In the lap of the ancestors

Tonight Ted Wheeler, serving his fourth year as Mayor of Portland, joined the crowd at the Federal complex where the protests have now been occurring for 56 nights. He was surrounded by large, heavily-muscled body guards and taunted by a crowd numbering at least two thousand people. He was standing up against the fence that is the point of contact between police and protesters when Federal agents fired a couple of canisters of tear gas at about 11 p.m. They were restrained. They didn’t use impact munitions and other military equipment. They didn’t come out and rush the crowd and beat people with truncheons as they have done so often. They just tossed a few tentative canisters of gas, a photo-op for the Mayor. 

Wheeler stayed, wearing a flimsy single-use hospital mask and some plastic goggles, breathing gas and lifting his mask occasionally to swig from a plastic water bottle, until his goggles fogged up, his eyes teared, his nose ran, he coughed several times, and he seemed on the verge of vomiting. The account in the local newspaper is here, with photos by Dave Killen and Beth Nakamura. Wheeler’s story is that the Feds are an invading force and should leave Portland, on which we agree. But the Portland Police under Wheeler’s direction have been just as vicious as the Feds. This account by Greg McKelvey, who I blipped four years ago, tells the full story of this Mayor.  

I watched all this on Livestream through Facebook. I continue to worry for the people I know and care deeply about, who I have been photographing for the past ten years, who go down there and face that violence. Every night. For 56 nights so far. My photo today is the bronze lap of St. Francis in the rosy light of dusk. I leave the protection of all these precious young beings in the laps of the saints, if there are any, and all the ancestors.