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I find the arguments about actual numbers, which cannot be substantiated one way or the other, silly and detracting. 

One of the last stories I covered while a journalist in Asia was that of child prostitution in the Philippines.  Most of the patrons were Westerners such as the American editor of a widely circulated Hong Kong based magazine who "retired" to Manila for the ready access to young victims.  As I remember, he preferred boys in the 8 to 10 year age range.

While Portland is about as far from Manila as a city can be in many ways, there are many common aspects of this sickening business.

It was the worst story I ever covered.  The men who used the kids actually looked me in the eye and claimed that the kids "wanted it."  And, as I led several different publications to the story, the pedophiles several times threatened my life.  In response to the embarrassment caused by the publicity, the Marcos regime rounded up and jailed the children; I do not recall any of the pedophiles being punished.

Just remembering it makes me feel sick.

The social structure leading to child prostitution is different in Asia and the USA, but I believe this is the lowest, most despicable adult human behavior, and liberal that I am, I would embrace special severe punishment for the adults that do this to kids.

posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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When I returned to the US after two tours in Vietnam as a Naval officer followed by 15 years as a photojournalist in SE Asia, I worked for a while as a shooter for the Portland office of an international wire service.

When I mentioned to the former chief photographer that I am an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, he said, "Don't you ever mention that you're an Indian to me again.  I wouldn't have a (sic) f***ing Indian in my office."  I didn't work there long.

It is difficult being poor in this country, no doubt about it, and the system does seem stacked in favor of those who are in a position to influence policy and politicians...as it ever was.  All poor people are at disadvantage in that way.

But on top of that, on top of blatantly racist Western movies continuing to be shown (how would John Wayne movies be received if he were an Indian, picking whites off their horses with a pistol at 100 yards?) there certainly is racial bias at work here.

posted 3 years ago
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The Tea Party presentations my conservative friends send me are rife with racism and implied "rights" to keep everything they can pillage or purloin, with no reciprocal responsibility to the society that supplies their living.

"Taking the country back" is too plainly a desire to return to the time when blacks were lynched, women were subjugated, and the primacy of middle aged white bullies was unquestionable.

As for the ones carrying guns to peaceful gatherings, who are those cowards afraid of?  Each other?  Are they just afraid that more liberal and compassionate people might be as primitive as they?

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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It's depressing how many of these responses seem to stem from kneejerk political correctness, and not one post I saw with compassion for the policeman.  He will have to live with the fact that he killed someone for the rest of his life, and that so many in the community he protects reacted with mindless vitriol.   This has nothing to do with whether the shooting was "justified," although it seems in current protocol, it was clear and clean.

As a former journalist at benign events with police presence, I have often wondered why the police seemed to have a chip on their shoulders when I certainly had no animus toward them and saw no threat at all.  Perhaps it is because they face this sort of reaction? 

We have gone through periods of "community policing" and I thought that was the best way, because it seemed to make their jobs easier and therefore, to provide us better, more efficient protection.  I wonder why that is no longer mentioned?

Our society has chosen not to provide for mentally ill citizens, to leave them to the streets where they are killed one way or the other, every day.  Mental hospitals are "too expensive," and we party on.  Well, this is the price we pay, and we're all guilty.  I'm so very sorry for the man who was shot, and for the policeman who shot him, and for the people who are doing their best at impossible jobs but are being villified for their efforts.

And I am sorry for our society.  It is a terrible, sickening state of affairs.  We are serving ourselves and the rest of humanity with depressing irresponsibility.

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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I love the movement to require members of congress and the supreme court (neither rates capitalization now) to wear NASCAR type suits with the logos of their corporate owners emblazoned thereon.

There, in the Kaiser Permanente colors, the senator from North Dakota!  And here, representing the defense industry, the supreme court justice from Texas!

posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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If you're who I think you are, Portland Telling script just emailed.  If not, let me know and I'll send it to you. 

DVDs do exist, I'll get you one of those, too.  The actual performances always varied some from the script and sometimes good stuff happened.

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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Boys DO need to be strong; they need to develop the inner strength and self-reliance to resist the pressure to act stupidly, or as bullies, or to prove their virility in ungentlemanly ways.  When I see stadiums full of men (and too many women) posturing like threatening gorillas, or fighting roosters, I think we are losing the struggle fast.

Our society needs men it can rely on to do the right thing, not to act out like barnyard animals, yet in the artificial representations of life from which young people must be informed of their responsibilities, posturing, bullying jerks seem to be winning.

