If you ask a traveler who has recently visited a small town what it is that best symbolizes the spirit of the place, he’s apt to name a prominent building, or perhaps a park.

I like to have a look at the local high school’s football field.

Side effects of single payer
To the editor:
People who sing the praises of “single payer” health care programs seldom tell us of their unpleasant side effects. One is that governments running these programs use rationing of health care as an attempt to control costs.

The Baker School Board needs a refresher course on Oregon’s Public Meetings law.

We’re convinced that the board ran afoul of the law Monday afternoon.

Specifically, the board excluded two reporters from the Baker City Herald from attending the portion of the meeting when a teacher, who has filed a grievance against the district, met with the board.

It’s commencement season and we are obligated, those of us who have passed this milestone, to dispense nuggets of our hard-earned wisdom to the graduates.

Well, here’s my advice to you in the gowns and mortarboards.

You don’t need it.

You’re pretty smart already.

There’s lots you don’t know, sure.

But you’ll figure all that out along the way.

Most of it, anyway.

Probably we ought not be shocked that our country’s transition to relying on “clean” electricity would have its messy bits.

The current conflict in the Northwest, though predicted by experts, surprised the general public.

It pits endangered salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River against the wind turbines on which we’ve lavished billions of dollars of public subsidies.

Oregonians are as a rule pretty tolerant of unconventional behavior.

We let people grow, and smoke, marijuana for a whole host of reasons.

We allow people to enlist the help of a physician to complete suicide.

But our tolerance must have reasonable limits.

To its credit, the Legislature last week acted to impose such a limit — one that’s long been lacking and that has, sadly, contributed to the deaths of at least two Oregon children.

As a person who has mastered little besides the repetitive pattern of respiration required to survive, I’ve never been especially annoyed at how often I dream about failing at some task.

It seems, based on my conversations with other people, that I’m plagued by an inordinate number of these nightmares.

Although I suppose this might be an illusion, the result of these unpleasant dreams being so abnormally vivid that they linger a good while and thus seem more frequent than they actually are.

We had no idea we were so naive.

Less than three months ago, in this same space and under the headline “Legislature gets serious,” we opined that Oregon lawmakers seemed to finally recognize that neither the state nor its cities, counties and school districts can afford to continue giving employees every fringe benefit they get now.

How embarrassing for us.

Which is nothing compared with the shame that state legislators ought to feel.