I’m in despair over this, both your tragic photos of a woman apparently exhausted, taking a nap, but really soon dead, as well as “John’s” email. It’s been 40 years since I worked at the detox and chemical dependency treatment center that my dad worked at in the fifties. Minneapolis was an early adoptee of Alcoholics Anonymous and the “disease concept, an approach that didn’t require Christianity, but required full abstinence and sponsors. But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids. So when we arrived at people dropping like birds in full view of pedestrians that don’t even scare us or move us to action, we are in serious trouble as a society. Now I accidentally wiped this comment clear off the iPad, but I’ll just hit send before it happens again because I don’t know, don’t have an endpoint. Thanks Nancy. Hang in there. Theo.
"The city is dead and decaying and evidence of the emptiness of the radical leftist ideology of the black bloc and those who excuse them . . ."
This is one of the few times I've encountered a piece that correctly places the blame for the nihilist war on property and law and order in Portland in 2020-21. Anarchist groupings operating under names such as the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front used Twitter like a virtual guerilla camp to incite one another and launch a wave of direct actions that caused millions of dollars of property damage.
By day anonymous anarchists would post the date, time and place of their staging areas on Twitter, and at night they'd show up, always clad in black bloc attire, to rampage through the streets, setting dumpsters on fire to create road blocks, breaking windows, tagging buildings and intimidating or even assaulting members of the public who dared try to capture their crimes on video. They left behind inarticulate scrawls to signal their maximalist, nonnegotiable demands such as the abolition of prisons and police. This went on from June 2020 until at least January 2021.
The best Portland's somnolent and diminished media could do was report the next day that "demonstrators," "protesters" or perhaps even "groups" had turned violent, causing the police to declare a riot and detain a handful of people. Portland's hapless mayor, Ted Wheeler, likewise failed to assign responsibility for the violence where it belonged for far too long. To this day Andy Ngô stubbornly refuses to call leftist rioters anything other than "Antifa." At least one civic organization promoted the notion that most people who took to the streets were peaceful citizens exercising their first amendment rights.
Who knows how long the direct actions would have continued if law enforcement hadn't finally started planting informants amongst the anarchist criminals and if the progressive Multnomah County DA, a criminal justice reformer, hadn't given in to pressure from the establishment and started charging some rioters who'd skated weeks or months earlier under his reckless catch-and-release policy. The latter move provoked howls of outrage and charges of unfairness from anarchists or their allies in media. When Ted Wheeler finally came to terms with reality and asked the public to report people to law enforcement who were out and about dressed in the unmistakable black bloc uniform, enablers on social media promptly denounced the Mayor for inciting vigilantism. Activist reporters in the local media parroted them.
It beggars belief that Portland's elected leaders, reporters, and members of law enforcement did not know at the time that anarchists were responsible for planning, inciting and carrying out the massive violence against real estate. However, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no feature pieces about the anarchists and their direct actions along the lines of The Oregonian’s unusually detailed reporting on the Red House debacle of 2020. Didn’t anyone at Willamette Week or the ultra-left Portland Mercury know someone who knew someone who was in the thick of things and would have gladly sat for an anonymous interview? The public still has no idea who the principal players were, much less where and how they operated. Likewise, while the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation front still has a website that provides some insights into their thinking ( https://youthliberation.noblogs.org/post/category/commentaries/ ), no outsider has explained the ideologies and objectives of the true believers among the planners and perpetrators of the direct actions. Who knows whether the history of that key chapter in Portland’s decline to its current sorry state will ever be written.
I’m in despair over this, both your tragic photos of a woman apparently exhausted, taking a nap, but really soon dead, as well as “John’s” email. It’s been 40 years since I worked at the detox and chemical dependency treatment center that my dad worked at in the fifties. Minneapolis was an early adoptee of Alcoholics Anonymous and the “disease concept, an approach that didn’t require Christianity, but required full abstinence and sponsors. But I’ve never known how 12 Steps could touch fentanyl or opioids. So when we arrived at people dropping like birds in full view of pedestrians that don’t even scare us or move us to action, we are in serious trouble as a society. Now I accidentally wiped this comment clear off the iPad, but I’ll just hit send before it happens again because I don’t know, don’t have an endpoint. Thanks Nancy. Hang in there. Theo.
Absolutely devastating
Damn.
"The city is dead and decaying and evidence of the emptiness of the radical leftist ideology of the black bloc and those who excuse them . . ."
This is one of the few times I've encountered a piece that correctly places the blame for the nihilist war on property and law and order in Portland in 2020-21. Anarchist groupings operating under names such as the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front used Twitter like a virtual guerilla camp to incite one another and launch a wave of direct actions that caused millions of dollars of property damage.
By day anonymous anarchists would post the date, time and place of their staging areas on Twitter, and at night they'd show up, always clad in black bloc attire, to rampage through the streets, setting dumpsters on fire to create road blocks, breaking windows, tagging buildings and intimidating or even assaulting members of the public who dared try to capture their crimes on video. They left behind inarticulate scrawls to signal their maximalist, nonnegotiable demands such as the abolition of prisons and police. This went on from June 2020 until at least January 2021.
The best Portland's somnolent and diminished media could do was report the next day that "demonstrators," "protesters" or perhaps even "groups" had turned violent, causing the police to declare a riot and detain a handful of people. Portland's hapless mayor, Ted Wheeler, likewise failed to assign responsibility for the violence where it belonged for far too long. To this day Andy Ngô stubbornly refuses to call leftist rioters anything other than "Antifa." At least one civic organization promoted the notion that most people who took to the streets were peaceful citizens exercising their first amendment rights.
Who knows how long the direct actions would have continued if law enforcement hadn't finally started planting informants amongst the anarchist criminals and if the progressive Multnomah County DA, a criminal justice reformer, hadn't given in to pressure from the establishment and started charging some rioters who'd skated weeks or months earlier under his reckless catch-and-release policy. The latter move provoked howls of outrage and charges of unfairness from anarchists or their allies in media. When Ted Wheeler finally came to terms with reality and asked the public to report people to law enforcement who were out and about dressed in the unmistakable black bloc uniform, enablers on social media promptly denounced the Mayor for inciting vigilantism. Activist reporters in the local media parroted them.
It beggars belief that Portland's elected leaders, reporters, and members of law enforcement did not know at the time that anarchists were responsible for planning, inciting and carrying out the massive violence against real estate. However, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no feature pieces about the anarchists and their direct actions along the lines of The Oregonian’s unusually detailed reporting on the Red House debacle of 2020. Didn’t anyone at Willamette Week or the ultra-left Portland Mercury know someone who knew someone who was in the thick of things and would have gladly sat for an anonymous interview? The public still has no idea who the principal players were, much less where and how they operated. Likewise, while the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation front still has a website that provides some insights into their thinking ( https://youthliberation.noblogs.org/post/category/commentaries/ ), no outsider has explained the ideologies and objectives of the true believers among the planners and perpetrators of the direct actions. Who knows whether the history of that key chapter in Portland’s decline to its current sorry state will ever be written.