These concepts also apply to our national and international policies, by the way.

posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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I find the continual harping about speed being a major factor in accidents silly-to-disingenuous.  Above a certain rate, speed becomes reckless driving.  Of course!  But that can be 25 mph some places, like SE Portland narrow streets, cars on both sides, bicyclists riding like they're in Blackwater Hummers, and drivers' doors swinging open as though there's no traffic.

Much of this society is dancing a corporate-supplied polka around the fact that many, many of our licensed drivers are incompetent, irresponsible, or otherwise unwilling to assume the responsibility of an activity that can kill and maim just as surely as a gun or poison in our environment.  People who would NEVER allow lead-based paint around their children routinely drive distracted by cell phones, video displays, business papers, laptops, meals and god help us, texting!  In a country whose most significant accomplishment may be unprecedented hypocrisy, this is still an exceptional example. 

I've seen more red lights run in the last 5 years than in the previous 40 years of my driving put together, and in virtually every case, the driver seems unaware that he or she is even in an intersection.  Same with the people swerving into me on the freeway, and the ones coming across the centerline on narrow roads...or wide ones.  And driving 45 mph on a freeway so you can be "safe" while texting is yet another example of the narcissicism we see everywhere these days, another example of the me me me mentality that surely may be the downfall of the country.

Have we all gone completely stupid?

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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There was one aspect I'd love to discuss further, that of forgiveness.  Many offensive acts are committed by people with personality disorders, and many of them cannot conceive how they hurt others.  I believe it is impossible for them to truly want forgiveness, although they may prefer to think we no longer hold a grudge (perhaps so they can proceed as before!).  For people like that, I believe the only remedy is to get away from them and stay away, and find healing within ourselves.

We have investments, willing or not, in the experiences, often felt as pain, we carry within us.  These memories can continue to erode our existence if we let them; they often destroy lives completely.  If we project them onto others in attacks or other forms of retribution, we almost guarantee that more negativity will come to us.

But if we take possesion of them, see them as a gift of unusual insight we have been given, we can make them ours to use productively and to generate compassion for ourselves and others.  Think of it this way: We have a finite amount of energy to expend.  If it is used antagonistically, we'll have to expend even more to defend ourselves from others' reactions.  If it is projected in positive ways (and I'm not talking vapid new-age silliness) it may even be reflected back in ways that build us up and make us feel safer and more loved.  Imagine that.

End of my moralistic meanderings for today!

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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This was one of the best radio programs I have ever heard; rich and deep, graceful and mindful.  Thank you, all of you, for what you did.

I tried to respond here during the program but had forgotten my log-on name and there was a glitch in the password reset function, only now resolved.  

Yesterday, I had the high privilege of working again with other members of the cast of The Telling Project Portland, a stage production performed last May and June, dealing with the schism between veterans' experiences and society's perceptions.  

We conducted two workshops in the Oregon Department of Human Services Diversity Conference.  The theme of our workshops was the struggle veterans and society find in re-engaging with each other after the vets have seen combat, while society at large is insulated from it to an almost obscene degree.    

There were profound parallels between your presentation and ours; we were even dealing with some of the same people in that Department of Corrections personnel were some of the most engaged attendees at our workshops.  We could have gone on for hours, and discussions like these should.  In any case, thank you for a program of importance and beauty.

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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I've been thinking a lot about these very subjects lately.

My grandmother and her sisters back in Cherokee County, Oklahoma are probably responsible for my survival far past what many might have expected.  And my grandmother's inculcation of Baptist Missionary Society values probably had everything to do with my decision to stay in Asia after being military in Vietnam, trying to put right with my cameras what we'd put so wrong with our naive and hubristic foreign policies.

Further, now that I'm digitizing my work the swells of insight are continuous.  The old family portraits that have come to me are like telephoto shots into the past, with more than enough soft focus for ambiguity into which I am certain I inject my own realities.

Good stuff.

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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It is sad that this would even be a question, but it brings up an interesting idea, that M.A.D.D.'s successful campaign to criminalize drunk driving has raised public awareness so that many other acts committed while drunk (I assume both parties in this hypothetical have had something to drink) are actionable crimes.  What I don't understand is why only male on female rape is mentioned.

