Category: Headlines

A Shining Light Rolls On

“Days up and down they come Like rain on a conga drum Forget most, remember some But don’t turn none away”                                –Townes Van Zandt   Story by Pete Shaw At the end of this month Portland will be losing organizer…

Burgerville Workers Union Serves Up Resistance and Hamburgers

  Story by Pete Shaw Over 100 members and supporters of the Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU) came out on Wednesday January 25 to stand for worker justice at the Convention Center Burgerville on NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. The BVWU’s most recent action occurred nearly a week after fellow worker and union leader Jordan…

Transforming Body and Mind a Page at a Time

Story and photos by Pete Shaw “You need to stop pretending you’re not a storyteller.” With that friendly admonition, author Prisca Dorca Mojica Rodriguez began an evening sponsored by the Momentum Alliance that served as a reminder that all people–particularly Latinas–have their own stories. It was also a plea for them to tell those stories because…

Amygdala Times: A love poem

By P. C. Wright   It’s snowed more in the Willamette Valley than any Ohio transplant can remember. Bodom E. Switch’s wheelchair idles beside the bed. Rain won’t clear the sidewalks for three more days. The furnace has gone out. My bed is his home. I’ve told him there’s a whole city like this –…

How to Shine During Bleak Times

  Story by Pete Shaw These are bleak times in the United States, although an honest reckoning shows that for many people, particularly those who are not heterosexual Christian men bearing white skin, these are perhaps more accurately times ranging between the usual and bleaker. After Monday’s electoral college balloting officially paved the way for…

Giving Thanks

Story and photos by Pete Shaw So here we are, not long after an election that saw the man who will become President of the United States spending over a year hurling invective against just about everyone not a white, straight, Christian male, that has now clearly encouraged blatant and aggressive bigoted actions. Clearly, we…

An Important Lesson

Story by Pete Shaw After last week’s election, the Portland Occupier published a column I wrote about how regardless of who won the election, the same work of organizing for a more just world faced us. Had Hillary Clinton won, she at most would likely have made slightly tepid changes, but I doubt those changes…

Where Do We Go From Here?

Story by Pete Shaw Judging from Facebook on the morning after the recent elections, it seems there are two very important things that need taking. One is that the proposed wisdom that we were watching the destruction of the Republican Party turned out to be false. Instead, it is the Democrats who have imploded, or…