by Street Roots staff
“We need a wider way to spread the conviction that moral
ethics are really the basis of a happy life. This is true on an individual
level as well as on a family, community and humanity level. That is something
common for all major religions and traditions, as well as non-believers.
Everybody wants to be happy and have a happy family.”
— The Dalai Lama, July 20
“My generation of service members is very skittish and they
don’t necessarily come out and say I’m homeless. It is pride. The military is a
very fear-based society. They pretty much tell you if you talk to someone, it’s
on your permanent record. You have the pride of wearing the uniform, you’re
children’s heroes, and now you’re needing help and asking for it? That just
throws so many people off.”
— Ryan McNabb, Iraq War Veteran,
Jan. 6
“Being an athlete can pick you up when you are down, and
pick other people’s spirits up. That’s what sports is all about. I’m not above
the people.”
— Damian Lillard, Portland Trail
Blazer, Nov. 9
“The conventional understanding is that you only get into
prison if you are committing crime. So I think for a lot of people, all of
those people that wind up in prison have forfeited their right to be the
beneficiaries of moral outrage.
The truth is, these very high rates of incarceration have a
little bit to do with crime, but a lot to do with how the American economy has
developed and how American politics have developed.”
— Bruce Western, author of
Punishment and Inequality in America, Jan. 20
“From what I have heard and seen they are behaving
responsibly. I don’t have anything against what they are doing, but as
commissioner I have a responsibility to enforce building codes, etcetera. There
is a path for the group to be able to obtain legal status, but I won’t be
waiving fines. It’s not about Right 2 Dream Too, it’s attached to the property
owner who is responsible.”
— Dan Saltzman, Portland city
commissioner, regarding Right 2 Dream Too, Feb. 17
“They didn’t want anyone to talk about anything that was
going to make the police uncomfortable. Well, it’s uncomfortable when police
shoot people in our community. That’s uncomfortable. When they racial profile
people, that’s uncomfortable. So it didn’t matter to me that people who are
paid with taxpayer dollars are going to be uncomfortable in a meeting. They
need to get over that.”
— Jo Ann Hardesty, police reform
activist, regarding the city’s Human Rights
Commission subcommittee on police and community relations, March 2
“We can’t afford to insure 50 million people in this
country, and there are millions of others who are under-insured, who are making
medical decisions because they can’t afford it. Somebody has to radicalize the
process, somebody’s got to get out there and shout from the rooftops and the
treetops that this is untenable. And patients, especially patients of color,
poor patients — we’re killing 134,000 Medicare patients a year in this country
through medical error.”
— William Charney, author,
Epidemic of Medical Errors and Hospital-Acquired Infections: Systemic and
Social Causes, March 16
“During World War II, every American knew a soldier at war.
During the Vietnam war, almost every American knew a soldier at war. But During
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we only know 2 or 2 percent of the soldiers at
war. My goal was for American people to get to know the soldiers that we send
to war.”
— Jim Lommasson, photographer,
April 13
“Music stirs the imagination which is really an important
thing for the development of any species.
Without imagination, you just dry up and die. You become a thing of the
past and you become irrelevant and eventually you will no longer be. So, if
you’re talking about a long range view of humanity, I see a very bleak future
when you don’t have the arts. Not just
music, but all kinds of arts. Because we were given those arts to become human
and stay human and advance as a species.
This takes us back to the Stone Age.”
— Mickey Hart, musician, April 27
“I can’t tell you what that does to a person. It’s the
scariest thing there is. If we can just get through this little pinch, we know
we’ll be OK.” … “I’ve never seen so many people hurting and suffering …”
— Caller to 211info, May 11
”Portland seems to pride itself on this sort of grooviness
that they’ve got and how hip it is. A lot of this has been built on a horrible
bed of inequality and terrible practices against people of color. So a story
like “Vanport 1948” is still good for people to hear. People who do not know
history are doomed to repeat it.
— Lewi Longmire, musician, May 25
“Toilets extend human longevity by 20 years. The flush
toilet extended our lives. According to some scientists, the flush toilet is
the biggest medical advancement of the last century. They could have said
vaccination; they could have said a lot of other medical advances, but they
said the flush toilet. It is the cheapest preventative medicine. The problem
with health care is that it’s driven by vested interests to cure people when
they are sick, not to prevent them from being sick. Investment in the toilets
has to be viewed as the cheapest health care and hygiene tool.”
— Jack Sim, World Toilet
Organization,
June 8
“The atomization that is so prevalent in the society as a
whole is harmful to individual movements, which could benefit greatly from
participation in a common enterprise with many complementary facets. That is
why for many years — many decades in fact — there have been efforts to create
broader regional or even national and international coalitions. It hasn’t been
easy, but it is clearly desirable.”
— Noam Chomsky, June 22
“I wouldn’t be dressing in the clothing that I’m dressing
in, and I wouldn’t be dancing and moving the way I do, if I wasn’t confident in
my songwriting and my performance and my singing and my grit and integrity and
the work that I have done to get to this place. For years I was hiding behind
blue jeans and cowboy boots and men’s T-shirts. I needed to hide and incubate
my skills in order to come out of my shell and become more comfortable and own
my womanhood. It took a long time.”
— Grace Potter, singer,
chanteuse, July 6
“I know that I’ve been called to ordination by God, and you
men are telling me no, when your biblical commission says there’s nothing to
stand in the way of my ordination. You’re making this decision based on
something that makes no sense to anybody: that because I’m a woman and I don’t
have a penis, I can’t be a priest.”
— Toni Tortorilla, a woman priest
in Portland, Aug. 17
“We participate in the process of making the media the way
they are. They’re essentially a commercial operation. If they didn’t sell their
image of the world, then they wouldn’t continue trying to peddle it. There
isn’t a conspiracy, is my point…. Basically what I contend is that it’s not a
responsible or useful position to blame the media whenever, increasingly, it is
in our own hands to change the media.”
— Brooke Gladstone, NPR’s On the
Media, Sept. 14
“Children notice everything. They are so sensitive. They are
so aware and very sophisticated. I don’t mean that they know how to run an
iPad. I mean sophisticated in an emotional and intellectual way. They are
forming a vision of the world all the time.”
— Natalie Merchant, musician,
Sept. 28
“You have my commitment to keeping our downtown the livable
center of a livable city, and to exploring all ideas and partnerships that will
help us make that vision real on the streets.
In the interim, until we can find and implement lasting solutions I
support Right 2 Dream Too. It’s not
perfect, but it provides Portland citizens with basic fundamental rights of
shelter, water and food.”
— Then-candidate Charlie Hales,
Portland mayor-elect, Oct. 12
“If you tell an elected official in a small town in
Minnesota that they should create harm reduction programs, they won’t care,
because they think it doesn’t affect their constituents. But what we’re seeing is
that drug abuse is really the same in every state, across the board, from
heroin to over-the-counter medicine. It will take leaders making drug addiction
a personal issue — by realizing that their family, friends, constituents are
effected by it — to get to real change.”
— Allan Clear, director of the
Harm Reduction Coalition, Nov. 23
“It’s striking to me that on the federal level, there’s no
dialogue about poverty. I can’t remember the last time I heard President Obama
talk about poverty. He talks a lot about the middle class. And Mitt Romney even
said, “I’m not concerned with the very rich or the very poor, I’m concerned
about the middle class.” I think that’s a pervasive attitude in both parties
throughout Washington.”
— Ari Shapiro, NPR White House
Correspondence, Dec. 7
This article appears in 2013-01-04.