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Repression against people serving food

December 9, 2024 /Opinion

This article was shared with us anonymously and we were asked to share it. 

The city of Eugene has developed a pattern of targeting people in our community who are offering care and resources to the most poor and vulnerable among us.  On Thursday, December 5th  the police showed up and threatened to arrest every one of the people in a group called Neighbors Feeding Neighbors that routinely serves meals at the Washington Jefferson park. This group, (formerly Breakfast Brigade, and more formerly the Catholic Workers) spend time out of their days to feed unhoused neighbors, acting with diligent and consistent compassion, serving free meals to people at Wash-Jeff park four days a week for years. Last year, 2023, after nine years of serving food in the park, EPD showed up and threatened the helpers with arrest. In response, the group obtained a permit to continue feeding in the park. In the last few months of 2024, three things have happened:
– The Whitteaker Community Council sent a letter to the city of Eugene requesting that the group’s permit be removed, and that ALL FUTURE groups be denied permits to serve meals in the park
– The group lost access to the commercial kitchen space that they had been using to prepare food
– The city of Eugene revoked the permit from the group, citing that they had failed to comply with certain parking requirements while unloading

Whittaker Community Council complains of their “compassion fatigue” as they sit inside their warm houses watching people struggle to survive across the street in Eugene’s own Washington-Jefferson park. Perhaps this is too harsh a judgment on the NIMBY* association; more likely they have nothing more than the parting glance for those suffering hungry in the cold just a few dozen feet from their front door, and resent the shattering of their piece when one of these wretched of the earth dares to shatter their lofty illusion of privilege by making a bit more noise than they would like. Whittaker Community Council’s fatigue must be deep indeed to prompt them to repeatedly call the Eugene Police on Neighbors Feeding Neighbors  in order to shut down their truly reprehensible actions of giving breakfast to the people who have found WJ to be a suitable place to stay for a while (every Wednesday-Saturday at 9am).

This cannot continue. People suffer enough on the streets and it is clear that many in this town are embarking on a war of attrition with the most vulnerable in our community. They simply hope to see them dead and gone so they can stop being such a bother to people who have nothing but cruelty and contempt in their hearts such as the good, compassion fatigued people of the Whittaker Community Council. A number of concerned citizens stood up to these unjust threats and intimidations, showing up in force to assist with the food distribution and to defend the good people of Neighbors Feeding Neighbors from being ticketed or arrested. The police responded to this by illegally sweeping a nearby camp without notice to the people in the camp, sending a clear message that they are cowards who would rather push around people without resources than try and make good on the lies and threats they bring to a group of elderly Christians.

This is a call to action for concerned people of Eugene, whatever your personal motive may be; do not sit on your laurels this winter and look the other way while the harassment of the unhoused and those who try to help them continues. Join Neighbors Feeding Neighbors (every Wednesday-Saturday at 9am at Wash-Jeff park), join Food Not Bombs (every Friday at 4:30pm at the Park Blocks), or start your own food distribution with your friends. distribute food, defend those doing so against bullying and intimidation. Let us show that for every food distributor that they harass and intimidate, ten more will take their place. “Guerilla Food Distro” your neighbors, the people on the streets, your friends. I know of several such groups that have no name to list that have already popped up in Wash-Jeff park, meeting under bridges and the cover of night to hand off the most delicious soups and juiciest burgers for the low low cost of complete free-dom. Let the hatred of these NIMBY so-called neighbors boil the pasta inside your heart to fill the bellies of the friends you make along the way. “Hate serve” with a radical love in your heart that they will never understand or name because they cannot feel it, and the most delicious of food in your hands to share with people struggling to survive this Winter.

-A Bug

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Have an action report or article you’d like published anonymously? Share it here: https://neighborhoodanarchists.org/action-report

When Nonviolent Disobedience is Repressed: An appeal, an explanation, and a warning

October 23, 2024 /Opinion

We were asked to share this piece. This may not represent the views of everyone in NAC. 

During any uprising – or really, any meaningful opposition to unjust, systemic actions from the government – there is categorical separation between the “good” protester and “bad” protester. The good ones are the ones that walk calmly, hold signs, and avoid causing any disruption or damage, either to property or people. The “bad” ones are those who would dare to cause material disruption, break the windows of corporate banks, weapons manufacturers, or become in any way militant in their opposition to injustice and oppression.

