by Lauren Paulsen Our eclectic media is puzzled. What is it these people (unwashed rabble) are protesting over there at the financial district of New York City? Longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer provides us with the easy answer. People who are down and out do not raise their voice when they are totally desperate and bereft. I,…
Category: Essays & Letters
Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder
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By Anonymous There seems to be a beautification, or as some call it, gentrification process that is taking place in our neighborhood. We have lived here for almost 11 years, and although that hardly qualifies us a indigenous to Portland’s Hawthorne district, we have noticed some changes we aren’t happy about as current residents. My…
Getting from A to B
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By David Glenn Cox It was just a few hours of one day, February 29th. It was leap day in downtown Portland and we were gathering under the Burnside Bridge and being Portland, it was raining. I’m learning a little about this town now: Portland is unique it is a quiet city, quiet and unhurried.…
Occupy’s ‘Shut Down the Corporations’ Action: Building Change One Action at a Time
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By Vargus Pike It can be said the Occupy movement’s national day of action, “Shut Down the Corporations”, was a success for many reasons. On the local Portland level a thousand people braved some of the worst weather of the year to demonstrate against a few of the corporate and legislative members of the American…
Occupy’s ‘Shut Down the Corporations’ Action: Success or Failure?
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By Shamus Cooke The Occupy movement’s national day of action — “Shut Down the Corporations” — is a difficult action to assess. Was the action a success or a failure? The first question that needs to be answered is, what were the action’s goals? Many of the activists who performed civil disobedience during the day…
The Pretend Society
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by S. Brian Willson I was once a young man, very much like the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan as US military soldiers. I grew up believing in the red, white and blue. I believed that the United States had a sacred mission to spread democracy around the world.…
Being Woody Guthrie
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By David Glenn Cox Today we have so many celebrities who take on social causes; it is almost a given that they will each have some charity or cause that they support. That is good, I suppose, but still there is a clear distinction between being socially conscious and being Woody Guthrie. Woody has…
The Class War Within
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by Lester Macgurdy The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. -Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto The throng of 8,000-plus protesters that converged on Pioneer Square in downtown Portland in early October was a massive chimera knit together by the tyranny of a world full of governments (ours among them) comprising…
A Brief Musing and Pathetically Informal Manifesto on Humanitism
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by Nate Perkins This is the internet’s greatest success: It is a private club that welcomes everyone and discriminates only against those who break the social contract that has arisen organically as a reflection of humanity. – a meshnet illuminatus by the name of DngrZnExpwyClosed The humanist focuses on the human as the cardinal, atomic…
Who Speaks for Occupy?
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by John Wood I’m on some of the planning lists and was involved in the December 12th port shutdown planning and in the EGT protest planning. Usually, whether or not an action had the approval of the General Assembly came up, implying that if it did not, it wasn’t a legitimate Occupy action. I went…
