PORTLAND CITY HALL HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT

“I have nine children with nine different women,” said Richard Cox, 56, who also said he is a former Army Ranger and has been homeless for a year. He, along with Aaron Porter, 24, were assigned to me as trained press liaisons for the homeless encampment at Portland City Hall on Congress Street. Aaron told me he has been homeless for eight years but both men preferred to call themselves “unhoused.”

Press liasons Richard Cox and Aaron Porter

They were attached to me last Friday after I took some pictures near the medical tent and asked questions of the volunteers there. One got on a walkie-talkie and pretty soon Richard and Aaron showed up. We went around the corner on a side street so my digital audio device didn’t pick up traffic noise or screaming obscenities from “residents” like the two women near us were delivering with incredibly-loud voices. 

Gray stains on pavement are dried urine

The “unhoused” encampment has grown on the steps of Portland City Hall and on the sidewalks in front of and beside the impressive stone edifice for almost two weeks. It would be more accurate to describe the building as a formerly-impressive edifice as it’s now covered with stains of dried urine, tents, trash,  sleeping bags, canopies, and people sleeping or walking around. How much more the encampment grows may be determined by a Portland City Council meeting scheduled for Monday, August 3rd.

Aaron and Richard told me no one is working in the building since Covid and are instead working from home. However, the Portland Press Herald reported that City Hall closed for business the previous Monday because staff felt unsafe. Walking around the encampment, I was reminded of what's happening at the other Portland on the west coast and in Seattle where leftists took over whole city blocks.

A large, prominent, professionally-printed sign on the sidewalk declared: “Our Demands,” which included: “DEFUND THE POLICE” and “EXTEND EVICTION FREEZE.” Another sign said: “HOMELESS LIVES MATTER.” That called to mind the Black Lives Matters protests there few weeks ago accompanied by violence and looting. Protesters included organizers like African refugees Hamdia Ahmed and Abdul Ali. Later, someone named Abdikareem Hasan was arrested for firing several shots into the nearby Portland Police Station parking garage.

Abdikareem Hassan

Leaving Richard and Aaron and walking carefully up the steps of City Hall, I squeezed between tents and sleeping bags, some with crashed-out people in them. There was dried urine all the way to the top and I couldn’t avoid stepping in it. I pitied people in tents on the lower steps and on the sidewalk as the urine would, of course, flow down to them, especially when it rained. I was glad not to see, or step in, any excrement, however.

Urine stains on City Hall steps

In one kiosk, I saw a list of people to whom donated tents, sleeping bags, soap, XL women’s diapers, kids’ clothes, and many other donated items had been given. There were written directions conspicuously posted explaining when to administer Narcan for those who overdose. 

“Housed” people were arriving regularly to drop off items that were requested on still another list. Everything visible, except for the people, was donated from the outside. This was clearly kept going by others who wanted political visibility.

Press liaisons Richard and Aaron wore walkie-talkies on their belts and were periodically called to quell disturbances. A Paddy Wagon with blue lights flashing on the next block took people to the police station or to the Cumberland County Jail where I had been volunteering for four years until the pandemic closed it to employees and inmates only.

Preble Street Resource Center

Also closed down by government overreaction to the virus was the nearby Preble Street Resource Center. It had provided all the services to the homeless now being delivered at the City Hall encampment and more. That seems a foolish decision considering that those camping at City Hall and in Deering Oaks Park aren’t socially distancing and few wear masks. There were also toilets at Preble Street. Paradoxically, it seems the “unhoused” at the encampment don’t have to live in donated tents because city officials have said homeless shelters at Oxford Street and at the Portland Expo are operating at only half capacity.

Portland Police Chief Frank Clark reported that shots were fired at the encampment on Saturday. The whole thing seems a political stunt to this writer and US News said it's organized by something called the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition,” I did several searches for it and only came up with a Facebook page. Links from there led me to national, leftist sites with LGBT, socialist, and communist links. The Portland Press Herald, however, has not dug into the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition” or its affiliates.

Is Portland, Maine being plagued by the same leftist forces now ruining the other Portland on the west coast? It would seem so.

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

Santa Maria in Portland Harbor

What struck me most about the Santa Maria was how tiny she is. A replica sailed into Portland Harbor last month and I paid ten dollars to go aboard and look around. More astonishing still was remembering that the Nina and the Pinta — the two caravels sailing with the Santa Maria — were even smaller. There’s only one enclosed space on the biggest ship, and that was where the captain slept. Its fifty-two crew members slept on the open deck of the 117-foot ship, only going below with the cargo when the weather was bad.