This piece is not for the purpose of defending a position on or advocating for violent or nonviolent civil disobedience. The singular purpose is to explain and assert these points:

1) If nonviolent civil disobedience, in which no person or property was harmed, is repressed and criminalized by the state, there is little choice for those who seek justice other than to escalate, and (subsequently),
2) If you do not want to see a complete eradication of resistance, or a “violent” escalation of tactics by those who will not tolerate injustice tolerated by law, you must help defend our collective rights to protest and resist in “nonviolent” ways.

There is an eternal conversation about what “violence” actually means, and whether or not it extends beyond a person’s self and body, and onto material property, either private or public, and when it becomes self-defense. The general definition is “the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force”. We make no aim to clarify this distinction, but would assert that there is a general consensus among those who possess or defend private property that civil disobedience is only acceptable, ethically and legally, as long as it does not cause property damage.

If you believe it is always wrong to disobey a law, under any circumstances, there will most likely be no insight or perspective gained from the arguments that follow.
If you believe that violence is always the right and necessary thing to do in the face of injustice, the argument that follows may somewhat frustrate you.

If you find yourself uncertain or wavering about what is justifiable and under what circumstances, and have a preference for order even in the face of egregious and unjust conditions, this was written for you.

_________

In the realm of resistance to unjust laws and actions taken by the state, there has always been a diversity of tactics.
There are those who believe that damaging and/or destroying property is justified if its in service of protecting something greater, such as people or the land. The Earth Liberation Front was an example of this. In the 90s, they took action to(among other things) destroy facilities that participated in the clear-cutting of old growth forests, valuing ancient trees, which are integral to wildlife habitats, indigenous culture, and the health of the air and climate, over that of buildings and machinery bent on their destruction. During these years, groups such as the ELF took many actions to interrupt corporate extraction and violence against the earth and its inhabitants, and to deteriorate the profit motives through destruction of property. Clear-cutting of old growth forests and the building of oil and gas pipelines on indigenous lands were/are just a few areas of focus for eco-activist groups. The decades that followed were marked by intensive legal action from the US government against the radical environmental movement, an era now referred to as the green scare.

There are those who believe in the power and necessity of breaking the law when it is unjust, but are unwilling to purposefully cause property damage or harm to others, committing their lives to staunchly nonviolent, nondestructive resistance. MLK Jr. is among the most famous for this, working with other organizers on boycotts, marches, sit-ins, blockades, and more. It should be noted, though committed to nonviolence, he was not rigid nor moral in his stance against property damage, saying this in response to the 1967 riots: “The military forces were treating acts of petty larceny as equal to murder. Far more rioters took chances with their own lives, in their attacks on property, than threatened the lives of anyone else. Why were they so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were trying to destroy.”

There are also those who believe that resistance to repression, occupation, and any form of class or identity-based oppression is justified, by any means necessary. Countless groups from around the world have engaged in armed resistance to their oppressors, from the Black Panthers to the Young Lords to the Zapatistas to Palestinian Liberation Front and beyond. They took up arms to protect their neighborhoods and communities when it became clear to them that those who possessed state-sanctioned weapons and power were a threat to those they loved.

Regardless of what tactics are used, all resistance movements have one thing in common: They are targeted to be snuffed out by the state, who –unlike its targets– is not made to justify its tactics.

In Eugene, we have(at least) two active criminal cases from this year, 2024, against protesters that engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience.

The first:
On April 15th, a group of people stopped traffic on interstate 5 in protest against the weapons and money sent from the US government to the Israeli army to carry out their ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza. The stated purpose of the action, which took place across many countries and cities simultaneously, was to inerrupt the flow of commerce to pressure the government to halt the transfers of weapons and funds. To stop the money from moving internationally, they set out to stop the money from moving domestically. Five law enforcement

agencies and over 127 officers arrived on the scene to carry out a mass arrest of everyone present. Each protester was charged with Disorderly Conduct in the second degree.

The second:
On July 22nd, a group of people walked into a public city council meeting at city hall to protest the constant sweeps, displacement, and criminal charges leveled against unhoused people in the community. They carried signs, walked into the meeting, and chanted “Stop the Sweeps, End Death on the Streets.” The disruption lasted less than a minute and the group then voluntarily departed. In the following weeks, investigators tracked down at least four people that had been present, and belatedly took them into custody at the lane county jail before charging them with at least three criminal counts: Disorderly Conduct, Interference with Govt Administration, and Disruption of City Council (yes, that’s a real charge, though it hasn’t been used in decades).

