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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (June 26, 2014)
NEWS SLANT • We wrote about longtime medical marijuana activist Jim Greig in this column May 8 when we heard he was not long for this world, and we enjoyed a final, upbeat conversation with him a short time before he died at home June 16. He expressed to us his gratitude for his 63 years on this planet, his family, his work and his many supporters. Greig suffered from debilitating arthritis, lung cancer and blindness in one eye. He found relief from his pain and other symptoms with medical pot, reducing his need for opiates. Despite his disabilities, he was an activist and mentor for 10 years, organizing local events, working on state ballot measures and getting involved in political campaigns. We remember him as a kind and passionate person and a high- impact advocate. A memorial is being planned for Aug. 2 at the Church of the Resurrection in Eugene, with details to be announced. Find a video interview with Greig and links to obituaries on the EW blog. • What does it cost to be homeless? We got an anonymous letter last week from a woman living in an RV and complaining about getting warning tickets for parking overnight on the streets of Eugene. “We go from place to place getting ticket after ticket,” she writes. “I know people who have been fined over a thousand dollars. This is bananas. How can someone who can’t even afford a safe, legal place afford to pay huge fines? It’s criminal to be homeless.” She says she goes to sleep at night not knowing when she will be “harassed, arrested or have my home taken away.” St. Vinnie’s has a car camping program but it can’t come close to meeting the demand. See our news story this week on how a federal court ruling could change the car camping rules in Eugene and Springfield. • Lane County now has 32,000 newly health- insured residents. That’s the good news out of City Club of Eugene June 20. How to meet their needs was not such good news from speakers from PeaceHealth, Community Health Centers and Trillium Community Health Plans. Trillium is overwhelmed with 10,000 applicants unassigned to primary care physicians in Lane County. The shortage of doctors is partly because medical students leave school with about $250,000 in loans, understandably eager to earn the higher incomes that come from specialties. Twelve new primary care physicians are coming in the next four months to PeaceHealth Medical Group. The problems, even the solutions, affirmed our support for single-payer health insurance in America. Hopefully, that’s next. • Some nonprofits do mass advertising and we noticed an envelope inserted in the R-G a few days ago. A photo of a Marine with an artificial leg was on the outside and inside was an appeal from the USO to “Please help our wounded warriors and their families.” The flyer claims 86 percent of USO’s expenses are program related, but the independent Charity Navigator says it’s only 65.5 percent. Big difference. Turns out 23 percent of USO’s $100 million budget gets spent on advertising (such as newspaper inserts) and another 11 percent on administration. The CEO makes $511,000 a year. We’re big supporters of charitable giving, but it’s good to visit charitynavigator.org to see how our donations are being managed. The National Veterans Services Fund, for example, only spends 18.4 percent of its $9 million budget on actual services for vets; but FOOD for Lane County spends 94.1 percent of its $14.6 million budget on — you guessed it — feeding the hungry. CAR CAMPING DECISION NOW IN FEDERAL COURT On June 19 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Los Angeles law prohibiting people from living in their vehicles, and legal experts say that law could affect other cities in the region with similar bans. Judge Harry Pregerson wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel that “the City of Los Angeles has many options at its disposal to alleviate the plight and suffering of its homeless citizens. Selectively preventing the homeless and the poor from using their ve- hicles for activities many other citizens also conduct in their cars should not be one of those options.” Pastor Dan Bryant of First Christian Church, who chairs the board for Op- portunity Village transitional housing in Eugene, says, “The conclusion in the decision pretty much says it all. Bans on living out of one’s vehicle, often the last ‘major possession’ a person without a home has, ‘opens the door to discrimina- tory enforcement against the homeless and the poor.’” Jean Stacey, an advocate for the unhoused, says she thinks Eugene’s camping ordinance is also overly vague and open to being unevenly applied. She adds, “I don’t know the penalty in L.A., but in Eugene a second ticket for RV camping