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
— 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
— 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