February 07, 2003
Student Strike in Words
Sitting on my camera is a rather large set of pictures from yesterday's student rally and march in downtown Portland, but I'm not going to get around to pulling them off and uploading them until later today.
At the waterfront, the crowd just milled around for quite some time as small groups of students continued to trickle in. Prior to the actual march, a ceremony of sorts was conducted at the center of the crowd -- difficult to hear if you weren't crushed in with everyone else, and impossible to see if you're like me and aren't aggressive enough in pushing through with one's camera.
Said ceremony consisted mainly of short statements by various protestors, and the collection of items related to the importance of education being placed into a small, black coffin marked, "RIP Public Education."
Then came the march.
In all honesty, I didn't even know in advance that the group intended to march at all. I recall no confrontations over this part of the protest. Police tailed the march from behind (I have no idea if they were doing so in order to keep the march moving, although that might be a reasonable assumption), in addition to circling around to get in front and block intersections through which the march was going to pass.
As the marchers approached SW Broadway and Morrison, they slowed to a halt and told the police blocking the street to let the MAX train pass because, as the protestors said, they believe in public transportation. The waiting cars, however, remained blocked from passage by the police.
Also escaping my advance knowledge was the stop at City Hall. Rather than squeezing through with the mass of students, I hustled around to the opposite side of the building, eventually taking the elevator to the floor above where they had assembled, so I could come down to them from above via the stairs.
This, of course, is when the Mayor put in an appearance. What threatened to become little more than a jumbled shouting match was reigned in fairly well by a few of the students present, who tried to keep the crowd from getting too heated, and kept track of who had questions they wanted to ask the Mayor.
Here's where I'll get into trouble. As ever with these sorts of things, both sides occassionally veered into being unproductive. While almost all of the questions posed were smart and reasonable, when the responses didn't suit the questioners, the "meeting" devolved into brief bouts of shouting. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but at some point (I would think) you need to consider that other people present also have questions to ask, and if you get too insulting along the way, you're going to lose your audience, and the other questioners just get cheated out of their opportunity.
(As a sidenote, it didn't help that some in the crowd were berating the Mayor for supporting an expensive war at the same time that states and localities don't have money for education and social services. Apparently, these few managed to miss the fact that the Mayor voted "yes" on the recent faield antiwar resolution before the City Council.)
As for the Mayor, it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, she came out to speak with the students. And she did try to explain to them the current process underway, at the city and county levels, to provide funding for schools and social services. On the other hand, her habit of getting overly testy when confronted with people challenging her positions or her explanations did, in fact, flare up now and then.
This was especially irksome because, despite those in the crowd who kept trying to turn the session into an "I mouthed off to the Man!" moment, there were other students very specifically trying to steer the discussion in productive directions. Much like the JTTF hearing, the Mayor seemed, at times, dangerously close to dismissing everyone's right to be heard because of the hyperactivity of a few.
In the end, another well-orchestrated event organized by the Student Activist Alliance, who are holding meetings on strategy, and can be expected to continue as a presence in the days to come.
For the sake of filling in the blanks with other reports and perspectives, there are items on the events at the Portland IndyMedia Center here, here, and here.
In addition, someone has posted a collage of the City Hall sit-in.