Serve with Love
The city of Eugene has been targeting people in our community who offer resources to the poor and huddled masses. This cannot continue. People suffer enough on the streets, but it’s clear that many are embarking on a war of attrition on the most vulnerable in our community.
Concerned citizens showed up in force to assist with the food distribution and to defend the good people of Neighbors Feeding Neighbors from being ticketed or arrested as the cops had threatened, and indeed the cops backed off when they were confronted by these volunteers. This is a call to action for concerned people of Eugene. Don’t look the other way while the city’s harassment of the unhoused and those who help them continue. Join Neighbors Feeding Neighbors (every Wednesday through Saturday at 9 am at WJ park). Contact them at NeighborsFeedingNeighbors.or@gmail.com, join Food Not Bombs (every Friday at 4:30 pm at the Park Blocks) or start your own food distribution with your friends. I know
of several such guerilla-food distros that have already popped up in WJ park, meeting under the cover of night to hand off the most delicious soups for the low cost of complete freedom.
Let the hatred of our culture of contempt boil the pasta inside your heart to fill the bellies of the friends you make along the way.
Sam Sokolsky
Eugene
Compost is the Key
Eliot Bald (EW Letters, 12/5) makes some good points about Eugene’s leaf pick up, but he fails to address the most important question: Why are home owners and property managers putting so many leaves in the street in the first place?
Leaves are a valuable on-site resource, and they should be tucked around bushes, left under trees or put in a compost pile. If done each year, the need for additional fertilizer will be reduced.
In our block, there are very few leaves needing pickup because I snag most of them to distribute around our own property.
Geraldo Morsello
Eugene
The Battle is On
In an attempt to cancel out a letter published in print on Dec. 12 (EW, “Astrology over Savage Love”), please, actually keep the so-called “stupid” Savage Love in the print edition and let generic astrology fans go online for that. Savage Love is an alternative newspaper staple that spans the nation and spans decades.
Alexander LaVake
Eugene
A Nod to Parker Learning Gardens
Parker Learning Gardens is growing mightily! The 330-acre educational organic farm has spent the pandemic offering outside education to children and families, offering children’s garden clubs and teen garden clubs, fresh cider-pressing and apple gleaning to low-income and neuro-divergent families in Lane County since 2020. Check out our website (ParkerLearningGardens.org) to donate and to see how you can help.
Robin Winfree-Andrew
Eugene
‘Experience Amazing’
What struck me most about the Dec. 12 cover photo of Eugene mayor-elect Kaarin Knudson were the Nike and Patagonia logos on her jogging outfit. They reminded me of my definition of a Lexus liberal.
A Lexus liberal donates to the Sierra Club, sits on nonprofit boards and supports all the public levies. But she also works on the upper floor of a bank building, lives in a $750,000 home and drives, well, a Lexus. (And jogs in upscale togs!)
Tim Baxter
Eugene
Need Some Help with Sudoku
Can you make that Sudoku game any smaller? I am looking forward to investing in a larger magnifying glass!
Suzanne O’Shea
Eugene
Editor’s note: We shrank last week’s Sudoku a little enthusiastically as we tried to balance content, ads and puzzles in print! We’ll try to re-inflate it this week.
What’s Next in Slant?
Hot damn, I’m pumped with your latest Slant screed following the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old family man with two kids. Yes, you grandly note, while a shot in the back is murder, we must be sympathetic with the killer’s motives, but also demand Thompson’s ilk be “arrested and sent to prison for fraud.” Without a trial? Right on!
You also indicated it’s time we the people go after PeaceHealth (my provider). Prison, too?
It’s not going to be easy. We just had an election and the people spoke. That may be a hurdle. Ditto the Bill of Rights.
Don McLean
Eugene
ONLINE EXTRA LETTERS
Dominators vs. Cooperators
President-elect Donald Trump’s agency and cabinet choices are consistent with the dominant culture of Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade. She outlines the rise of the dominator culture from the partnership (cooperator) culture thousands of years ago. While America’s culture is influenced by the dominator culture, we currently have a hybrid.
Cooperator culture members created the hybrid to be able to hold differing views in peace, but dominators have to conquer — that’s the rub. If a personality or propaganda have lowered the self esteem of voters sufficiently, they may elect a dominator out of fear.
