dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle's blog

When Alton Baker came to Eugene and bought the Eugene Guard in 1927, he followed his father’s lead, earning the trust of skeptical business leaders. But the Bakers were just getting started.

Paper has looked like the sandy cliffs of Normandy — the insurmountable beachhead between the wavy worlds of machinery and the sodden sands of tactility. The closer we got to “the paperless office,” the more paper we bought. Dunder-Mifflin stock soared.

Each homeowner has the opportunity to mount a form of self-expression on the edge of the public realm. This edge — biologists call it an ecotone — between public and private is where creativity thrives.

Circumstances are not what drive history forward; character is. Consequences and precedents can dissuade us from becoming true expressions of our unique and authentic selves, but they are always over and done with before we can act on them.

Toasters don’t jump off our counters to follow it. But the fears of one generation have been visited on the next. We have designed a machine that we cannot stop.

Knowledge and passion can be blissfully bifurcated. That’s good for adult sports fans, but lousy for high school athletes.

For four hours, a downtown street will be open to traffic but closed to cars. The commons will be taken back from automobiles and reclaimed by the people who drive them.

Within a decade, let’s reduce the American work week to 32 hours, and bring millions back into the work force. The president’s political opponents want smaller government. Can they campaign against three-day weekends?

Humans have been trying to find their place in the world ever since. Maybe the Heat Index helps. Does it really matter how the world is? Can’t we just talk about how it feels to us?

And so begins a small story of heroism, government speaking up for regular people, asking a business to sacrifice a little efficiency for the good of the public.