Can We Shop in Peace?
I am a long-time Saturday Market-Farmers Market shopper. Today (May 17) I was there and was appalled. On every corner there were screaming evangelist people with loud speakers harassing everyone. It was loud and obnoxious. Hard to shop, hard to speak to vendors, dangerous to all …cars, pedestrians and bike riders. The large photos of supposed aborted fetuses was horrible. Children should not have to see this.
I believe in freedom of speech. However, the street corners are public spaces. I pay taxes for the right to safely be there. I know this happens each week and I believe something must be done.
Michele Miller
Eugene
Feeling Disconnected
I watched the May 14 Eugene Budget Committee meeting on YouTube. The public had many good comments opposing the city’s proposed cuts to the library, Cahoots, Greenhill, community centers, etc.
Committee member Ryan Moore said city staff have put in an “inhuman” amount of work on the budget. If we don’t like the proposed cuts, he said, we should find some “less harmful” places to cut.
Well, the public has already told them that. Cut some of the police budget and use the money to fund Cahoots. Cut all the money used to harass the homeless and clean up their temporary unsanctioned camps. Instead, designate legal places where they can camp and provide portapotties and trash service to prevent messes.
Stop all the tax breaks for market rate housing. Stop spending money on city infrastructure on the old EWEB property so businesses can make money. Likewise downtown subsidies. Provide needed services to working-class people instead of businesses.
I get no sense that these people are listening to us or even living on the same planet. I feel totally alienated from city government and have no reason to support anything the city wants to do, or to vote for the so-called fire fee. Until they stop persecuting the homeless they can all go to hell.
Lynn Porter
Eugene
More on Thrifting
Eugene has a thrift store called Bella + Bear that opened last November worthy of mention. It is located in the Churchill Shopping Center on Bailey Hill Road, south of 18th Avenue and across from Churchill High School. The store has an eclectic mix of unique items freely donated by community members with a rotating inventory featuring pet items, books, clothing, jewelry, kitchenware, home décor, vintage and collectible items and much more.
All proceeds support the work of the nonprofit Willamette Animal Guild (WAG), which provides low-cost spaying and neutering services. WAG has performed over 82,000 surgeries since 2008.
The all-volunteer run store is open on Wednesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm. Visit Wagwag.org/bella-bear for more information.
Rick Obst
Eugene
More on the Market
My ears are still ringing from the blasting of an amplified megaphone that rang continuously for three hours over Eugene’s downtown Park Blocks yesterday. Not only were my ears ringing but my mental attitude had been shaken. Every market vendor, and all the local and out of town visitors to the market had been verbally abused. Because of this radical religious group, visitors left and the sales for market vendors stopped.
The target of this loud sound assault was not a religious revival, as the perpetrators deceitfully proclaimed, the purpose was to destroy one of Eugene’s vaunted successful downtown nonprofits — Eugene’s Saturday Market.
For the first two hours of the regularly organized market most of us were having a pretty successful day, sales were happening due to the influx of people that came to Eugene for the NCAA Track and Field Championships. Then at noon this radical group from Roseburg began their so-called religious fanatical attack. This was not a protest against abortion, or the LGBTQ community, or the non-religious, this protest disguised in biblical format, was a direct assault on Eugene’s Saturday Market. The hardworking vendors of the Market’s community who have created crafts to sell, and need, in most cases, a few extra dollars to survive, had their efforts to sell their craft — squashed.
Saturday Market has over 600 vendors and offers opportunities not only to creative individuals who make the art and craft, but to musicians and start-up food handlers too! It is the first craft market of its kind, and has spawned like markets across our state and nation.
As uniformed officers stood idly by, this radical group crowded the corners with their crude and offensive posters, large banners and verbal attacks. The leaders stood on an elevated platform and harangued, while their disciples clogged the corners with their ugly signs mouthing similar sentiments to passersby. It was a unified attack designed to drown out every type of dissent.
I saw some of our young mothers trying to reason with these invaders — “please leave.” All of us tried to reason with the protesters. We were met with a preacher’s monologue of continuous insults and blather. Combined with the loud blaring megaphone and their religious bigotry, their child-scaring belligerent signs, and their personal insults to citizens on the corners, the aisles where visitors usually walk — cleared. The so-called evangelical group had won the day.
A negative image of Eugene was sent to people from out of town, especially those here for the NCAA Track and Field Championships.
Something must be done to stop these grotesque attacks on Eugene’s beloved — Eugene’s Saturday Market.
Joe R. Blakely
Eugene
Follow Your Heart
Many individuals and groups promote their version of right and wrong because they want your money and power. Their punishment in your name binds you to them to keep you loyal. People are damaged. In the end, they keep the money and the power. You get the guilt and regret. Please consider following your heart.
Bruce Barney
Eugene
ONLINE EXTRA LETTERS
Resign, Sen. Wyden
The psychopathic criminality of the Israeli Zionists and their supporters — such as Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden — has now been exposed for what it really is: a racist, genocidal social/political program conducted by a group of lunatics based on the subjective belief of their own superiority relative to other human beings and which somehow gives them the right, sanctioned by God almighty, to slaughter other humans as if they were nothing more than animals in human form. Israel itself is, however, collapsing right before our very eyes and a good portion of the work being done to bring about the collapse is being done by the Zionist fools themselves who are currently (but not for long) in charge of the Israeli state.
Wyden’s long standing support for the actions of his Zionist cronies in Israel casts a dark shadow over what might have been a legitimate representation of the good people of Oregon in the United States Senate. Instead, Wyden has become nothing more than a doddering old fool well past his pull date. No one even cares about him any more. He needs to resign his senate seat before he brings even more disgrace upon the citizens of Oregon for his support for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel’s attempted genocide of the Palestinian people.
Steven Johnston
Creswell
Read The Bible
Hey D-Man,
Sometimes I don’t even know what day it is.
Did you ever get that feeling? Things have been happening so fast that I can’t keep up. Then I begin doubting what I even knew. Does that ever happen to you?
But I’ve been reading this book (yeah, I read, smartass) about the Spanish civil war, and the way it seems to me, is that when the king couldn’t keep the cork in the bottle, things went to hell.
You had all kinds of trash talk and attacks, assassinations and bad stuff with the kids that the priests did and where the baby’s buried. Commies raping nuns and descreating churches. Just a lot of inflammation so Generalissimo Franco comes in and slaps down a dictatorship for about forty years.
Here we are with prices going up (“Let’s Go Brandon), people afraid to shop, getting snatched off the street. Plus all the dying in shithole countries.
You might have to get nasty. (I already know about your plan to grab all the loot, sell the resources, gin up the planet and escape to Mar A Lago or a large luxury space station.)
Dude, read your Bible. “Sow division that thou may reap the harvest.” So if you’re going for the golden ring, check out the Spanish civil war. You’re busy so have somebody read it to you or read it and tell you about it.