I'm male, but in 1964 the local pharmacist and the son of the owner of the drug store in the little Ozark town where I was raised set me up---got me drunk, drugged me unconscious, and the pharmacist (at least) raped me.  Young, trusting and naive as I was, it had never occurred to me that these young men I'd grown up with, gone to Sunday school with, would do such a thing. 

I remember the pharmacist giving me a couple of yellow and white capsules, saying "This will help with the hangover," and the next thing I knew I came partially awake when he was raping me, then afterward in pain, with him smirking and saying, "That's how it is after the first time." 

There was nobody to tell what had happened; after me he apparently victimized others and was finally caught.  But he was simply told to leave town, as far as I know he was never prosecuted.  For me, even walking down main street became a fearsome ordeal, and although I suppressed the memories for decades they never stopped affecting my perceptions, my ability to trust.  I still see their sneering smirks.

That experience has afflicted my life ever since.  After long consideration, I told my father about it back in the '90s to confirm what I thought would be the response, and sure enough he replied, "Why didn't you fight back?  Why did you let him do it?"  THAT is why I couldn't report it back then, but to this day it hurts and negatively affects my relation to authority figures.

It has also provided me a great fertile field to grow compassion, for others so injured and for myself.  I am deeply grateful to have found the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk who has led so many of us to deeper peace and acceptance.  For, if he and his colleagues could find peace, work for peace, when they were being persecuted by both sides during the Vietnam War, he has provided us the means to find it for ourselves.

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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The reason for the jump in "mixed race" registrations may be as simple as the fact that it has become an option on many ethnicity forms.  For many years, I had to debate whether to check "Caucasian," which I mostly am by blood, or "Native American," which I am by place of origin and heritage.

I carry the name of a g-g-g-grandfather who died on the Trail of Tears and was raised in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, so I always checked Native American before.  Besides, our Cherokee Principle Chief at the time of the Trail of Tears, John Ross, was 1/8 Cherokee by blood.  So was Sequoyah.  To the world, they were "Cherokee;" it was enough to force the Cherokees off their land into concentration camps and on the forced march to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, in good old American ethnic cleansing.

And being only 1/8 black has been quite enough to get people lynched in the not-so-distant past. 

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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I was laid off March 20 and the next morning, I woke with a wonderful feeling that I had been given a gift of time to help organizations such as Mercy Corps, The Food Bank, and others...and I could donate platelets at the Red Cross during the day, leaving the precious after-work hours for those who had to be at work during the day.

It is also an opportunity to participate in The Telling Project, a stage production about veterans dealing with memories of their military experience.

My goodness folks, with inspiration like today's Morning Edition obituary for Catherine Royce, (whom I was privileged to know as a friend) we have a wonderful tool for seeing layoffs as gifts, helping to override the despair of our personal problems.  Like it or not, we are being forced to approach life differently, and whether we make that a crushing terror, or a gift, is up to us.

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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Another thing came to mind; the first professed communists I ever met were Chinese, living in Queretaro, Mexico in 1966.  Their families had moved from California during World War II, because although they were not Japanese, and in fact their native country was suffering terribly from the Japanese invaders, the fact that they looked Asian was enough for many Americans to treat them very badly.  As we have done so many times in so many ways, we created a whole new class of enemies for ourselves.

The USA is a wonderful country, but how much better we might be were we not afflicted by our debilitating bigotry!  And when will people realize that bigotry in all its guises, not just the enemies of particular groups, is the real enemy of all of us?

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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Interesting coincidence, I was thinking about this very thing last night after watching a WW2 propaganda movie where Marines were being vetted to a raider battalion, and an apparently unquestionable motive for joining was, "I hate Japs." 

In the movie, the Japanese soldiers were depicted as sneaky, inept and total losers, which is instructive when I think of the deep paradox between the way the US population was led to perceive the Japanese, and the extreme difficulties our soldiers, sailors and Marines had with them in the Pacific war.

I don't recall seeing anything like that about Germans in the movies of my youth; it is instructive regarding the deeply ingrained racist nature of our culture.

But as an American Indian, I sorta knew that.

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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I was laid off 10 days ago, and at 63 the outlook for standard-type jobs is dismal.  I have applied for unemployment insurance, and plan to go onto Social Security this week.

But the good thing is that this enables me to "put back," by volunteering for organizations like The Oregon Food Bank and many others.  That helps mightily to alleviate the feelings of rejection and feeling unvalued by society, and brings me into contact with some of the best people with the biggest hearts in our society.

I recommend it.

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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