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About Jackson herald. (Jefferson, Jackson County, Ga.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 25, 2023)
PAGE 4A THE JACKSON HERALD WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2023 Opinions “Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. Henry Ward Beecher Mike Buffington, editor • Email: Mike@mainstreetnews.com I’ve been thinking a lot lately about progress. What is progress? How do we measure in real terms some thing as abstract as “progress?” This comes in part due to the ongoing lure of the elec tric vehicle industry to the state. Over the past few years, Georgia has garnered a lot of atten tion from companies building electric vehicle manufacturing facilities in the state, including the South Korean SK Battery plant in Jackson County. That plant will em ploy over 2,500 people when it’s at full oper ation, but that’s small compared to Hyundai’s 8,100 jobs coming to its EV plant in Bryan County. SK and Hyun dai are also jointly building a massive EV battery plant in Bartow County. All of that is undoubtedly a kind of progress for the state. Long mired in poverty and racism and the lingering effects from the Civil War. Georgia has emerged over the last 50 years as a manufacturing powerhouse, luring new invest ments for all kinds of product manufacturing. But what is the cost of all this “progress?” ••• There are a lot of people who dissent against what our society considers to be progress. Among the leading voices that question modern “progress” is poet, essayist and en vironmentalist Wendell Berry, who writes on these themes from his farm in Kentucky. Says Berry in one poem: I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw the poisoned river-the mountain cast into the valley; I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city Berry is something of an iconoclast on progress. He writes on a typewriter and eschews using a computer and he plows his farm with a mule rather than a tractor or other equipment. While he may be a little eccentric, he speaks for a lot of people who question the long-term implications of what we consider to be progress. We see that in local government zoning meetings where citizens often oppose development due to its likely impact on the native flora and fauna (among other things like traffic, impact on schools, etc.) Much of this was bom in the 1960s when the early roots of environments were established. That was in part due to the counter-culture ideology of that era and to doomsday predic tions in the 1968 book, “The Population Bomb.” That book created a lot of fear about human consumption of limited re sources on earth. The gas shortage of the early 1970s echoed that theme long before EV cars came into vogue. The era was also one when the back-to-the-land move ment started, as reflected in the popular magazine of the time, Mother Earth News. What is ‘progress?’ While that movement has waxed and waned over the years, it remains alive today with farmer-celebrities such as Joel Salatin, a self-described “Christian libertarian environ mentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.” Salatin has written a number of books and produced vid eos and given lectures on creative ways for small farmers and homesteaders to improve their operations. While Salatin is something of a back-to-the-land rock star, there are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of books, videos, podcasts, social media links and websites that cater to the eco-land movement: Homesteaders of America and Bootstrap Farmer come to mind. All of this generally flies under the radar of most people. The cadre of small-scale environmentalists is limited and of ten isolated. The larger public mostly reacts to big environ mental controversies, such as mining around environmental ly sensitive areas. • •• The largest environmental issue today is, of course, cli mate change. Due to a number of factors, some manmade, the earth is warming up. There’s little doubt that this is hap pening; all you have to do is look at a photo of a glacier 50 years ago and compare it to today. Still, the issue of climate change has become politically polarizing and often divides along generation lines. Older Americans tend to scoff at the hype of climate change activ ists while the issue is largely embraced by the younger gen erations. That’s not always the case, but there does appear to be a rather sharp divide on the issue. Even when there is some degree of agreement on what’s happening, the solutions tend to be vague and often limited. Take the EV movement that is affecting Georgia. While electric vehicles would generate less greenhouse gases than traditional fossil fuel, the electricity needed to recharge EV batteries does have an environmental cost (coal-fired plants, hydro power, natural gas and even nuclear power plants all have environmental downsides and costs.) In addition, we’ve not yet solved the problem of how to dispose (or recycle) all those EV batteries at the end of their life, another environ mental issue. So the “progress” of electric vehicles may be only in one sphere; the larger impact environmentally has yet to be fully understood. ••• There’s no doubt that while some question “progress,” there have been a lot of positive things that modem society and its progress has brought us. While “big pharma” is often cited as a boogyman by the anti-vaxx crowd, modern pharmaceuticals gave us antibiot ics, cancer treatments, vaccines and other things that have saved millions of lives and eased