Cathedral Park looking nice. Music is being DJ'd up on the hill. A flat bed truck with speakers is down under the bridge.
Letha is getting ready to speak.Jahdi and Kinsey are warming it up.
March starts at 3:30. Letha just dropped a strong speech, seemed to back and forth a bit about radical action.
BLM is the focus, not fires, but she still respects and thanks the fire starters for their passion and commitment to her cause, is what she seems to be saying.
As the march started, I published a response to the @Oregonian's uninformed opinion piece.
These people should not be allowed to lecture us about Black Lives.
This first stand here reminds me very much of #PlantBloc! Love it!
Meanwhile, our buds over at @SnackBloc stay with the high end snacks. I didn't take any food this time, but was blessed enough to have @MasynWade check in on me personally. Always appreciate that!
Free Lunch Collective came with lots of info today.
A @TeressaLRaiford pop-up supporting her write-in campaign is well staffed.
Indigenous Solidarity for Black Liberation has a couple of tents. If you ever get invited to one of their Sunrise Celebrations... highly recommended.
Some lady got caught up in the parade and had her car surrounded by bikes and cameras.
She seems to be calm, but people are saying she was aiming mace at folks a moment ago.
Someone is talking to her... and the march continues.
I thought we were marching to Roosevelt, but it seems we're doing a loop through St. John's and back to the park.
This resident came outside on FaceTime asking someone who Breonna Taylor was. During the moment of silence we all heard her explain that Breonna was shot in her bed.
The march stops again to chant names.
I don't know who Leotis Jones is, and Google is not helping me.
Neighbors look on from their balconies in a picturesque location.
Across the street, a community garden.
Posters and bubbles.
A few of us got hit in the face by giant bubbles while conversing. Big laughs everytime.
An indigenous speaker whose name I did not catch gave a speech while holding his daughter.
The winds picked up. I also really liked this dog.
My guy Aaron (does he have a Twitter?) delivered an excellent spoken word poem aimed at Black men about challenging our privileges and recognizing our roles in the patriarchy.
Oh, I've missed hearing him speak.
Hearing the youth speak always grows my heart. I remember being that age. Having that imagination. Not being weighed down by life's anchors. I remember just looking to find my place in the world and not seeing where the path was.
Sitting here hungry, thinking about the first week of the 2020 protests when I tried to catch a gas canister off the first bounce and it ended up being a flashbang.
I ran around deaf and half blind for a while minute. Shout out to the homies.
We were real traumatized out there. Some of us have yet to recover.
It's hard to explain how watching our nightmares unfold from the hands of our city, state and federal government radicalized us and left us distrustful of everyone.
I truly thought I was going to be murdered by a LEO before I turned 40. And I was OK with that.
Betsy Johnson has the support of the cops, big timber, the PDX business community and Nike. And when I say "support", I mean she has around $5M in campaign funds and no one else in the governor's race is anywhere near close.
Where is the resistance?
Betsy is a Joe Manchin style Democrat-turned-Independent.
Low scores on labor, environment, gun control, etc. Not a Republican in name, but for reasons unbeknownst.
Ever heard of People for Portland? The right-wing dark-money group who wants to ban homelessness by herding undesirables into forced shelters?
America: Where everybody is ready to fake fight over things that don't actually matter instead of focusing on making the very obvious changes that are within reach.
America: Where everyone knows the fight is a ruse but we play along anyway because the alternative is actually fighting.
Abolishing police without constructing and using publicly accepted restorative justice practices IN REALITY simply leads to increased public support of policing and vigilantism.
We have to create the alternative we want to see. We have to communicate it. We have to model it.
People keep asking where leftists collectively lost the carrot and its right there.
Why do mostly white anon leftists attack leftists of color? Because leftists of color typically work in actual physical communities where RJ is used in praxis.
So they call us all apologists.
For a lot of the Twitter-left, this is a show. Stirring up mess is the fuel for their ONLINE engagement, so they prioritize gossip as real work. Then they log off.
But if we look at this behavior through an restorative justice lens, what space is created for change? Zero.
Far worse things have happened since, but I hadn't thought about that in a while and it popped out as the moment I stopped fucking with people.
It was also an early example to me that white people def understand restorative justice when it comes to themselves.
The boy who pushed me never faced any consequence. Later that year, I quit school to homeschool. I don't recall how much this had to do with it. Might ask my mom.