Dayton Turner’s false smashing the pumpkins analogy.
It is always interesting to note when Ursula La Guin gets a letter to the editor published. Nothing all that remarkable — you understand she is opinionated.
But, passing past her letter, we get to this item. Interesting.
Smashing pumpkins
My neighbors had some jack-o-lanterns out on their front porch and last night someone came along and smashed them. I have to wonder what they were thinking.
“These people have jack-o-lanterns, but we don’t, so let’s even up the score card, by making sure they don’t have what we don’t have.” Result: no one has jack-o-lanterns. This seems to the same brand of thinking of the Occupy movement in which people protest the wealthy: “These people have something we don’t have, so let’s take it away from them.”
I find it difficult to argue against the wealth of, say, a Steve Jobs; a Mark Zuckerberg; a Bill Gates; or even a Jed Clampett who had the good fortune to own a piece of property that produced oil.
Why do the Occupiers think they should benefit from the good work or fortune of others? When we get rid of the rich all we have left are the poor.
We live in a country that was built on the idea that everyone is guaranteed an equal opportunity, not an equal result. Abandon Portland, all ye who Occupy here.
DAYTON TURNER
Southeast Portland
At first I thought this writer was hitting upon the reasonably good rock band, popular in the 1990s, headed by Billy Corrigan. But no, Turner was referring to actual smashed pumpkins, and making an analogy between that and the ideology of the “Occupy Wall Street etc” groups. It is a false ideology. Ignoring anything one way or the other about the merits of what he believes the Occupiers stand for and against, he is wrong about what smashing pumpkins is all about.
“These people have jack-o-lanterns, but we don’t, so let’s even up the score card, by making sure they don’t have what we don’t have.” Result: no one has jack-o-lanterns.
Whether these people have jack-o-laterns or not does not figure into the equation. It is similar to the act of smashing postal boxes — done to and by people who have postal boxes. Why do youths smash pumpkins? It’s an anti-social activity, to be sure — they probably don’t quite have a reason for it worked out.