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Slant: Short opinion pieces and rumor-chasing notes News: News: Happening People: Eugene BioCarShare WEP GOES TO HEARING The Metropolitan Policy Committee (MPC) has scheduled a public hearing on an update to the Regional Transportation Plan (formerly TransPlan) at its next meeting from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm Thursday, Dec. 9 at the Eugene Library Bascom-Tykeson Room. The update of the transportation plan, high on the to-do list of Mayor Jim Torrey before he leaves office, is expected to help pave the way for the contentious West Eugene Parkway. Opponents to the WEP note that the highway's price tag has ballooned from $88 million in 1997 to $169 million in 2004, a recent ODOT re-evaluation report recommends turning the Beltline intersection into a full-blown $45 million interchange that would fill even more wetlands, and ODOT is asking the city to maintain the WEP east of Belt Line. "Would it surprise you to learn the public process has been all but invisible and ineffective, with a dearth of public hearings and gathering of public input?" asks local transportation activist Rob Handy in a message sent to rally people to testify for three minutes at the Dec. 9 MPC meeting. A little history: In December 2000, ODOT informed the city that the WEP couldn't be constructed unless all of the WEP were included in TransPlan's financially constrained list of projects. That requirement ultimately led to the November 2001 vote on the WEP, which gave local jurisdictions the green light to make the needed amendments to TransPlan. In early 2002, the proposed amendments were reviewed by the Eugene, Springfield and Lane County planning commissions. In July 2002, the necessary amendments to TransPlan were adopted by the Eugene and Springfield councils, the County Commission, and LTD. More recently, an ODOT report reveals that the July 2002 amendments to TransPlan were inadequate. Those amendments left out two key parts of the WEP: the Beltline/WEP interchange and the connection from Terry Street to the WEP. Thus to construct the WEP, it is necessary to also include these two projects in TransPlan's financially constrained list of projects. The decision now goes to the MPC, whose members include Mayor Torrey and City Councilor Bonny Bettman representing Eugene. Unlike Torrey, Bettman is opposed to the WEP. For more information, call the Eugene office of 1000 Friends of Oregon at 343-5201 or e-mail rhandy@efn.org The public comment period for the Regional Transportation Plan runs through Dec. 9. Written comments can be sent to Lane Council of Governments, 99 E. Broadway, Suite 400, Eugene 97401 or e-mail mpo@lane.cog.or.us or visit www.lcog.org/mpo/rtp.html— TJT
ART FOR EVERYONE You may have heard of the First Friday ArtWalk, but what about the Last Friday ArtWalk? Hosted by an association of Eugene artists and galleries primarily in the Whiteaker neighborhood, Last Friday is a new event that features public art by behind-the-scenes artists. Sterling Wallach and his partner Ruth Beller came up with the idea for Last Friday in tandem with the founding of Possum Place, a community art space that highlights the work of neighborhood artists. "It's a pretty simple concept," Wallach says. "It's about people opening their doors. There should be art on every corner, or more. We like others to see their porches or their living rooms as art galleries." The first Last Friday ArtWalk took place from 6 to 9 pm Nov. 26, showcasing work at Possum Place (339 Taylor), Jawbreaker (415 Monroe), the Museum of Unfine Art (537 Willamette), Last Eye Open (938 W. 3rd) and sixseventyseven (677 West 12th Ave.). It also included a listing of public art installments and murals across town. Wallach says that Last Friday is intended as an extension of the First Friday ArtWalk, but with more emphasis on artists who may not display their work in high-end galleries. "There are people who don't think of themselves as artists, but when they get around other artists, they get inspired," he says. "We feel like everyone is an artist, and everyone can participate in the process in their own way. The sharing of art should be accessible to everybody — artists as well as the public. It's a good way for artists to exchange input and inspiration." The next Last Friday ArtWalk will take place Dec. 31. For more information, contact Possum Place at 683-0626. — Kera Abraham
PROTESTERS BACK FROM SOA Four anti-war activists from Eugene returned last week from attending a large protest Nov. 21 at Fort Benning, Ga. The Eugene contingency was Sister John Maureen Backenstos, SNJM, of McKenzie Bridge; Trudy Maloney of the Church of the Bretheren in Springfield; Marilyn Hunter, SNJM associate; and Peg Morton of Eugene. Morton, a Quaker scholar, has been arrested several times at Fort Benning and was released from federal prison in July after serving a three-month sentence for civil disobedience. None of the Eugene group were among the 20 arrested this time. The annual protest drew a record crowd of about 16,000 people calling for the closing of the Army School of the Americas (SOA), which has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The SOA is known for providing advanced military training to Latin American dictators, generals and other officers and