Deceptively beautiful

On the way to Sue's house from my place, I wait for a bus at this corner, and it always moves me to be here. When Occupy Wall Street began, an encampment grew in this spot in Portland in October, 2011, and I found community. Here, among a sea of tents, were a medical tent, a library, a school, a kitchen, and temporary homes for housed and unhoused people. I joined the "media committee," became a documentary photographer for the movement, and met many of the people who are still my friends today.

After the encampment was evicted, this little one-block park continued being a place of action. Buddhist Peace Fellowship meditated here during confrontations between right-wing, centrist, and anarchist groups. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, this little park was the site of nightly tear-gassing by Portland Police and Homeland Security. 

Now activism has gone underground. Photographs have been used to surveil and jail activists. The pandemic arrived. Homeless people have been forced out of downtown spaces and either jailed or harassed till they set up tents in far-flung places. Now the park looks peaceful in its dressing of yellow ginkgo leaves, but I feel a loss. My community no longer gathers here. Many have lost hope for activism to halt climate change or to bring compassion and socialism to the direction in which we are headed. I have lost direction myself.