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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Commentary...
Echoes of tumult
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
Two months of tumult in
Portland echo and reverber-
ate across the mountains to
Sisters.
Many folks here have
deep ties to the weird and
wonderful city along the
Willamette River. Many who
live here now once lived and
worked in Portland. We have
friends and family there.
We travel there for business
and pleasure. What happens
in Portland does not stay in
Portland.
What people see in the
tumult that has rocked the
downtown core of the city
for most of two months
tends to depend on what
they choose to see. Cody
Rheault of Central Oregon
Daily, who also freelances
for The Nugget, traveled
to Portland to report on the
situation. The resulting story
depicts distinctly different
actions depending on the
time of day or night (https://
centraloregondaily.com/
rally-to-riot-portland/).
Rally or riot 4 you can
take your pick.
Things should never have
come to this pass. Through
weeks of unrest, municipal
authorities threw up their
hands and abdicated respon-
sibility for the security and
livability of their own city,
and the governor has refused
to act since June 1, so some-
body was going to take
action.
This kind of turmoil has
been brewing for some time,
long before the killing of
PHOTO BY CODY RHEAULT
The late-night action becomes confrontational and destructive.
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Lumber • Hardware • Paint
Fencing & Decking • Doors & Windows
PHOTO BY CODY RHEAULT
Sisters journalist Cody Rheault covered the unrest in Portland last weekend. A rally became a riot as the night
wore on — a pattern that has repeated for weeks in the Oregon city.
George Floyd. Portland can9t
keep a police chief, because
it9s an impossible job in the
face of a mayor and city com-
missioners who are overtly
hostile to law enforcement.
Talk to Portland cops who
haven9t been able to do the
real work of protecting and
serving their city because
they had to stand still for
days in the face of being spat
upon in the midst of a pan-
demic and pelted with every-
thing from urine and feces to
ball bearings shot from wrist
rockets. They know their
elected officials don9t have
their backs.
With legitimate protest
rallies morphing into riot,
vandalism, and arson on a
nightly basis, and municipal
authorities unwilling to allow
the Portland Police Bureau to
act effectively to quell vio-
lent and destructive behavior,
is it really any surprise that
the feds stepped in?
There is nothing to
applaud in the deployment of
Quality Truck-mounted
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federal law enforcement to
protect the Mark O. Hatfield
Federal Courthouse. Federal
snatch teams on the streets
of an American city are not
something any of us should
be happy to see. There is
no good outcome from this
kind of action, which will be
exploited by everyone with
a dog in the 2020 electoral
fight, to grandstand, posture,
and promote ideologically-
driven narratives.
But we need to be honest
about why it9s happening.
President Trump may, as
his detractors argue, want to
flex federal muscle for his
own ends 4 but this really
isn9t about Donald Trump.
Both the President and his
most ardent opponents seem
to have a hard time seeing
anything outside the context
of Donald Trump 4 and this
obscures a fundamental truth
about the ongoing turmoil in
Portland and in other cities
across the USA:
Those
who
are
W e’re
committing criminal acts of
vandalism, assault, and arson
are the ones responsible for
creating the present tumult.
Those who tolerate, excuse,
or enable such actions are
encouraging more of them
4 and an escalated response.
Want to de-escalate the
situation? Stop the rioting
and destruction.
We in Sisters are not as
distant from all of this as it
might seem. The decline
in livability in Portland,
Seattle, and San Francisco is
affecting us directly already.
People are fleeing those cit-
ies to move here. We have
choices to make about what
kind of community they find
in Sisters. Will we continue
to be the kind of community
that looks past differences
and bridges ideological
divides to support our neigh-
bors? Or will we, like so
much of the USA, break up
into hostile tribes with little
in common but the land we
stand on?
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