soldiers since the 1940s. "Its graduates have been implicated in massacres, assassinations, torture and disappearances throughout the region and throughout its history," says Morton. The gathering outside Fort Benning lasted for three days. "We listed to the wounded cries of survivors who watched the killing and disappearance of loved ones, absorbing the ongoing courage as they seek justice," says Morton. "We participated in the hours-long procession of mourning and creation of a memorial fence. We watched the 20 people who found ways to climb and go through the fence onto the base in acts of nonviolent "holy obedience" and will probably serve time in prison. We wept, we were taught, we danced, we laughed, feeling more deeply than ever a living, loving, courageous worldwide community devoted to building a world of peace and dignity." This was Marilyn Hunter's first trip to the SOA. She recently retired after 24 years as director of religious education at St. Peter's Catholic Church. "The experience of being at this gathering, of hearing the suffering of Latin American people present, and from many who have lived and worked among them, has led to a rising up of deeper understanding," she says. "It has been a move from inactive to active participation of the spirit."
CORRECTIONS/ CLARIFICATIONS In our film review of Sideways Nov. 18, mention was made of a fictitious novel The Day After Tomorrow, but the actual name of the novel is The Day After Yesterday.
In an age of escalating global violence against human and non-human life, writer and historian Rebecca Solnit reminds us that seeds of hope take root in the darkest of times. Her writing, speeches and activism focus on creating change in an increasingly complex ecological and social landscape.
Solnit is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the author of a dozen books, including her most recent, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. She is a regular contributor to Orion magazine and The Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com daily newsgram. She will speak at the UO on the politics of hope in turbulent times, examining the histories of progressive movements across the globe and connecting them with today's struggles against ecological destruction and war. Solnit's talk, "Hope in the Dark," is sponsored by the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society as part of the annual Joy Belsky lecture series. Free and open to the public, the event will be held at 7:30 pm Thursday, Dec. 2 in the Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall on the UO campus, 1468 University St. You've written about a great paradox of activism — that "Americans so often imagine political participation as something for times of crisis, at best." Do people have to be terrified to act? No, there are a significant number of people who remain active at all times. It's partly about how far your imagination extends into identifying with people who are suffering, with species that are threatened and places that can disappear, when you're not suffering yourself. There are a great many activists in this country who fight for the environment and social justice even though their own well-being doesn't depend on it. There's a certain amount of obliviousness in this country too, of course. Are you describing a sort of yin-yang model in which desperate times, such as now, propel activism while comfortable times, such as under Clinton, bring political apathy? What I see over and over is that there are moments when you see a groundswell, such as [the global protests against the Iraq War on] Feb. 15, 2003, the recent election, and the nuclear freeze movement, when huge masses of people become politically involved. Moments such as these are as motivating as terrible times. People who are committed over the long haul are the embers who never burn out, and the next fire will arise from them. Before the Nov. 2 election, you wrote about the international community's negative view of the U.S. How did George W. Bush's re-election affect that view? I think that those of us who are against Bush in this country are in the same boat at people in the rest of the world who are deeply dismayed that a very narrow majority of Americans who voted — supposedly, if you don't count election fraud — think that environmental devastation, economic disaster, loss of civil rights and endless war are good ideas. One comfort for those of us who voted against Bush is that we are a part of the global majority. How can America's progressives counter negative images of Americans in the rest of the world? Not enough of these movements are visible outside the country, and I think even activists are surprised when they hear of these wonderful things happening in the United States. It's important to keep doing what you're doing and to talk to the media at home and abroad. What message will you bring to your Eugene audience? "Hope in the Dark" has two strong tenets. One is that the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, and other movements have so powerfully transformed the world that people don't even apprehend how different the world was 40 years ago. Part of activist despair is not remembering our own victories. What would the world be like if we hadn't passed civil rights legislation? What about all the species