A Journal of the Plague Year: #22

I live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. You might say that it is the closest suburb to downtown, just south of the city center by a 15 minute car ride. In my town of Milwaukie, there are often small groups of people on the sidewalks of 99 or at the Farmer’s Market downtown holding up signs that say Black Lives Matter and deriding the current administration. While I was at the market Sunday buying Lavender plants for the yard with my wife, cars coming down the highway would honk their support for the sign wavers. No trouble. No conflict. No police. If there were alt right-white supremacists in the area, they kept quiet.

Downtown Portland has seen large scale protests for sixty days running in response to the murder of George Floyd and a spate of police violence against black Americans across the country. Early on, things were vandalized or destroyed. People looted businesses where storefront windows were shattered. Fires were set. If you were sympathetic to injustices perpetrated against Black Americans in this country and in particular aggrieved by Portland’s abysmal history along these lines, it was easy to understand the rage. But further sleuthing revealed that much of the violence and vandalism could be attributed to people outside the BLM movement, inciting the chaos either because they deliberately wanted bad PR for the movement, or they were just opportunists, looking for an excuse to act out. At any rate, what is absolutely clear is that the vandalism and the violence perpetrated by civilians represented a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of people in peaceful protest. Nevertheless, riot police were often in conflict with crowds. Tear gas and rubber bullets were commonplace. People got severely hurt.

Then in the coming weeks, outside of a wide assortment of graffiti art, the protests continued, but large scale destruction, looting, and violent protests had diminished and peaceful demonstrations seemed to be the order of the day. But in the last week or two, despite this fact, violence against protestors by local police and, horrifyingly, by unidentified federal agents from Homeland Security, has increased. Goons dressed in camo are abducting people into unmarked vehicles without identifying themselves or stating any reason for detention or arrest. An American vet was beaten for simply asking the officers to remember their oaths. A young man was shot in the head with a rubber bullet that shattered his skull. Local mothers in a line of protection in front of protestors were tear gassed. Local dads showed up with leaf blowers to protect the moms and others from the gas. A group of military veterans showed up to protect the dads with leaf blowers who were protecting the moms protecting the protestors. And then there was this woman in the photo above who showed up naked to confront the police and federal agents. Faced with all that feminine power, at least in this event, they backed down. I don’t know her name. I don’t know her story. But she has become iconic, an awesome demonstration of courage, a brilliant metaphor reflecting and/or deflecting the impotence of our nation’s current political leadership.

One thing is perfectly clear. Things got increasingly worse when the federal agents descended on our city. And the protests got substantially larger and more violent, drawing thousands and thousands to the Portland city block surrounding the federal courthouse. Somehow, between a Mayor and a Governor who stood against the presence of federal agents in our city and other factors perhaps obscure to me, the agents have left almost entirely, and last night the protestors emerged again in large numbers and without incident. Here are the opening sentences of a news piece from Dan McCarthy of KATU news:

Portland Police Bureau says protesters, not officers, were doing the enforcing downtown Thursday night. 

Police said demonstrators put out fires and told others to stop climbing the fence in front of the federal courthouse. 

As a result, police said they didn’t have any interactions with demonstrators downtown.

There are people on my facebook newsfeed who are certain that Portland is lost, that the city is burning, that the looters and the vandals and arsonists have won, that Portland will soon become a wasteland, some anarchist hellscape. Totally misinformed, no doubt watching Hannity every night, having never seen the city for themselves, knowing not a single soul participating in this historically monumental moment to save democracy and restore it for ALL of our citizens, these poor folk remain in the dark. I, for one, have never been more proud to be a Portlander, even if my vantage point is 6 or 7 miles away from the action, just down the road a peg in Milwaukie. For a few weeks there it seemed we were at the very center of the universe.