“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…
A Shining Light Rolls On
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Category: Essays & Letters
How to Shine During Bleak Times
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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
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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
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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?
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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…
A Memory of Justin Buri
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Story and photos by Pete Shaw Thursday, November 3, late Justin Buri, the former executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants (CAT), an organization that fights for renters and their rights, died on Tuesday, November 1. He was 36. I will not pretend that I knew him, but I did have the pleasure of…
City Council Ignores Voices of People of Color; Rewards Police Violence with New Contract
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Story by Pete Shaw Let’s skip the formalities and conventions and get right to the point: Mayor Charlie Hales, Commissioner Nick Fish, and Commissioner Amanda Fritz are racists. They are dangerous racists whose recent support for the new police contract shows a complete disregard for the lives of people of color–particularly Black people–and an equally…
A Letter From France
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Article and photos by Pete Shaw September 24, 2016 Dear Mom, Early morning at a very large table in a quite nice house in a really neat artists’ commune in the quaint Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, far enough from the madding crowd of Sacre Couer. The tourists run wild there, which is hardly a bad…
A Warm Farewell
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Story and photos by Pete Shaw “I’ll never stop believing in your smile Even though you didn’t stay, it was all worthwhile.” –Donnie Fritts This month Portland is losing two very fine activists in Alyssa Pagan and Walidah Imarisha. They will be deeply missed, but this city is all the better for the time we…
Moving Life, Still
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Story and photos by Pete Shaw A few weeks ago I was in New Jersey. I go there twice a year, and I should tell you now that this is not the lead-in to a joke, although I am sure you have already come up with numerous punchlines. My brother and my father live there,…
