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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 24, 2015)
Street Roots • Dec. 24-31. 2015 le s a s cam e la t e e a r w o rld w tt& e a t a b orne, a a d lie chose p o v e rty . T he c h a rc h seeks to e m b ra c e as a ll a a d says th a t I t Is a r ig h t t e h a w a r e e l o v e r y e a r head« ? — POPE FRANCIS, NOV. 13 | more but in those days it felt like do or die. Now I want to say to my younger self, if you think of life as a play, you’re the bumbling forgetful character who appears in Scene 7 looking for his keys. - Comedian, actor and filmmaker, Dylan Moran, March 6 he problem is you have these ideologues who run the Republican Party today, and who are very attuned to that group of regulatory foes and the extremists of the Fox network and elsewhere, who really don’t think the government has a positive role in our society. And there’s very little they let the government do besides defense and law enforcement. This is a manifestation of their ideology. - American politician, author, Barney * Frank, March 13 ■ Notable & quotable Words o f wisdom - a n d then some fro m our favorite profiles o f 2015 he social conditions that produce the environment in which the blues was created, in which jazz was created; in which hip hop music was created, those conditions haven’t really changed that much. So there is always going to be an authentic expression that comes from the cultural experience of the people who are oppressed. - Musician and activist, Mic Crenshaw, Jan. 9 ■ eachers are not against tests. We invented tests. We want to know if students learn what we’re teaching them. The problem is, these tests are not assessing what we’re teaching. Oftentimes we don’t get the results until the next year. The assessments that we make every day, whether it’s checking for understanding by asking questions or more formal assessments, give us much better feedback. By inundating our schools with high stakes testing, we’re actually eliminating assessment altogether and actually aren’t getting any useful feedback on the things we’re actually ■ teaching. School teacher, Jesse Hagopian, Jan. 23 T T T e entered the mainstream, but on our own terms without compromising who we are. At all, i t ’s not thatw e changed or , VV Page 7 News I we’re asking other queer people to change. We made demands, not on queer people to change, but on straight people to change. That’s not heteronormative, assimilist sell-out shit. That’s radical-queer-barging-in shit. - Author, advocate, publisher, Dan Savage, Feb. 6 n one hand, pain specialists and pharmaceutical companies were convincing Americans that (an opiate painkiller) is how youlreat pain and this is a safe thing and it’s virtually non-addictive. That was a big, big part of it. And on the other hand you have the classic street drug dealers in the form of the Xalisco Boys, who are masters of marketing - who understand the power of marketing, of customer service, of convenience. So the stories dovetailed organically into one large tale, but it was really two stories of the marketing of drugs in America. - Author, Sam Quinones, April 3 ■ reative people will use anything they have. If you take away their paints, they’ll use mud. If you take away their mud, they’ll use their blood. If you take away their blood, they’ll fucking just use dust. They will do anything they can to do their thing.” - Musician and Flaming Lips front man, Wayne Coyne, April 24 he reason I decided to tell people I was a Christian was because when I looked around in the United States, evangelical Protestants, the group that I’m in, were the hy are (tests) normed to upper middle class white students? Because those are least likely to agree that the climate is the students whose parents have the money changing due to human activities. My community, my church, my neighbors — the to pay for them to go to test prep, so that people who believe much of the same they can then do well on these tests. So that theology as I do - they were the ones being the tests - as one scholar said - are better deliberately misinformed about climate predictors of the car your parents drive than change. they are predictors of how well you’re going — Atmospheric scientist and professor, to do in college. Katherine Hayhoe, June 19 - Professor and theorist, Lani Guinier, Feb. 13 know this neighborhood, and I know the city. Folks love it, and they have reasons to entrification doesn’t fix the problem, it love it, but the things that I loved about it just relocates it; - Author, Mitchell S. Jackson, Feb. 2% most aren’t here anymore. So I think what my childhood experience does is allows me to be a mythbuster when it comes to, “Oh, ’d tell my 16-year-old self not to take well, Portland is so great now; it’s so much everything so seriously. I’m stunned when I look back at how monumentally important I better than it ever was before.” That’s not true for a lot of Portlanders. thought everything was. I was incredibly - President of the Urban League of Portland, intense, ridiculously up myself. It was all Nkenge Harmon Johnson, June 26 about me, and books and poetry. Not that ■ M S I those things aren’t important to me any I t isn’t money that makes the world go around. I really believe that. That is the corporate hallucination by which we are controlled. It’s not as if we have to get up in arms and go and fight the world. No. You don’t. No, no. Stay calm and decolonize. — Musician and activist, Buffy Sainte-Marie July 3 I ery big business is in bed with very big government, for their mutual benefit, not to the benefit of news consumers, and not as a public service. The sense of public service is what’s been drained out of a bunch of journalism of the last 25 to 30 years. t Journalist Dan Rather, Aug. 21 ■ t’s hard to point to any particular death and say, “This one is due to the war on drugs,” but if we weren’t there, getting into the middle of their turf wars, and if our policies did not promote this massive corruption within the ministry of the interior, people would not be having an insurgency against their own government. So I am quite sure there were deaths of American service members in Afghanistan that would riot have happened had it not been for the war on drugs. — Former U.S. military advisor in Afghanistan and current drug prohibition adversary, Inge Fryklund, Sept. 18 I omedy is the place where you get to celebrate those parts of yourself that used to be the things that people would pick on you for. The things that make you unique and different and stand out are the things that make your voice unique and distinct and awesome. ' | - Contedian, curator All fane Comedy Festival, Stacey Hallal, Oct. 9 B at if I’m walking and someone just like they have no ill intentions, nothing against me personally, but just because of a stereotype, they call the police? It could be something where I end up getting arrested or end up being dead. I dream of a world where I never have that fear. f —Joshua Davis, participating in the National League of Cities Black Male Achievement Initiative symposium, Oct. 23 eople are willingly giving up an enormous amount of information every minute of the day. When the FBI was going after Martin Luther King, they actually had to have a room in the hotel next to him or somebody had to follow his car in a car; there was visible evidence. None of that’s needed now. MLK wouldn’t survive two weeks with the FBI now. They would know every thought and every person, contact, piece of food he ate, everything. -Journalist, author, Robert Scheer, Nov. 6 ■ ’m in a constant vise and crossfire - any mayor is - between the folks who say criminalize the homeless and get those people out of here and those who say it’s our responsibility as a city to take care of these people. Unfortunately, we don’t have good answers today for these complex problems. Until we can say we have got housing for people, we can’t just criminalize people who are homeless. If we want to get on with the problem and try to solve it, it’s the only solution I can see. It’s one of our greatest challenges, but it can be done. - Portland Mayor, Charlie Hales, Nov. 27 I
