There are more than a few Grinches trying to steal Christmas this year, and we fear the ending will not be quite as happy as the one Dr. Seuss wrote for his 1957 children’s book, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Washington and Oregon residents are lucky to live in the Pacific Northwest, where state leaders have consistently taken the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, listened to public health experts, enacted early mask mandates and stay-at-home orders to help quell the virus and limited indoor activities shown to be at high risk of spreading the airborne coronavirus.
If there is one thing we can all agree on this holiday season, it is that we must protect the independent, locally owned small businesses that make the Camas-Washougal area a desirable place to live, work and visit.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and public health officials urging all of us to cancel dinner plans with anyone not included in our immediate households, Thanksgiving is going to feel abnormal for a lot of families this year.
It seems unreal — not to mention unfair to small business owners trying their best to keep the doors open during this global pandemic — to think it was only six weeks ago that Gov. Jay Inslee loosened COVID-19 restrictions across the state, reopening movie theaters and libraries, allowing more people to dine indoors at restaurants and letting real estate agents resume in-person open houses.
The presidential election is over, but the country — and even our own small piece of Southwest Washington — is still very much a house divided.
With the end of the 2020 general election just around the corner — please remember to get those ballots into a ballot drop box by 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3 — we wanted to kick off this Cheers & Jeers column with a resounding CHEERS for the League of Women Voters of Clark County.
Clark County’s COVID-19 numbers continued to surge this week, bumping the county even further into the red “high activity” zone and shattering the hope that local students might return to their classrooms before the Thanksgiving holiday.
We know spending hours of your free time listening to political debates isn’t something anyone (except maybe a few political journalists who live for the thrill of election season) really wants to do right now, especially in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that our current president seems hellbent on spreading far and wide despite public health experts’ dire warnings against shooting for “herd immunity.”
We realize many of our readers may already be a few clicks past “burned out” this election season — especially if they happened to tune in to that trainwreck of a presidential debate on Tuesday — but we would urge folks to dig deep and not let interest in the election wane over the next few weeks.