that didn't go extinct? Another thing is to try and appreciate the strange ways that change happens. A lot of people are depressed because Bush got elected for the next four years, but they don't think, 'What will happen in five years?' Those are some of the ways that I try to complicate people's sense of their own power and of history. The way change happens is unpredictable. What seems impossible beforehand looks inevitable afterward, and in the meantime comes a sudden seismic shift, and the Zapatistas have appeared, apartheid is dismantled, Brazil has a labor-leader president, East Timor is independent, the Soviet Union is dissolved and the Communist Bloc is gone. It doesn't just happen, but change is not an assembly-line product. It's a bolt of lightning, a drop wearing away stone, a gradual emergence, a shift in the balance, one person or a million who drive their dreams into reality. You have a hopeful message, but in your heart, do you fear four more years under Bush? Of course! Hope and fear aren't incompatible. I hope that good things will happen, and I recognize that it's not all of one or all of another. We have had victories under Bush; we will have more victories under Bush. John Kerry wasn't exactly the dream prince I was always waiting for, and I think that a lot of his [policies] could have been disappointing at best. We've lost a lot of things, but we haven't lost everything, and we're not going to. A lot of it, for me, is being stubborn. I refuse to be defeated, and I refuse to be silenced, and I think most of us — those who aren't threatened with prison or deportment — are in a position to take a stand. For middle-class white people, it's actually kind of fun and easy. Is the left organized enough to combat the conservative corporate government? Oh God, no. If we were we'd overthrow it. There are victories at the grassroots. And internationally, there are movements that are growing not only in numbers, but in networks and in sophistication. We're coming up on the fifth anniversary of the WTO shutdown in Seattle. That really marks the shift into making alliances with people from the Third World and recognizing the common ground between issues like the environment and labor. We've really won against the WTO. The WTO is paralyzed and failing. That's something that nobody thought would happen five years ago, before the shutdown in Seattle, and it's extraordinary. In Sept. 1999, the WTO was a tank that nobody thought could be stopped. On Sept 15, 2003 [after the mobilization in Cancún], that tank was spinning its wheels in a ditch, and that's a huge victory.
Vietnam
to Iraq Last week's cover story looked at some of the obstacles facing students who oppose the Iraq War. Here we examine some of the most promising tools for making change. Learning from History Our nation's past is riddled with moments both terrible and hopeful, but the truth is always clearer in retrospect. History reminds us to avoid the mistakes of the past and learn from yesterday's heroes. The Iraq War is couched in a different context than the Vietnam War, but UO history major Emily Howard, 21, sees a parallel reflected in politicians' rhetoric. "They talked about it at the beginning of the war, saying, 'We promise we won't make this another Vietnam,'" she says.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson's administration falsely claimed that North Vietnamese guerillas had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, spurring Congress to pass a near-unanimous resolution to begin aerial bombing of North Vietnam. In 2002, the Bush administration's false accusation that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction prompted Congress to pass a near-unanimous resolution to initiate war against Iraq. The general populace rallied behind both of these resolutions, galvanized by fear — of communism in the 1960s; of terrorism today. Long-time Eugene activist Marion Malcolm, 65, senses a common goal connecting the two wars. "The government project is the same," she says. "It's global dominance. It's U.S. hegemony. It's manifest destiny — the idea that we somehow have the right to run all over everybody. It was fueled then, and it remains fueled now, by racism, making a whole group of people the 'other.' That's part of what we need to work against on the deepest levels." UO journalism student Ryan Duff, 22, suspects that the motives behind the Iraq War are even more insidious than those propelling the Vietnam War. "I think that the Vietnam War was a mistake on our government's part," he says. "For war on Iraq, the public has been intentionally misled. The reasons for the war in Iraq are very well known, and the goals are very clear." Supporting Anti-war Candidates In the '60s and '70s, some anti-war UO students and community activists bypassed mainstream media and went straight to the source: local politicians. At the start of the Vietnam War, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse was one of only two Congressmen to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Eugene peace worker Dan Goldrich, 71, remembers the sense of reverence that students held for Senator Morse. "Morse was one of the few politicians who could instantly walk onto any campus in this country and be accorded enormous honor for his honesty and guts. That was scarce," he says.
