Eugene weekly., August 21, 2025, Page 3, Image 3

Cancel the Flock
Since May, a massive surveillance
system has been implemented in Eugene,
the largest in the city’s history. Since May,
you have been watched everywhere you
go, and your data shared with a myriad
of law enforcement agencies and anyone
that Flock wishes to share it with.
Do you remember when the public had
a chance to comment on these cameras
before their installation? Probably not,
because that never happened. The unelected
city manager, Sarah Medary, signed the
contract in March. Hardly anyone on the
city council or Eugene police commission
knew about the Flock cameras before
their installation. Your tax dollars (grant
money from the state is tax dollars, at
least partially) are now funding a dysto-
pian surveillance network in Eugene that
will need to be maintained and leased.
Mainstream media in Eugene have been
firing off one Flock-aganda story after
another, talking about how many crimes
are being solved with these cameras. Ques-
tions are then to be asked: Does mass
surveillance actually reduce or prevent
crime? What could these crimes be? Are
they all scary serial killers, gangs and retail
Local
theft rings, or could they be protesters,
homeless people and poor families stealing
food to survive? Does the 4th Amendment
mean anything if we are constantly being
spied upon?
Where does it stop? When the presi-
dent is seizing police departments and the
country is seeing the largest rightward shift
since 2001, we don’t need more surveillance.
Cancel the Flock contract now!
Kamryn Stringfield
Eugene
Yearning for Humanity
It occurs to me to send a postcard to my
local ICE offi ce, expressing my thoughts.
I’m not really sure what I want to say, so
I put pen to paper to see what happens.
Here’s what arrives:
Dear Eugene ICE Agents,
Please know that my heart goes out to
you as you carry out the diffi cult work of
immigration enforcement in our commu-
nity.
Not because resistance to your mission
is so great, but because you are required
to push so hard against the sacredness of
your own humanity.
I yearn for you the freedom to show your
faces, the natural goodness in the smile,
& Vocal
am the father of Daniel Kahn,
who was shot and killed by the
police on July 30 in Springfi eld.
First, as a baseline, people
with mental illnesses were once
babies, loving children, energetic and eager-
to-grow-up teenagers, and young adults
with their whole lives ahead of them. They
did not wake up one random morning and
make a decision that they wanted to have
one or more mental illnesses. With that in
mind, we should look to change how we
see these tormented souls.
The real story is how we as a nation
look upon the mentally ill, the homeless
and how we treat them because they don’t
act like us and they don’t talk like us and
they don’t think like us, so we are fearful
of them; however, we do absolutely noth-
ing to help them long-term, like we do for
heart or cancer patients.
Anything written or said about people
with mental illness or, in my son’s case,
multiple mental illnesses, should drive
the feeling of sympathy to the reader or
the listener. In doing this, we are far less
likely to get a bad outcome.
We should also attempt to drive a
sympathetic feeling toward the mentally
ill into our police forces so that they don’t
mistake what truly is mental illness for
defi ance.
So at a high level, why did this happen
to my son Daniel? Everywhere my son went
to get help was voluntary on his part and
I
support.eugeneweekly.com
The Power of Telepathy
I had a strange and mysterious event
happen to me a few years ago. While riding
a recumbent bike I became dizzy, it was the
onset of vertigo. I decided that I needed
to fi nd an upright three wheeler — an
adult trike.
For years I looked in bike stores and
on-line for such a contraption. I would
need an electrical assist to ride up the
hill to my home. I never mentioned this
to my older brother.
Two years ago while visiting my niece
and her husband, I mentioned my dilemma.
“We have a bike like that stored in our
garage,” my niece said. “My dad bought it
online a few years ago, now he’s nearly 90
and not able to ride it, you can have it.”
When my niece showed me the trike I
couldn’t believe my eyes. It was precisely
the type of bike I’d been looking for.
I believe it was a form of telepathy.
Does this phenomenon only exist between
siblings? I don’t think so. Spouses seem
to have telepathy, too.
In old-growth forests there is an inter-
connectedness between the above ground
trees and the century’s old underground
plant life and root systems. A symbiotic
benefi cial relationship.
Is it possible that human telepathy
is a form of root system that also helps
sustain and enrich human existence akin
to the interconnectedness of our forests?
If we could only stop cutting down our
old growth forests, would it help sustain
them? If we could stop wars, would it help
sustain the existence of the human race?
Joe Blakely
Eugene
Illus
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Wilk
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Viewpoint by Mort Kahn
A MESSAGE FROM A FATHER
Let’s change how
we treat people
with mental illness
in the eyes, in the relaxed and welcom-
ing stance.
