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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 11, 2016)
VIEWPOINT LET TERS BY M A R K A L O PA R K A L O SLUG Invitation A LETTER FROM A SOON-TO-BE OLD QUEEN M y Dearest Minions and Various Subjects, Your Queen and Mine of the Society for the Legitimization of Ubiquitous Gastropods, Markalo Parkalo, wishes to convey warmest wishes, solstice celebration and official offerings herewith: First, thank you for your support of my favorite nonprofit: LILA (Lane Independent Living Alliance). Your contributions from my Third Ball amounted to more than $2,000, and we increased awareness of Independent Living (IL) in Lane County. IL is the applied value of choice for people with any disability. Having choice in our lives is a core desire for us all and LILA promotes choice for anyone who comes to us. LILA offers peer support and advocacy at no cost for many of our programs. The money we raised is dedicated to assisting local businesses to make their locations more accessible to people with disabilities. If you own a business, call LILA to request a Blue Path Survey. The first hour of consultation will be free to the first 30 businesses. We will show you methods, many at low or no cost, that allow more customers access to your shop. We advertise businesses to people with disabilities for organizations that complete our Blue Path Survey. Third, (I’m saving second ‘cause it's so great!) thanks for the community support for Empathy Tent. We began last year to offer free empathy for folks at Saturday Market. Thanks to the board and management at Saturday Market for our spot with you. A very wide variety of people stop in to be heard. I get to meet a lot of people new to town or homeless. We have a team of listeners staffing the tent from 11 am to 5 pm most Saturdays. Look across from the Wells Fargo Bank and come meet us. We not only hear troubles and heartbreak but also the most supreme celebrations and all that is in between. Empathy Tent is a living memorial to the life of the late Marshall Rosenberg and his Nonviolent Communication. Second, Empathy Tent opened at Oregon Country Fair this year in the tail of the dragon near the entrance! Our local mediation center, Center for Dialogue and Resolution, hosted the tent at the Fair. I have been mediating conflicts for Center for Dialogue and Resolution and at Small Claims Court for 10 years. And I look forward to continuing empathy work to polish my rough edges and to contribute, in whatever measure, to peace on our precious planet. Fourth, I invite you to see my metamorphosis from Raining Queen to Old Queen. The Society for the Legitimization of Ubiquitous Gastropods invites you to the 34th annual SLUG Queen Competition and Coronation. Somesuch occurs every year about this time at 6 pm Friday, Aug. 12, at the Saturday Market stage. Come on out and we’ll sing for you and entertain you. (Bring a chair.) Thank you for the very fun year. THE PEOPLE CAN’T BE STOPPED If the Lane County Board of Commissioners votes in late September to give themselves the power to yank duly approved initiatives from the vote of the people because they decide the initiatives are not “of county concern,” there is at least one bright spot: the subsequent people’s initiative to reverse that unconstitutional ordinance will most assuredly be “of county concern.” To Commissioners Bozievich, Stewart, Farr and Leiken: The initiative process belongs to the people! Keep your eye on the Board of Commissioners’ agendas at goo.gl/J7Alni. Cathy Barr Deadwood CALL FOR PEACE AND EDUCATION Both the Third Annual Interfaith Peace Walk and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration remind us of the importance of working for peace in our world (Activist Alert, 8/4). Of course with hunger, disease and lack of educational opportunities, it is hard for peace to take hold. But we can support the bipartisan Education for All Act of 2016 in Congress, to focus on helping the 59 million children without educational opportunity to finally go to school. Your calls and letters to your representatives about supporting this legislation can make a difference. Willie Dickerson Snohomish, Washington COUNTY AND CONSTITUTION We are concerned that some members of the Lane County Board of Commissioners do not understand the concept of separation of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The commissioners’ interest in giving themselves the power to deny “we the people” the right to vote on countywide ballot measures that we ourselves have initiated seems decidedly un-American, given that the courts in this country are the bodies that decide on the constitutionality of laws, not elected lawmakers. After a ballot measure has been approved by voters, then it can be challenged — in the courts. If the commissioners enact this illegal ordinance, they will certainly be wasting taxpayer dollars defending it in court. Ironically, saving money is their stated reason for considering the ordinance, but perhaps they have other motives. The commissioners who have expressed the most interest in selectively squashing citizen initiatives are the same ones who are well-funded by the timber industry, which opposes a citizen initiative currently collecting signatures for the ballot. The Cottage Grove Blackberry Pie Society Leslie Rubinstein, Cathy Bellavita, Steve Kilston, Gail Hoelzle, Julie Parker, Brian Forge, Alice Doyle OMISSION I appreciated the recent issue, “Black Lives Matter,” and Camilla Mortensen’s brief section “And So Does Oregon’s History of Racism.” However, it was a great oversight in that 4 A ugust 11, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com article to omit mention of the nationally recognized and immeasurably important work on this topic by Walidah Imarisha, former Oregon Humanities Foundation Fellow, longtime Portland State University Black Studies professor, author, poet, organizer and frequent public speaker on Oregon’s white supremacist history. She is the creator of the acclaimed Oregon Black History Timeline and associated presentation/related curriculum, “Why Aren’t There More Black People In Oregon?” I have heard that when she gave this talk at the Eugene Public Library, it attracted a near-capacity crowd. Professor Imarisha is also a local expert: an alumna of Springfield High School. As an Oregonian, African-American, woman scholar with recognized expertise on the subject of Oregon Black history and its founding as a white supremacist state, she and her work should have received attention in an article on Oregon’s racist history, over a book published more than 10 years ago by an (apparently) white man. I encourage anyone interested in the roots of modern racism in Oregon to explore Imarisha’s work, much of it accessible online. Bayla Ostrach Boston, Mass. EDITOR’S NOTE: Agreed it’s preferable to cite a source from the community of color when writing about that community, in this case Walidah Imarisha herself cites Loewen as her source on sundown towns. See one of our previous stories on Imarisha’s research at goo.gl/VdzRi6. GRIM STUPIDITY “Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny ... that we’re in any way connected to the rest of life on earth. We don’t come from it ... we own it and we’re put here to run the place. It’s deeply threatening to our ideology ... to admit that we’re constrained by ... biology ... and our puritanical heritage.” I quote author Barbara Kingsolver from her book, Small Wonder, in order to bring context to the strictly white, Christian, entitled world in which both Jerry Ritter [Letters, 7/21] and Lon Miller inhabit. Within this context, their white privilege justifies such ignorant arrogance that belies hatred. But enough of Miller. I want to address Ritter’s letter, “Grim Statistics.” Let me start by countering his Taylor Swift lyrics with “I’ve never heard such stupidity quite like this.” His soundbite, easily disputable, lazy generalities are akin to the flatulence of Trump’s pink, puckered piehole. It is Ritter’s “(in)convenient truth” to avoid something called facts and history, where black lives lived and died, so since he sarcastically inquires as to where are those who have cared about his statistical concerns, I have an answer: 240 years of founding fathers’ slaves (and their offspring); slaves building the “White”(!) House; Buffalo Soldiers and their forced killing of Native Americans; Sojourner Truth; Booker T. Washington; Frederick Douglass; Jim Crow; NAACP; lynchings; segregation; Rosa Parks; Medgar Evers; Fred Hampton; Paul Robeson; James Baldwin; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Julian Bond; COINTELPRO; the Black Panthers; MOVE’s firebombing in Philadelphia; Grace Boggs; Cornel West; Muhammad Ali; War on Drugs; Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance”; Ta-Nehisi Coates’
