When riding a bike; if you assert your right of way and ride on the left side of the white line when there is room to ride on the right, ride two abreast in traffic, pass cars on the right in town, use the crosswalk so you don’t have to stop at the stop sign, or just fail to stop at the stop sign and go; why wear a helmet? You don’t have any brains to protect.

Dog wash

Sending out a big thank you to Lisa at Gorge Dog and Jenni at Cascade Pet Camp, who organized and sponsored another successful dog wash.

Many appreciative pet lovers walked up with doggies in need of a bath and maybe a nail trim and went home with a happy, clean pup. It wasn’t just suds and water for the dogs — their reward for being so patient as they were combed and groomed by the volunteers was a Gorge Dog cookie treat, which they all thoroughly enjoyed.

Thanks again to all who participated in this F-U-N-d-raiser!

Remembrance

Last Sunday, tragedy struck our sister congregation in Knoxville, Tenn., when a man entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church during Sunday worship and began shooting. He killed two people and injured eight others. He is in custody, leaving behind a note stating that his target was intentionally chosen to express his rage at “the liberal movement.”

As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, proud descendants of a long liberal religious heritage, our hearts break to imagine the suffering in Knoxville and beyond. We also strive to extend compassion to the man whose only remaining response to his pain was to enter a church and start shooting.

We are saddened and troubled. We are confused. We are angry. We are afraid. And that may be the worst part.

One of our great living Unitarian Universalist ministers and theologians, Rev. Dr. Forrest Church, has written “The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is fear.” Events such as these turn our attention to fear, and in fear alone we will lose ourselves and all we believe. If we spend our time paying attention only to violence and anger, we’re looking in the wrong direction.

In our congregational life, we try to figure out how to look the right way. We seek to nurture love and hope in ourselves and our neighbors. We seek to build bridges of compassion and understanding to create the beloved community.

Our Universalist ancestors stood apart in their times because of their belief in universal salvation. We inherit from them our strong commitment to value the inherent worth and dignity of all. This belief informs our stances in support of historically marginalized people. This may be what made the Unitarian Universalists of Knoxville, Tenn., targets of violence.

We inherit with our Unitarian ancestry a deep respect for reason, dialogue, civility, and free will in religious and social life. Perhaps here we will find the roadmap to lead us through the fear, violence, and repression in our country.

This week we pause, reminded yet again of all that can go awry on this seething, careening earth of ours. And this week we walk forward as religious liberals, holding fast to love and hope as the lights that will see us through.

Slanted view

On a recent ballot initiative that passed overwhelmingly, we voted to protect the Hood River water supply from the pollution of a high-end housing and recreation development. The County Commissioners and Mt Hood Meadows had decided to locate it on top of the recharge area for the spring from which a quarter of our water flows.

Lots of negotiation resulted in a wilderness bill that includes a land trade whereby Meadows would get to develop land in Government Camp, legislation would protect the watershed, and a tiny fraction of Mount Hood would become federally protected wilderness.

That is the big picture. The smaller details are harder to summarize but they do include many sacrifices by all sides. One loss will be some mountain bike access to existing trails.

At a recent county commissioners’ meeting 21 people representing most of our demographic presented cases for passing the wilderness bill. All mentioned protecting the water. Now why is it that the Hood River News allows an activist writer to report the giant tragedy and injustice to those with the least sacrifice while neglecting to mention the water issue that affects everyone?

Raelynn Ricarte writes opinion pieces, like Ann Coulter or Maureen Dowd, not reportage, and she doesn’t do it particularly well judging by the number of people who write to contest her versions of public meetings.

For the Hood River News to be a community asset and survive into the future, it needs to report more truth than just sports scores and movie times. You can get movies from Netflix and much more cogent opinions from your friends and neighbors.

It’s time to tell the commission and Greg Walden to support this wilderness bill that will secure our water supply. It’s their job to represent us and do our bidding.