JEERS to us… The Corvallis Advocate… our very own paper which you’re reading right now. We messed up. We said that gas prices are rising because of lack of development. Boy howdy, were we wrong. In fact, developments are getting all clustery together because gas is getting too expensive. Our sincere apologies. Our even more sincere mea culpas. We’ll try to do better. [*sigh*]
CHEERS for Corvallis Public Schools. Did you know that we have become known in the Benton County area and beyond for enforcing the mask mandate? It kinda sorta came up when the Alsea school district decided to… well… not. Thank you to our teachers, administrators, superintendent, and school board for keeping things safe for our kids.
SAD SIGHS as we leave Human Trafficking Awareness Month with a story that hit closer to home than we would like. The fact that an OSU-bound student got caught up in it might be shocking to many, but as it has happened before, it will happen again. Scary side note here is that Corvallis’s House of Engedi has closed leaving victims nowhere to find safety here. [If you or someone you know are a victim of trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888]
HAPPIER SIGHS as we enter Black History month, and a school somewhere near the middle of town has a boatload of cool events. New centers are opening, vinyl is being played, and LaTosha Brown is giving a speech on Feb. 17! Check out the various events here. [and def’ give the Brown speech a listen as she rocks]
BATED BREATH may be held for a while… or not. The Three Sisters Volcanic Complex [you know, the trio of mountains in the Cascades just a hop-two-skips-and-five-jumps from town] may be coming alive again. We’ve got earthquakes happening, and ground lifting, and volcanologists all excited because there may be a bit of magma bouncing around in there. The Sisters last erupted something like 2,200 years ago, but while the Cascades Volcano Observatory is keeping an eye on things, they don’t think it’s a cause for undue alarm right now. [If you were around in 1980, you’ll remember that these folks knew when to be ready for St. Helens, so we’re gonna just trust them’all for now]
CRAZY-LOUD CHEERS for the 11 new books expected to be released by Oregon State University Press in 2022. They’ve got books about what Oregon looked like long ago [by Robert T. Boyd], about Earth’s Weary Lovers [by Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck], about Willamette River Greenways [by Travis Williams], and about science education for Indigenous People back in the 1990’s [by Ed Galindo and Lori Lambert]. And that’s just the first four titles! So support your local bookmakers and check them all out!
Stepping out from Oregon for a moment…
BIG LOUD NOISY BOOS for Texas and their new push to ban books. On a 15-and-a-half page spreadsheet [landscape orientation] is the list of books the conservative parents of our nearly neighbor to the southeast want to “protect their children from.” Not surprisingly, at least four of the titles are simply “Abortion,” but also in there are at least four titles with the words “Black Lives Matter” in them, one titled “My Two Uncles,” and one “The Girl with the Baby.”
Yes, parents have the right to protect their children – we just always thought that meant to keep them out of traffic and locking away the [unloaded] guns. The idea that we should protect the youth of this world from knowing that LGBTQ+ people exist, that sex happens and can result in unwanted pregnancy, or that our BIPOC community has faced racism at the hands of white people seems infantile.
These young people will eventually become adults, and the crushing weight of all of the world’s truths landing on their heads at that time is overwhelming even to us – and we’re old people who have known about these things for a very long time indeed.
NOT TO MENTION books are our covenant with the world to come. They are a means of keeping a record of how people today lived, loved, and survived so future generations will understand why things happened. Had we gone out and burned all of the books by Jane Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, D.H. Lawrence, or Alan Ginsberg [yes, they were all considered controversial], would we be who we are today?
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