In each of the aforementioned cases, many other attempts at advocacy and resistance had been made– attempts that fall under the purview of legal and respectable actions.

In the first case, the highway blockade occurred following the first six (of twelve, now!) months of Israel’s sweeping ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Six months of writing letters, doing public education, attending public meetings, countless rallies and marches, and even going to the homes and offices of the politicians that hold the power of change in the palms of their hands. This does not even begin to take into account the last 75 years of appartheid and violence against the people of occupied Palestine. People of concience knew that escalation was necessary, and still chose a path of escalation that caused no material harm or damage.

In the second case, this protest came on the heels of years of worsening economic conditions and legal persecution of poor people in our community, leading to criminal charges, intense and ongoing trauma, and death for people living on the streets. Despite exhaustive outreach efforts, networking with city officials and attending city council meetings to make public comment, and so much more, restrictions around camping and parking continued to tighten, social services continued to be defunded, and being unhoused in any space has been further criminalized. Just this year, the issue of criminalizing homelessness made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and they ruled that “localities may impose criminal penalties for acts like public camping and public sleeping without violating the Eighth Amendment — even if they lack sufficient available shelter space to accommodate their unhoused population.” What respectable or lawful means are left to protect ourselves and our neighbors? What recourse remains?

Why do governments get the monopoly on violence? What should we, as citizens, do when staring literally and figuratively down the barrel of a gun? We write this as a small group of individuals that want nothing more than peace – peace for the people fleeing sniper gunfire and missiles, peace for those looking for a safe place to lay their heads, peace for those who see their land of orgin being destroyed more each day. We write this as a people who love to build, to plant, and to cultivate networks of care, and are going to great lengths to preserve the hope and love that is still alive inside us.

And yet.

There has been little justice for any of the people targeted by state violence – not for our unhoused neighbors on the streets of Oregon, not for the indigenous population that was wiped out to make room for white settlers, and not for the Palestinians being decimated as you read this. If you haven’t yet, question your faith in the legal system’s authority, capacity, and willingness to deliver justice.

As options for resistance are being both exhausted and criminalized, there are two probable eventualities:
1. People who have attempted every legal method of enacting change are criminalized for nonviolent civil disobedience, and are pushed to more extreme methods as their efforts fall flat. 2. The state successfully scares, criminalizes, and otherwise represses those who would resist the systemic onslaught of our neighbors here and abroad, and there is little to no visible defense left.

We end with a series of questions.

  • If you agree that our government bodies, locally and at broader levels, should fund affordable housing, education and healthcare, instead of prisons, prosecutors and bombs, yet you see that is not happening – what do you propose we do?
  • And not only are those things not happening, but people are suffering and dying from no place to sleep here in our town, and getting moved around despite having no place to go. In Palestine they are being moved North, South, North, to this refugee camp and that, only to be bombed, starved, and burned to death in every place – what do you propose we do?
  • It requires only 3.5% of the population to engage in protest to bring about change; how do we convince you to help us?

An Appeal to Build Networks of Care

September 22, 2024 /Opinion

Reposted from the Eugene Weekly’s 9/21/24 Guest Viewpoint

An Open Letter to the Whiteaker Community Council and all neighbors in the Whit

Recently, a letter has been circulating from the Whiteaker Community Council to the city of Eugene and its Parks department requesting that they “revoke any permits for daily group feeding activities in Washington Jefferson Park(WJ).”

Listed among the reasons for this request are things such as theft, trash, drugs, threats and harassment of city staff.

Reading this was disheartening and disturbing. It charts a dark path for our community toward a world bleaker than most of us have seen. In this world, we and our neighbors deepen a culture of distrust, unmet needs and a narrative that our safety and best interest will always be in opposition to another’s.

Consider this letter a supplication of the most heartfelt and desperately hopeful degree, to understand that all of our fates are bound together. This is an appeal to both your empathy and your pragmatism.

Individual health and collective health are inextricably tied. The more unmet needs that exist in a community, the less safe every person is. As the housing crisis and inflation are soaring, and being financially stable is becoming less accessible to people, more people are living outside and relying on social services to make their lives liveable. The contradictions and the economic conditions are getting worse, and there is no sign of that stopping.

Every time a necessary resource is taken from a person, their humanity is degraded. This is not only a matter of dignity; it has very material affects and consequences. Low blood sugar will make a person cranky — if they continue in that state, and it becomes more severe, their ability to self-regulate becomes exponentially more difficult, and their need becomes urgent, even desperate. What do desperate people do?