the suffering of many. Ditto for “big medicine.” In the economic sphere, modern computers have revolu tionized the workplace, increasing productivity, allowing some people to work from home and created new categories of products. In transportation, progress has made our cars safer and less polluting. Air travel has opened up the world to peo ple who a generation or two ago couldn’t imagine seeing so Some using King’s words selectively Dear Editor: Words from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech about a colorblind nation are repeat ed every MLK Day. But the frequent cherry-picking of quotes distorts his views and masks today’s systemic racism. Why does this matter? The U.S. still faces a reckoning almost three years after the death of George Floyd along with a conservative backlash. Right extremists are using King’s words very differently. King’s “Dream” speech envisions a country that lives up to the prom ises of equality made in its founding documents. But King also brought up police brutality and systemic poverty hurting African Americans in the same address. In recent years, some Republicans have selectively used King’s color blind words from the “Dream” speech to attack civil rights programs and initiatives. Florida Governor Ron De Santis (R) invoked King when he pro posed his “Stop Woke Act,” aimed at limiting discussions around slavery and racism in public schools. Speak er of the House Kevin McCarthy (R) tweeted in 2021 that critical race theo ry goes against everything Martin Lu ther King Jr. taught us. In reality, King repeatedly brought up the legacy of enslavement and the need to address structural racism in 1967. Some libraries are now being told to remove books by MLK. Which is why with our upcoming Special Elec tion on January 31st for State House District 119 and the open vacancy on the Barrow County School Board, we need to look very carefully at the content of each candidates character. Choose wisely. Sincerely, Harper Kindle Statham much of the world. In general, “progress” has raised the standards of living for millions of people. • •• But “progress” isn’t without costs. Modem progress has increased the complexity of our dai ly lives in ways that we’ve yet to fully understand. One as pect of this increased complexity is the need for additional referees in our social-political-economic construct; in gener al, that leads to more government intervention in our daily lives in an attempt to create a more level playing field. Modem progress has also created huge amounts of cen tralization in our economy. Agriculture, once a small farm enterprise, is now largely industrialized. That keeps food prices low for consumers, but it also creates environmental hazards and has led to genetic modifications of our foods that concern many people. That centralization is also evident in our shopping. Once a nation of small mom-and-pop stores, we’re now a nation of large stores and chain restaurants that control the mar ketplace and that have squeezed out those mom-and-pop businesses. While the Walmarts and Krogers and Amazons of the world may have brought us more choices, they have also devastated the social capital that had been created and supported by independent businesses in local communities. Even computers that have brought about so much eco nomic benefits have downsides. They have created a pipe line of misinformation and have become a tool for criminal activity, from kiddie pom to electronic thefts. • •• I guess my biggest gripe about “progress” is the homoge nization of the American landscape. We’ve become a nation made up largely of cookie-cutter suburbs. No matter where you travel, there are the same stores, same restaurants, and the same “look” in community after community. Is there anywhere in America that doesn’t have a Starbucks within a mile or two? The uniqueness of our individual communities is being washed away in this tide of sameness. Our homes and neigh borhoods have become products of national builders who churn out the same floor plans and exteriors from coast to coast. Our shopping centers are ubiquitous. It’s all a little disorienting. It isn’t that American economic and cultural hegemony is necessarily bad in and of itself, but it does change the way we perceive the world and the way we think about our own lives. So is progress a good or bad thing? It is neither, and yet it is both. A rising tide may float all boats, but it can also wipe out the shoreline and its reference points used for guidance, and it can bury dangers just beneath the surface where they can rip the boats of those who forget they were there in the first place. Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspa pers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com. Relates to aging column Dear Editor: Having read the opinion page for many years, I must confess that I was surprised when your recent column on getting old didn’t give the political cauldron a few stirs to the left. In any case, I enjoyed reading the article and identified with the sen timents expressed. Today I am in my mid-eighties, but I was a twenty-one year-old promising young man when my wife and I loaded our belongs into a 1954 Desota and headed for Georgia. Since then, as the decades have drifted by, visits back to our rural Mississippi hometown remind me of watching a long-running stage play with a dwindling number of original cast members performing on stage. Throughout the years, many loved ones and dear friends have died, so my wife and I are blessed to have