We need the dominator spirit in moderation, but when the appetite for it is increased, it’s destructive. For example, in sports, individuals can contribute to success, but it is teams that win games. Societally, we are all on the same team, but some players will do what they have to do to get any kind of attention for themselves, and that compromises our chance for success.
Bruce Barney
Eugene
It’s the Disease
There are two realities about Donald Trump we should’ve grasped eight years ago. If we still don’t accept them, things can still spiral down even lower.
The first is that Trump is not the disease; he’s a symptom. You don’t give a hemophiliac a box of Band-Aids and say good luck. You cope with Trump by ploughing your resources into the underlying rot that drove people to vote for him.
The second is that Trump’s voters are a teenage daughter with a bad boyfriend. Harangue until you’re hoarse, and you’ll just make her stick to him more stubbornly. You have no choice but to wait until she sees for herself, and be ready to welcome her back. Until then, keep your damn mouth shut.
Doyle Srader
Eugene
You Fear Competence?
The meltdown on the left in the wake of the Nov. 5 election is almost too painful to watch. As a conservative I’m happy with the presidential election results and I am “unburdened by what has been.” However, I take no “joy” in seeing so much hysteria.
I get that liberals despise Donald Trump. I can see that the left and their media allies have doubled down on the crusade to throw every roadblock they can into his presidency. That includes attacking and threatening his nominees for cabinet positions.
Some of the comments give us insight into the liberal mindset. An example is from MSNBC political analyst Jason Johnson, who apparently is especially upset with Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for Attorney General.
As reported by the New York Post, Johnson opined, “Pam Bondi is what I said we should fear because she is competent… she knows how to do this job. Pam Bondi knows what she is doing about immigration… She is a dangerous and effective pick, and that’s frankly worse than we would have got with Matt Gaetz.”
Let’s see: She’s competent, effective, knows how to do the job and will enforce immigration law — and for that she’s “dangerous?” It’s clear why MSNBC’s ratings are tanking.
Heads up to Oregon and other sanctuary jurisdictions that have for years been violating federal immigration law (see 8 U.S.C. 1324(a)): If they think Pam Bondi is dangerous wait until they meet incoming ICE director Tom Homan.
Jerry Ritter
Springfield
Take Out Hate
Let’s take a good look at hate — and also how we protest for justice and peace. Hate is truly a contagious poison. Where does it come from? We humans manufacture it as a byproduct of our own internal traumatic resentments. Is it the same thing as anger? I don’t think so. Isn’t anger an agitated internal energy that boils up when we perceive a personal affront or a grievous injustice somewhere? So how can we protest while rightly indignant about violence, prejudice and blatant injustice?
A major tip I received from Thich Naht Hanh in the ’90s, at Plum Village in France, was to “take hate out of anger.” He certainly knew what he was talking about after the Vietnamese war atrocity, and offered us this inner guidance. Remove hate from ourselves like we take a splinter out of our feet. Identify it (within ourselves) and remove it. Then we can walk in a march without unconsciously spreading the poison of hate. Taking hate out of our own anger actually demonstrates peace.
Deb Huntley
Eugene
The Next Four Years
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going away, and that is good for us. They didn’t care.
We’ve seen people who are taking things from stores up to $700 or more, doing it over and over again. They don’t go to jail or prison. Good people don’t do that. Mayors and governors are letting them do it. We need to get rid of bad government people. It’s graft.
Fentanyl hurts us, too: our children and adults. They also rape or murder and do drugs. Coming over the borders illegally is not right. It hurts people. A bad person wants to kill or maim a person in a subway, but a good person stops it. Which is right? The bad person goes to prison, and the good person goes home.
Sports shouldn’t have to be in a place where the two sexes can be nude in a single room, because a biological man and a biological woman are not the same. If a biological sex man wants to be in a biological sex woman sport, you can’t do that. Anything outside of that is just flat wrong.
Biden and Harris want you to be your father and mother for the country. We’re not children. We just want to live our own lives, not yours. We don’t need Biden and Harris telling what to do if you are 18 years. We want “freedom.”
I’m looking forward to these next four years. The government is for laws and they must stick.