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How can I help the community with the funds going into the search? I'd love to give money towards feeding the policemen, for example. Although there are complaints about the amount of money going into the search, he is armed and dangerous, and given the difficulty of the terrain, I think this is very responsible city government action.

Linda

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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I often vacation in Yachats, but don't really know the local history, including that of Waldport. I wonder if Emily Harris could explore this a bit for your listeners. We have heard briefly what kind of community it is--because the questions sort of stop with "it's a small community." Listening to the show, Tony, the cafe owner, obviously has an accent. Who lives in Waldport? Is it la long-standing community of mostly Oregonians? How long has it been a 'quaint resort town" on the way to Florence or other more conventional tourist sites? What is its traditional source of work? Fishing? Just curious about the local history.

Thanks! Linda

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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I currently teach a course at Lewis and Clark College called the Anthropology of Violence, and after a semester of studying the wars and genocides of the 20th century, my students are grappling with the question of how to prevent these terrible atrocities against people. One thing they learn is that there is no biological basis for these occurrences but that, rather, they are always historically and culturally situated. Instead of the cop out "explanation" that genocides are due to "ancient hatreds" we need to see how such understandings of history are manipulated by those in power to justify subsequent actions against those deemed enemies. The nation-state itself is a target--we learn of how this political form is comprised of structures of violence. 

In my own research on the Battle of Okinawa, in which 150,000 Okinawans (a third of the population in 1944-45) were killed as they found themselves caught between American and Japanese forces, it is clear that there are cultural reasons why women (the focus of my study) did not speak out about their experiences during wartime, as well as why their daughters and granddaughters have chosen to speak out. Silence and speaking out, private memories and public histories--these are some of the key themes in all studies of genocide that we can and should explore. Okinawan women speak out today because they see that people forget very easily, and they want to demonstrate through the details of their long ago memories that it can happen again and that we need to remember why it must be prevented, at the individual level. My book from Harvard University Press on this topic will be out at the end of the year. In addition, I want to add that Yale University has a long-standing archive on the Holocaust, which I used for my own research while a graduate student at Yale's Anthropology Department.

posted 3 years ago
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Too bad you missed the point, daniel meyers.

posted 5 years ago
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Not only from reading the various email blogs today re Reed and drugs, but also from my own experience as a local educator, I must say that I too have found Reed faculty and students to be surprisingly arrogant. Many of us have prestigious degrees from top schools--in my case, degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley. But the degree of arrogance at Reed has always struck me as surprising--the idea of elitism is taken to new heights at Reed, unlike anything I've seen at the top Ivy League schools on the East coast, which usually have the reputation for supreme snootiness. Reed tops all of them, in my experience!

My point is that it is this arrogance which is in fact the source of a sense of entitlement--particularly a sense of being above a law that applies to other citizens outside of Reed but seemingly not to Reedies. Because Enlightenment understandings of rationality reign above all other considerations at Reed, experimentation with drugs is taken out of any context (moral, etc.) other than that of objective scientific enquiry. At least, that is my assessment after hearing on air the drug policy at Reed. No wonder these kids and faculty have their heads in the clouds--they are so smart that they are different and better than anyone outside of Reed. I don't doubt that the school does excellent teaching, but why be arrogant and distiniguish yourself in such a way that the school as a whole has a terrible reputation in the city? In short, I'm not surprised at the permissive culture of drug use at the college. Friends of mine who took their young children to Ren Fayre this year said they were disgusted by the lack of consideration shown by students--young adults, afterall, not children still home and in the care of their parents. Doesn't Reed also have an obligation to nurture students into becoming responsible citizens? And why is 18 too soon to start this? The negative attention Reed is getting is well deserved--it's about time the shit hit the fan about a reclusive, elitist school that likes to pretend that it has no connection to and therefore no obligation to the wider community around it. Add to this the insensitive act of students hanging nooses on campus this past year (suggestive of lynchings) and the defensive response to that act by administration. Is Reed so isolated that it also condones historical insensitivity to minority peoples in this city? Shame on Reed.

posted 5 years ago
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Until 1992, I only biked, never owned a car, mainly because I was against the ecological footprint of cars. I have been concerned ever since the ecology movement of the 1970s, when I was in high school and headed the first Ecology Club at my high school, then headed the first recycling center in college. Since then, I have owned a car because of (1) living in a part of the country that required a motor vehicle, and (2) lately because I have a child. However, whenever we can, we ride our bikes. This still means that there are occasions during the week when we must use a car.

What I find troubling in Portland is the obnoxious sense of self-righteousness I've experienced on the part of bike riders as they encounter me as a driver. In one case, I needed to pass a bike rider downtown and had to do so quickly in order to avoid a construction site in the road ahead. At the next intersection, the bike rider caught up with me and rapped on my window, expecting me to have a conversation, I suppose, about my having passed him. At that point, I felt that this constituted a form of harrassment. I did not do anything to endanger anyone, nor did I feel I owed this biker an explanation. However, through the window he was trying to put blame on me for having passed him in a way that he found unacceptable (he of course did not know my side of the story re the construction site). I simply waved at him and drove off when the light changed.

After having ridden for so many years, I believe firmly that bikers need to follow the same rules of the road as cars, but that we must also provide bike lanes wherever possible for biker protection. Bikers also need to recognize that many of us are both bikers and drivers, out of necessity, and they might consider changing their own aggressive and politicized attitudes towards others on the road.

posted 5 years ago
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