can get your car impounded … and does.” According to The Wall Street Journal, “Carol Sobel, an attorney for the plain- tiffs, said that the ruling would affect bans similar to Los Angeles’ throughout the Ninth Circuit, which covers seven Western states as well as Alaska and Hawaii.” The city attorney’s office did review the federal court’s ruling, Eugene city attorney Glenn Klein tells EW, and “based on our review, we believe that Eu- gene’s prohibited camping provisions are constitutional and can continue to be enforced.” Bryant says that although advocates have worked to reduce the impact of dis- criminatory enforcement against the homeless and the poor, “unfortunately, there are simply too few spots available” and it appears that St. Vincent de Paul “will have to reduce the number of spots they manage because of a reduction in funds from the city of Eugene.” Bryant says that losing car-camping spots “will likely only increase costs to the city when city officials will have to deal with those who no longer have an ap- proved parking spot.” He says providing approved places to park is cost-efficient and that his preference would be “to expand such services rather than reduce them so that we do not have to go to the courts to find a way for those who have no other options to survive in our community.” — Camilla Mortensen DOHERTY WITH NEW BRAZILIAN FRIENDS AFTER THE EXCITING MATCH BETWEEN U.S.A. AND PORTUGAL 8 June 26, 2014 • eugeneweekly.com WHUTSUPWORLDCUP U.S. CATCHES WORLD CUP FEVER While soccer has been exploited by some with malicious intentions (recently evidenced by the hor- rific suicide bombing that took 14 lives of World Cup- viewers in Nigeria), soccer has tremendous potential for promoting and facilitating peaceful intercultural exchanges and fraternal international relations. Though this potential is relevant for all nations and peoples, it is especially important for Americans (in the narrow U.S.-centric meaning of the term, and not in the broader and more logical meaning of being from the Americas) due to Americans’ disproportion- ate impact on the world and due to Americans’ embar- rassing and dangerous ignorance of other countries and other peoples. As David Goldblatt put it in his voluminous and meticulous history of the game, “[s]occer’s mission in the United States is not, I think, to supplement or challenge American football, baseball or basketball but to offer a conduit to the rest of the world; a sport- ing antidote to the excesses of isolationism, a prism for understanding the world that the United States may currently shape but will increasingly be shaped by.” Specifically regarding the World Cup host na- tion, a 2007 Zogby poll indicated that only 10 per- cent of Americans knew of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) — which was just after the charismatic lead- er was re-elected to his second term as president of the fifth biggest country on the planet (both in popu- lation and territory). Perhaps an even more shocking Brazil-specific example of American ignorance is former U.S. president G. W. Bush’s question to Bra- zil’s ex-president F. H. Cardoso in 2001: “Does Brazil have blacks, too?” Brazil happens to have more Af- rican descendants than the U.S. or any other country outside of Africa. Such examples of American ignorance of Brazil and elsewhere are innumerable (I’m particularly tired of explaining to Americans that Manaus is a large in- dustrial city — more populous than Seattle — in the middle of the planet’s largest rainforest and terrestrial carbon reservoir). How can Americans expect to lead the world if Americans have such a poor understand- ing of the world? That broad generalization being said, the 2014 World Cup has thus far provided me with great hope that Americans are beginning to appreciate soccer and its uniqueness as a nearly universal passion, and that such an appreciation may help awaken many Ameri- cans to the diversity, complexity and beauty beyond American borders. For the first time in World Cup his- tory, U.S. fans were the foremost purchasers of match tickets (besides host nation fans, who pay less). During the first match of the U.S. team, ESPN registered a record-breaking 11 million viewers. I at- tended the U.S.A.-Portugal match June 22 in Manaus (because an American fan sold me an extra ticket the day before), and the presence of American fans was truly impressive. Despite the weakness of the U.S. team’s defense, which snatched an exciting victory from our hands in the final minutes, I left the stadium as hopeful as ever that Americans are indeed begin- ning to share the nearly universal passion for soccer. — Killian Doherty Killian Doherty is a recent UO Law School grad who is in Brazil on a shoestring budget to experience the World Cup, not from the stands, but from the streets.