Removing access to vital resources puts those who have the least power and the most vulnerability in an impossible situation.

Every time a person, a politician, a group, or a neighborhood makes a free service or resource unavailable, everyone becomes less safe. The needs don’t go away; people still need to get their needs met, but the places they were going to get it are gone. This means that the places they go to get it are less safe, and probably less legal.

If you’re looking for a culpable party, blame the politicians that are feigning helplessness in the face of these issues, the property owners who are buying multiple houses and complexes to leverage them for wealth, and making it impossible for working-class people and families to buy or rent here. Blame property developers, who have made the city more and more inaccessible to people without wealth to afford basic expenses.

The needs begin to stack and stack, and the weight on the community-minded and the helpers becomes heavier. On the West Coast — and in Lane County and Eugene, specifically —, we are seeing a disproportionate amount of individuals living outside, because communities in many other cities throughout the country have made conditions absolutely unsurvivable, through hostile architecture, severe criminalization, lack of social services, etc.

Every single city that turns its back on the poor places a greater burden on other communities to meet the needs. The feedings at Washington Jefferson park are a perfect example of this. Until a few months ago, the group that feeds people in the park would serve a hundred meals at most, and only on pancake day. Since the massive rounds of sweeps that displaced long-standing communities on the railroad tracks this spring and summer, those numbers have doubled. Every serving day, upward of 200 people, 40 percent of which are housed and struggling to get by, come to WJ to get a meal.

This cycle, if it continues to build momentum, paints an ugly picture for all of us in which we build walls around houses, place locks on every door, fence and dumpster, and only the wealthy can protect themselves from the desperation of those who are given little choice but to take.

And each one of us must reconcile with the glaring question that follows:

How long until I’m the one with the unmet need?

Tragedy, disaster, addiction or just the stacking straws of burden placed on us by an unrelenting system of law and labor — at any moment one of us could be left with a deficit of resources, and will have a need for community care. We must, WE MUST, build these networks of community care, for the sake of our neighbors, our families and ourselves.

We have to decide what kind of people we will be. We have to decide if we are going to be people that take care of one another, that do the hard and tedious work of building relationships with our neighbors so that there is a net of care that can catch whoever happens to fall next, or if we will buy into the lie that there isn’t enough for everyone.

If you’re feeling angry, or afraid, or even desperate in the face of the unmet needs that are at your doorstep, don’t take it out on the people trying to help, and don’t take it out on the people who have found themselves in enough of a needs deficit that they have to live on a sidewalk.

And if you need help, let’s work together. Reach out to the local mutual aid groups — there are so many of us. We can organize park clean-ups, medical and sanitary supplies to keep people healthier and needles off the ground, open up spaces for relationship-building, and so much more.

I’ve reached out to each of these groups and they have given explicit permission be resources to the Whiteaker neighborhood and community members.

  • Neighborhood Anarchist Collective: NAC has many projects and community organizers, and is willing to be reached out to for support with issues at WH. Reach out through their website: https://neighborhoodanarchists.org/
  • Housing and Neighborhood Defense: HAND organizes working class people in Eugene and Springfield to collectively combat exploitation by landlords, developers, and other class enemies. For more about  public meetings and events:  eugeneHAND.org or their Instagram @eug.HAND to get involved.
  • Community Alliance of Lane County: CALC collaborates with orgs and groups to enact positive social change. They have a lot of resources and could help with specific support requests.

A few of the other  orgs that support this letter(each has an Instagram):

  • Jewish Voices for Peace Eugene
  • Springfield Eugene Anti-Imperialist Coalition
  • Food not Bombs Eugene
  • Eugene Community Fridge

Other local resources for those in crisis:

Call 541-682-5111 to request CAHOOTS, a mobile crisis unit that is available 24/7 and can send a team directly to your location.

Call the White Bird Crisis line at 541-687-4000 to speak with a counselor that can support someone through a crisis over the phone or direct them to relevant resources.

For anyone who is seeking help with substance recovery, Willamette Family Downtown Treatment Center takes walk-ins.

Buckley Detox Center (605 West 4th Avenue) also accepts walk-ins for sobering services, daily 5 pm to 5 am.

This list is not comprehensive; it is just a sample of the care this community has to offer if we work together.

Collective care is always the antidote.

Jesselyn Perkins is a community organizer.

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