Good Columbus

Americans my age were taught to revere Columbus for his intrepid maritime leadership sailing across uncharted waters, holding a mutinous crew together, and discovering what we call America. Now school children are taught that Columbus was a money-grubbing, European, white guy who slaughtered and enslaved innocent Native Americans who only wanted to help him and his men. When Democrats took over Maine government in 2018, they abolished Columbus Day and ordered Maine citizens to celebrate “Indigenous Citizens Day” instead.

Bad Columbus

Not only that, schoolchildren are now taught that Columbus was too dumb to know he had bumped into two previously unknown continents and thought he was in the Indies. So, he called the people he found “Indians,” and they continued to be called that for the next five centuries until progressives insisted they be called Native Americans. Whenever I meet someone who is a real American Indian and looks nothing like Senator Elizabeth Warren, I ask whether he or she wishes to be called Indian or Native American. So far, all have said, “Indian.” Next time I’ll also ask: “How about calling you ’Indigenous Person’?” but I think I know what the answer will be.

In light of all this, I wonder if I should be wishing people “Happy Indigenous People Day” over the weekend in Maine, and “Happy Columbus Day” in New Hampshire since I’m so often driving back and forth across the state line. Will automobile dealerships in Maine be putting on special Indigenous People’s Day Sales? Is it now illegal to sponsor a “Special Columbus Day Sale” over here on Maine’s side of the border?

Since no drawings or plans of the original Santa Maria exist, we cannot know how closely the ship I explored compared to it. All I can say is that it represents the closest guess of what it probably looked like based on other ships in use at the time. I have to wonder if the Spanish crew members knew about what happened in Maine when Democrats returned to power. Would they have sailed right on by Portland if they knew?

Portland Progressives demonstrate

I didn’t see any left-wing demonstrators down there on Commercial Street while I was touring the ship and it doesn’t take much to get them cranked up enough to staple signs to sticks and march down the street chanting. I expected the arrival of Columbus’s ship would have been enough to turn them out. Doing research for this article, I learned that a replica of Nina sank last April in Corpus Christi Texas, but the articles I read said nothing about foul play and the ship was eventually re-floated.

The City of Portland had earlier (2017) abolished Columbus Day before the whole state did it in 2019 but I don’t recall seeing any Indigenous People celebrating the new holiday and I’m often there during the second Monday of October. Come to think of it, I never saw any Spanish Americans or Italian Americans (Columbus was Italian) celebrating when it was called Columbus Day either. I do see people celebrating other holidays like the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, but those last two are threatened by progressives as well. The Pilgrims, after all, were also white Europeans. Progressive groups are now claiming that Thanksgiving is “celebrating ongoing genocide.”

And of course, Christmas has been under siege by the left for decades now. Public schools no longer mention the word, calling it “Winter Holiday” instead. People paying homage to political correctness are hesitant to say, “Merry Christmas” outside their own household, wish people “Happy Holidays.” It all makes me wonder: what’s next? Labor Day? The diminishing number of unionized workers still marks the occasion but most of our populace gives it a big ho-hum.

Memorial Day is celebrated and we’ve all known soldiers who have died in recent wars. That holiday should be safe, and Veteran’s Day too. Martin Luther King Day? It’s still relatively new so I guess it’ll be okay for a while. I have come to believe most Americans care much more about getting a paid holiday off from work than whatever it is that day is supposed to commemorate.

It’ll be up to the Spanish now to decide whether they’ll pay future voyages of the Santa Maria to Portland, Maine.

The Transgender Juggernaut

Last Saturday’s Conway Daily Sun reported on a “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the local public library scheduled for later this month. According to the national organization for drag queens who want to read books to children, the target demographic is children aged 3-8. Books that “may be read” include: "Jacob's New Dress" by Sarah and Ian Hoffman and "Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.” Children must be accompanied by an adult so parental permission is assumed. If that’s something to which parents want to expose their kids, so be it.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a further assault on societal sexual norms. I mean it’s not as if homosexual men are suddenly dedicated to raising literacy rates. The library program is voluntary but elementary schools are mandatory and supported by our tax dollars. Similar homosexual propaganda is endorsed by teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats at all levels and we’re paying for it.

Just before I retired from teaching, I learned that a boy in the lower grades thought he was a girl. His parents evidently believed he was and insisted that everyone at the local elementary school behave as if he were. I figured I’d be gone before he got to my classroom and wouldn’t have to deal with the situation, and that’s the way it worked out. All elementary staff used female pronouns and he used the girls’ bathroom. I don’t know how long his confusion lasted and I wondered if the parents went ahead with puberty-blocking drugs and penis amputation for him as well.

