Op Ed: 'Copper-Canisters' Provide
The Only Campaign-Test
Oregonians Need

We often focus too far-and-wide on what is in Oregon’s future; while forgetting, for a while what's still there as witness from our past.

This woman became homeless after fire ravaged her apartment, her plight typical of many who never chose their unfortunate circumstances in life Photo by: Tim King

(SALEM) - Throughout the Ages-past, what populations did to honor their ancestors has historically measured their level of culture. That single criterion is seen as reflecting cultural concern for others; and thus the cooperative necessity we are still learning as the only true-and-solid binder for modern society. Even though the concept was surely communicated clearly by our Founders in that first Revolution. Compassion encompasses the entire concept, at whatever levels it is allowed to operate. In Oregon’s early years we allowed --with then-reasonable rationale for dollar-driven deficiency-- a wreck of compassionate care to be committed against then-defenseless Oregonians. More recently the stark spectacle of “copper canisters”, set out in accusing rows for final fixation of “name, date” --and not much else-- has made clear, again, to many of us unknowing and until then unmoved, what took place and why it was allowed to happen. We often focus too far-and-wide on what is in Oregon’s future; while forgetting, for a while what's still there as witness from our past. We find ourselves confronted again with the wreck --and those “copper canisters.” With that forbidding old facility full of shocking tales; and those canisters STILL before our very eyes, all these years; many anguished and documented pleas, to plenty of persons who could and should DO SOMEthing about it, have continued to occur. World-acclaimed journalistic attention was conferred on one of our leading Oregon newspapers, very recently, for a program of revelation reminding us that we allow this monstrosity from our checkered past to remain un-mended and un-mastered. It is much more than a public atrocity still accusing us on the level-of-compassion our culture is showing NOW. Somehow very significantly, for many Oregonians muddled-up and made apprehensive by our faltering society’s compassionate failures, that continuing situation provides a political test; perhaps better tuned to times-now than any other single situation in an overwhelming series we must solve. Right on the public record for any company,large or small business or corporation, cooperative enterprise, or any other incoming income-producing and productive organization to see ; there's the proof of where we really are NOW in Oregon no matter what the position of our mouths and our "representatives" political promises is made to seem. Removal of the wreckage is only the first step. What is now demanded, essential, and distinctly "smart-funding", is first-class health-care via modern methods and technologies; saving not only the dollars-demanded for higher-cost “warehousing” but also salvaging sensible proportions of persons involved for return to reality and productive citizenship, also salvaging family relationships. Do you think that today, in the stressed-environment perpetrated on all of us by ongoing economic, social --and political !!-- situations, surely put into place in large part by heavy pressures to forget "corporate social responsibilities" in the name of "stockholder profits"'; that we no longer need such health-system special-facilities now demanded for the devastations inflicted by those steadily- mounting, family-destroying current pressures? For more than a few of you, simply seeking family-experience will give you the inevitable and too often unavoidable answer. (My condolence: "been there" myself.) For others still in some doubt as to this demanding necessity-NOW, right here in our home-state, go "see with own eyes"; and seek out also those inestimably persuasive photos published locally and state-wide, not so long ago. SO let's add that one, too, for both the current candidates for our Chair as Governor: Tell us true, now when we really need to know, what you will do, and when you will get it done, and how you will pay to finally remove and remediate this ongoing and highly visible stain on what we must surely accept as “the Oregon culture.” One of our candidates should be well-acquainted with the concept of such care, reflected in the concerns of any incoming corporation. As a corporate lawyer, conversant with the many problems of affluent and powerful corporate clients, there's no way he will not have encountered precisely these portions of the compelling picture written large for all to see; right there in our State's history of compassion for every citizen when demanded by desperate circumstance. The incumbent is already on-record and engaged in a cooperative plan with Legislative members also struck by the spectacle of those copper canisters --and what they tell the world about Oregon as a place to live. That makes it not only ethical but desperately-demanded to seek solid statement-now, while we still have democratic opportunity to do so, from each of our two would-be “top dog in Salem” contenders. (Disclosure: My Dad died of dementia forced by long-term depression, untreatable in Maine at the time --for some of the same "reasonable rationale" --despite quality-care knowledge known then but unprovided for us common folk.)