look nei- ther right nor left. That’s not my job. My job is to obey and comply.”
Not to compare the evil of the European Holocaust with the CIA rendition and torture (as if evil could be measured by quantity) but the evasions and obfusca- tions of these two willing technicians of state terror are chillingly similar. Eich- mann’s cowardly protesta- tions that he could not have known that facilitating tor- ture and murder was illegal ring hollow. It was only af- ter Eichmann’s atrocities, though, that such crimes as torture were formally codified into law. By 2002, however, along the prec- edents of the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the United States was legally bound along with most na- tions in the world to the Geneva Conventions, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention against Torture. Even the
U.S. Army Field Manual, cited by Haspel in her hear- ing, labels waterboarding as torture and a war crime.
“We all believed in our work. We were all com- mitted,” Haspel proudly boasted to the Senate, de- scribing the morale and esprit de corps of her CIA comrades overseeing illegal detention, torture and mur- der in the years after 9-11. Eichmann similarly praised the work ethic of his team. Inspired by Eichmann’s tri- al, Thomas Merton, in his poem, “Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces,” put these words in the mouth of a condemned concentration camp commander: “In my day we worked hard we saw what we did our self- sacrifice was conscientious and complete our work was faultless and detailed.”
An Israeli court did not buy Adolf Eichmann’s defense that he was fol- lowing orders and obeying the law as he understood it and he was hung on June 1, 1962. We will soon know if the U.S. Senate will accept Gina Haspel’s appropria- tion of Eichmann’s alibi and confirm her as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Brian Terrell is a co-co- ordinator of Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonvio- lence.
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