Jim Weaver, 77, a World War II veteran and a U.S. Representative from 1975-1987, won the support of anti-war liberals when he took a stand against the Vietnam War. "There was a deep-seated feeling that it was immoral, if not evil, what we were doing in Vietnam," he says. "It caused people to do things, like burning down buildings, that you don't see today." Weaver remembers the public's initial hesitance to oppose the Vietnam War, and he isn't surprised that the movement against the Iraq War stalled after troops entered Baghdad. "You can oppose war before it starts, but a nation at war rallies around its leader," he says. "When I was campaigning for Congress in the late '60s and early '70s, it was not easy to be against the war. I was beaten up several times. People who were against the war were traitors." Despite that stigma, Weaver says, it's important for anti-war activists to reach out to local politicians. For example, Senator Ron Wyden may have voted against the Iraq War in response to feedback from anti-war groups across Oregon. And Weaver suggests that John Kerry may have fared better in the Nov. 2 election if he had taken a solid anti-war stance. "Kerry wouldn't have been as vulnerable to charges of flip-flopping if he had just said, 'I wouldn't have voted for the war if I knew then what I know now,'" he says.
The Role of Media While some things — like the motives for war and the power of politicians — have remained relatively consistent from one war to the next, American media has changed dramatically since the Vietnam War era. With the Internet at our fingertips, it's easier than ever before to access perspectives from across the globe. "I can tell you on the fingers of my hand how many Vietnamese people I knew during the Vietnam War," Malcolm says. "Now, if we want to know what the people of the Middle East are feeling and thinking, there are ways to find out." In the '60s, local peace worker Carol Van Houten, 67, copied anti-war leaflets on a ditto machine. Now she is able to distribute information instantly and easily across cyber-space. "In a way, the Internet takes the place of the big demonstrations," Van Houten says. "The biggest benefit is how quickly an action can be organized and communicated. You can reach people who would never come to a rally. But the biggest disadvantage is that there isn't that sense of community, of coming together." Ironically, the Internet has expanded while mainstream news has narrowed. During the Vietnam War, reporters wandered around Southeast Asia unrestricted. As a result, the gruesome details of the war were beamed into living rooms all over America. But media have been carefully controlled during the Iraq War. Only "embedded," or military-controlled, journalists are allowed into war zones, and the Pentagon has imposed a media blackout on images of the coffins of slain American soldiers. Duff says that media consolidation and military censorship have caused mainstream news sources to present a skewed view of the Iraq War. "All the information is out there," he says, "but a majority of people only get their news from a few outlets." A Way of Life Malcolm, Goldrich, Van Houten and Weaver share the view that activism doesn't stop with the end of a war; it is a way of life. While they recognize the Iraq War as a unique event, veteran activists are able to view it as a patch in the quilt of our nation's history. That perspective is encouraging for student activists who are trying to mobilize their peers against the Iraq War. "We've received a lot of support from people from the Vietnam era who are helping launch the anti-war movement and have been working closely with the students in doing so," Howard says. "They definitely made the administration stop and think about how powerful the people are when they do decide to mobilize. The tenacity of protesting is really important."
Eugene BioCarShare
Back in the spring of 2003, social activist Matthew Rutman (third from left in the photo) and a small band of like-minded Eugeneans got together to organize Eugene BioCarShare, a biodiesel-car-sharing co-op. Others pictured are Michael White, Matt Branch, Lily Payne, Tree Bressen, Leeann Ford, Ephraim Payne, and Elliot Shuford. "Matthew was our visionary," says Bressen, a founding member. "We bought our car at the beginning of summer." Each member chipped in $375 to purchase a 1982 Mercedes diesel sedan. The car is powered with clean-burning biodiesel fuel, available locally through SeQuential Biofuels. Co-op members get around town by bike or public transport. They schedule use of the car for out-of-town work or recreation through an interface on their web site, biocarshare.org. "I do the bookkeeping," says Ford, who is studying to become a CPA. Others take on chores such as maintenance and refueling. Members pay a small monthly fee to cover insurance and repairs, plus 30 cents a mile (includes fuel) when they drive. In a year-and-a-half, the car has been driven 12,000 miles. New members are welcome — call 434-6347 for details.
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