I yearn for the day, the moment, when
you make the consequential choice to
strip away the armor, the mask, reclaim
your true humanity, and do useful things
in this world with your one precious life.
Respectfully,
I can’t predict what will happen when
I put pen to paper. I trust that it is always
for the good.
Mary Sharon Moore
Springfield
through the direction of every member of
our greater family. This assistance helped
him to thrive for short periods of time of
between one and three months. Then,
either Daniel removed himself from the
mental health assistance and medication,
thinking that it was OK for him to start
up with life again, or the program that he
had enrolled in cut off his support for vari-
ous reasons. In both cases, Daniel would
quickly become homeless and without
medication and without any psychological
support or direction.
Each and every time this occurred,
Daniel would end up losing everything
that he had either purchased on his own
or that his family provided for him. Cloth-
ing, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shoes,
important identifi cation cards; anything
that a typical person would need to sustain
a healthy life would be either stolen or lost
by simply moving from place to place or
park bench to park bench or street.
Why did Daniel attack two Springfi eld
Police Department offi cers?
Eight or so years ago, when my son was
in the Harris County, Texas, jail system, he
told us he had been raped on more than
one occasion.
It was diffi cult to determine whether
these events were actually taking place or
part of Daniel’s mental illnesses. At some
point these events must’ve been taken
seriously by Harris County because many
months after my son was early-released
from jail by the court, two police offi cers
came to my home looking for Daniel to
see if he wanted to follow through on his
documented complaints.
By the time these two offi cers arrived,
Daniel was long gone from Houston. It was
always Daniel’s position that the police
only cared about what people said about
him and what he did, but not what other
people did to him. It is presumed that
Daniel developed a great distrust of police
offi cers.
When the two Springfi eld police offi cers
approached Daniel for what was likely a
breakdown, he likely assumed that they
were going to arrest him for something
and take him to a jail where he would be,
as Daniel would say, raped and raped and
raped again.
Daniel most likely took the position that
he would not allow anybody to put him
back in jail, so he decided to fi ght. The two
Springfi eld police offi cers would’ve had no
concept of Daniel’s great fear.
Daniel grew up in an upper-middleclass
house. He had his own bedroom and a
shared game room with his other siblings.
He had his own bike, ate balanced meals
other than snacks, and he went to private
school during grade school. He did have
the occasional altercation, but we wrote
that off to Daniel’s desire to be Superman
and defend people he knew from bullying.
Daniel was the defender of those who could
not defend themselves, and that caused
him some grief in life.
After high school I got him his own
apartment next to Houston Community
College — in walking distance, in hopes that
he would get his fi rst two years of college
under his belt. Everything was paid for, his
apartment, electricity, furniture, food, you
name it. Unfortunately, this is when my
son began showing signs of some mental
illness and found his way into the drug
culture. He wasted the entire fi rst year
doing drugs and not much else.
In several of his text messages a month
before he died, Daniel would refl ect back
on that time and say that he made some
huge mistakes in that part of his life, and
that he had everything going for him and
completely wasted it.
Daniel was not a product of an unstruc-
tured life or one without discipline and/
or consequences or one of poverty. Daniel
simply developed, over time, multiple
mental illnesses that he did not decide to
have. They just occurred.
I make all of these remarks in an attempt
to remove the stigma of how most of us
think about mentally ill individuals as we
walk by them.
Mentally ill people don’t act like us, they
don’t talk like us and they don’t think like
us, and because of this we are fearful of
them and walk at a quick pace to ensure
there’s a distance between us and them.
Then, as we walk away, we stigmatize
them and suggest that all of this is their
own damn fault.
Daniel had a bright life ahead of him,
and where some people develop heart
conditions and others develop cancer
and others have a birth deformity, Daniel
developed multiple mental illnesses of no
fault of his own.
Why do I share all of this information
with you? It’s to begin the process of help-
ing people to develop a sympathetic posi-
tion towards the mentally ill.
Consider the potential cost of provid-
ing care for the mentally ill, and in some
cases involuntarily, against the cost of the
injuries they can cause to innocent people,
the cost in our court systems, the cost in
our jail systems, and, most importantly
the cost to society who no longer feel safe
anymore, anywhere.
If you truly want to be part of the
change; do what I have done along with
every other member of our family and
friends. Write your senators and your
representative and continue to badger
them to make a change.
We are the solution.
Mort Kahn is the father of Daniel Kahn, who
was shot and killed by the police on July 30 in
Springfi eld, Oregon.
August 21, 2025
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