children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren living nearby. During the 1940s and 50s, I attended grammar school and high school with a dazzler who would become my wife. We have been married for 66 years. As our journey takes us nearer to the setting sun, we have much to reminisce about because we have always traveled the road of life together. Sincerely, Claude Diamond Braselton The Jackson Herald Founded 1875 Merged with The Commerce News 2017 The Official Legal Organ of Jackson County, Ga. Herman Buffington, Publisher 1965-2005 Mike Buffington Co-Publisher Scott Buffington Co-Publisher Alex Buffington News Editor Hannah Barron Reporter Taylor Heam Sports Editor MEMBER • Georgia Press Association • National Newspaper Association • Inland Press Association • International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors Postmaster: Send Address Changes To: MainStreet Newspapers, Inc. PO Box 908 Jefferson, Georgia 30549-0908 Web Site: www.JacksonHeraldTODAY.com Email: mike@mainstreetnews.com Voice: 706.367.5233 Fax:708.621.4117 (news) Periodical Postage paid at Jefferson, GA 30549 (SCED 271980) Yearly Subscriptions: $45 / $40 for seniors Abortion law doesn’t make sense By Jay Bookman Georgia Recorder If you honestly, sincerely believe that human life begins at the moment that sperm is introduced to egg, certain con clusions flow logically from that starting point, including that abortion is murder and that banning abortion is a moral obli gation on a par with banning slavery. I strongly disagree with that approach, but I understand it, and I respect the pas sion of those who take that position out of deep faith. Personally, I’m just not smart enough to say I know when human life be gins, and I'm not arrogant enough to insist that whatever conclusion I reach on that topic must be made binding on everybody else in the country. That degree of certain ty eludes me. And while I can’t pinpoint when it starts, I do know that human life as we live it is immensely complicated and at times difficult, confronting us with circumstanc es in which no choice seems the right choice, when we are reduced to making the least worst decision. At its most fun damental level, I believe, freedom must mean that the individual has the right to make such complicated choices for her self, rather than be dictated to by one rule applied to all situations and imposed by legislators who have no understanding of the circumstances and no direct stake in the outcome. Life is just not so neat as to allow such easy answers. And increasingly. I’m starting to doubt the good faith and sincerity of many who have long insisted upon conception as the legal and moral starting point of life, par ticularly here in Georgia. The chasm be tween what they say and what they do has become too great. Under current Georgia law, adopted in 2019, a human embryo is a legally recog nized, legally protected person, with all the rights and protections that implies. For example, a woman who became pregnant at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31 can theoretically claim that embryo as a deduction on that year’s taxes. "It is about establishing personhood of the unborn child, in the tax code, for child support for mothers, in our census counts, across our (legal) code, so that we can lay the foundation that no other state in the nation in the last 46 years has ever done, which is to establish the personhood of this child,” state Rep. Ed Setzler, a sponsor of the legislation, explained at the time. Yet, under that same state law, a human embryo/person in Georgia can legally be aborted before six weeks’ gestation time. How can that be? If an embryo is a full- fledged human being under state law, how can state law also condone what amounts to murder of that human being in its first six weeks? Logically, it cannot. Yet it does. During his successful re-election cam paign, Gov. Brian Kemp said that he would not attempt to further tighten state laws regarding abortion. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones has taken a similar tack, saying he has no intention of bringing up the issue this legislative session. If you look at the polls and other signs, the reason for their hesitation is obvious. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, six states have held abortion-related referen- dums. In every case, voters have rejected abortion bans and voted to protect choice. In states such as California, the margin was predictably large, 67.9% to 33.1%. But even in a deep-red state such as Kan sas, voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to weaken pro-choice provisions in the state constitution, 59%-41%. Georgia Republicans have the political power, with substantial majorities in the House and Senate and control of every statewide office, to follow the dictates of their conscience and ban abortion alto gether. The Supreme Court has removed any legal obstacle blocking them from taking that action, and their decades-long commitment to the idea that life begins at conception has presumably given them a moral mandate to act. Yet they will not. Either they don’t really believe that life begins at conception, and this has all been an act, or they are willing to allow the on going “murder” of thousands of embryos/ human beings because trying to stop it would endanger their grip on power. If there’s a third explanation. I’m not seeing it. Jay Bookman covered Georgia and na tional politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning nu merous national, regional and state jour nalism awards.
