Activism and Ridicule

Because you’re reading the Weekly, you’re old enough to feel old occasionally. Your favorite movie gets re-released on its 20th anniversary, but you remember seeing it in the theater. Or your neighbor has a baby, and you blink, and suddenly they’re doing doughnuts in the Autzen parking lot, learning to drive.

Stick with that one: teenagers. Isn’t their music terrible? That’s the big wake-up call that you’re getting old. I mean, what they listen to is just gibberish and racket. Right?

So go tell them how terrible their music is. If it doesn’t work right away, keep it up. In fact, start making fun of their music. Do bad imitations while you drip with contempt. Clearly, that will make them see reason, and they’ll start listening to good music, like your favorites, right? Because that’s the way people change their minds: they think something until someone makes fun of them for it, and then they change. Right?

If you’re staring at this letter, baffled that anyone could think that would ever work, then you know how I feel when your political activism is all about publicly telling the world how stupid and despicable the other side is. I behave the same way sometimes when my frustration boils over, but you can’t tell me you genuinely expect it to change anything. Leaders at all levels keep exploiting our deeply etched habit to enrich and empower themselves, and it’s only going to get worse until we make up our minds to break it.

Doyle Srader

Eugene

Hypocrisy on Panhandling

I’m humbled by the power of Sarah Koski’s Dec. 24 letter calling out the moral hypocrisy of the city of Eugene’s illegalization of aid to panhandlers while purporting to be a sanctuary city. The Weekly should reprint the letter on the front page of its next issue. As Koski points out, the city’s ordinance has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with sanitizing Eugene of the sight of our homeless fellow citizens.

Koski’s letter provides incisive commentary on the wider moral implications arising from the city’s ordinance, but I’ll confine my own input to the panhandling issue. I’ll continue to stop my car to give socks, dog biscuits, and cash to my fellow human beings standing on street corners. And I’ll proudly claim the citations the enforcers of power may hand to me.

Tim Baxter

Eugene

Step Up

Just finished reading the previous issue (12/24) re dying homeless in Lane County. When do the mayor and the City Council step up and do something about this horror? There is a lot of open land in the city where small communities could begin with homes from Amazon approx. $7,000 and up. Perhaps the mayor, whoever she is, needs to step up and look into it.

We are in Ward 7 and have never seen nor heard anything from the person running this ward and don’t even know her name. We voted out the last person that did nothing. 

Why is Lane County so dysfunctional? Check out the incredible job being done at the Eugene Mission with their 18-month program, changing the lives of alcoholics, drug addicts and mentally ill people. When they graduate, the Mission steps up and helps them find jobs, apartments and from their vast collection of furnishings from donations, gives these people a new start in life. We can do better!

Marlene Pearson

Eugene

Counting Homelessness

As someone who spent several long years working on the homelessness issue in Eugene I was saddened, but not surprised to read the Weekly’s account of the Eugene Human Rights Commission’s Homeless Memorial.

The insults were most glaringly ones of omission, starting with serious undercutting of those who died from homelessness, even if we go by official figures, and continuing with the refusal to acknowledge the human rights crimes committed by the Eugene city government. 

Even if we just go by media account, these include the refusal to follow the state of Oregon’s 72-hour notice requirement for established [camps], the increased $500 fines for unsanctioned camping, combined with the use of jail as a debtors prison for those unable to pay the fine, the impounding of the vehicles and tents that provide the homeless with their only shelter, etc.

In the light of these crimes, the strange bureaucratic doublespeak of the Human Rights Commission member quoted in the article ceased to be humorous and became morbid.

I was, however, heartened by the coverage given to some of the other groups covered in the same issue, such as Black Thistle and Neighbors Feeding Neighbors. Lives are saved, not by those who attend committee meetings, but by these who meet the ethical demand created by human suffering by directly engaging with those who suffer.

Art Bollmann

Springfield

A Bloated Student Housing Market

What a meaningful juxtaposition of the Dec. 24 EW main stories, across from each other. Christian Withol’s piece about the teardowns and redevelopment of the 13th and Alder area to accommodate yet more students. I checked with the Office of Institutional Research as to the University of Oregon’s enrollment 15 years ago. In 2010, enrollment was 23,389 and in 2023, there were 23,834.

Am I missing a critical piece of information here? Where were students living in 2010 and why, without huge growth in enrollment, would students need over 4,000 more units? Overbuilt to say the least and also seems like there’s some funny math going on.

What would certainly make sense is that older buildings be made available to people on the street. Homes for Good, according to its website, is doing this already “with the Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly known as ‘Section,’  Homes for Good provides rental assistance to low-income families accessing a home through the private rental market. To do this, Homes for Good forms a connection between families and landlords. Through the Housing Choice Voucher Program, families maintain secure, quality housing in neighborhoods of their choice.” 

The cover story across from Bricks $ Mortar (“A Long Night For Grief” by Eve Weston) outlines the extreme need:  “Lane County is home to the largest per capita homeless population in the country.” In. The. Country.

We in Lane County must do some critical and lateral thinking to do more. Carving out units in these high rises specifically for Section 8 should be written into sales contracts and leases. 

Kim Kelly

Eugene

ONLINE EXTRA LETTERS

No Benefits

Give a person a fish dinner, they’ll eat that day.

Teach a person the art of angling; they’ll feed their family for years.

Community Supported Shelters has an amazing success rate for its low-barrier programs.

An efficient way to increase employment in our town is for parents to take the bus to school with their youngest child, using free bus passes. After breakfast in the school cafeteria, they’ll pick up a sack lunch and go to four hours of entry-level work: parks maintenance (hand weeding reduces the need for chemicals), child care, food service, retail and constructing the new McKenzie-Wilamette ER.

Afternoons will be spent in traditional jobs training as well as peer-led groups to learn good parenting boundaries, economical meal planning and what free resources are available (such as watching movies on Kanopy free from the library instead of paying for cable.)

A health science careers program like the one at Churchill is an efficient way to train our kids for rewarding careers. After training in patient confidentiality and HIPAA regs, they can work as patient transport, activity and nutrition aides. Spending two years at LCC taking gen-ed classes and learning to think critically, do research in print texts and online and to write effectively before tackling the subject matter of one’s major is more prudent than taking on loan debt. I was turfed to the street by Sacred Heart at 1 am after having a massive arteriovenous malformation (AVM) bleed while in a motel, homeless, then squatted for a week in the Overpark garage. I grossed $40/hour transcribing, but had no shiny benefits card, so I was treated as human refuse.

Joi Cardinal

Eugene