Perhaps the boy overcame his confusion. Seventy or eighty percent do according to brave psychiatrists not afraid to speak out, but when everyone with whom a sexually confused young person comes in contact cooperates with the pretense it will likely persist. I felt bad for the little boy because the rate of suicide attempts for so-called transgenders was and is higher than 40%. The LGBTQIA (and whatever other letters have added to the ever-expanding acronym) lobby insists it’s because of discrimination by people who continue to maintain that humans are male and female and cannot switch sex on a whim.

Others dispute that. According to Daniel Payne writing in the Federalist: “[I]t utterly ignores the most salient feature of transgender individuals: that they are mentally ill and need serious treatment. This is not a moral or ethical judgment. It is, rather, a fact. Individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so—and one would quite reasonably expect a higher suicide rate from a portion of the population that suffers from so significant a mental illness (particularly a mental illness it is fashionable to indulge rather than treat).”

It was possible that a sexually confused student might transfer into my class and I resolved that I would not call her “him” or him “her” even if school authorities insisted and if I were fired I’d sue. I didn’t want to hurt the student’s feelings but I had a responsibility to other students. If I went along I’d signal that I believed it was possible to change from male to female or vice versa, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t pretend to admire the emperor’s new clothes or Morris’s tangerine dress as it were. I would resist the education Thought Police as well.

Mainstream media ignore developments counter to the LGBTQIA narrative so you’re not likely to read about so-called “transgenders” who regret their transition and seek to reverse their surgery. The Daily Wire quotes Professor Miroslav Djordjevic of Belgrade, one of the world’s leading genital reconstructive surgeons: “Definitely reversal surgery and regret in transgender persons is one of the very hot topics. Generally, we have to support all research in this field.” But universities will not fund it because it counters the LGBTQIA narrative.

Last week, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a bill banning “conversion therapy” defined as: “any practice or treatment that seeks or claims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” Maine therapists could lose their license if they help a child accept his/her biological sex. Canada’s Supreme Court ruled last month that a parent must allow his 14-year-old daughter to receive male hormone injections. Last year, an Ohio judge removed a female child from her parents’ custody because they refused to allow hormone injections.

Last year, Brown University Assistant Professor Lisa Littman MD published a research study on ROGD — “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” in PLOS One a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Among her findings: “Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a[an adolescent female] peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.” To this former teacher of adolescent girls, her conclusions seemed eminently plausible.

Littman was vilified by the LGBTQIA lobby for “using transphobic dogwhistles” because she pulled the rug out from under the fashionable transgender juggernaut now getting its nose in the tent of the Conway Public Library.

Male Issues

At the Women's March

Men aren’t doing well here in the 21st century. Male life expectancy has always been lower than that of females by about five years but lately, it is declining further. Researchers cite what they call “deaths of despair” in non-college-educated white men aged 45-54. “The mortality rate for that group… increased by a half percent each year from 1999 to 2013,” according to NPR, mostly because of suicide, drugs, and alcohol, yet progressives insist men should renounce their “white male privilege.” It would appear that white men are feeling anything but privileged.

Fifty years ago, 60% of those with bachelor’s degrees were men. Today the reverse is true. Boys are behind girls in primary and secondary schools as well and according to a 2002 60 Minutes report they’ve been falling behind for a long time. Increasingly, boys simply don’t like school. For many parents, it’s a fight to get their sons to school every morning.

During my teaching career, it was clear that the culture of most public school classrooms suited girls much more than boys, many of whom found it confining and restrictive. They needed more active, hands-on activities such as a vocational school environment would provide. Unfortunately, those were reserved for high school boys only — by which time many had developed profoundly negative feelings about school and themselves that were very hard to penetrate.

Men who do go to college might be considered part of a “rape culture,” especially white men. Ask the Duke Lacrosse team. Ask the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity about “rape culture.” With no evidence, and only on the word of a single woman in each case, two large universities made these young men’s lives hell because both institutions denied the men any presumption of innocence and automatically assumed the worst. The same phenomenon led to the Kavanaugh Hearings debacle.

At the Women's March

This is not to deny that a lot of men behave abominably toward women and always have. Such men have little or no control over their sexual urges and don’t think they need to either, no matter who is hurt by their actions. Relatively recent laws against sexual harassment were much needed and overdue, but presumption of innocence and due process must be enforced at all times.

Last week’s news included articles on “toxic masculinity” and a Gillette commercial titled: “Is This The Best A Man Can Get?” Several conservative pundits objected but I saw little problem with it. It dramatized examples of men and boys bullying others and disrespecting women, but also of good men speaking up and acting to intervene.

Conspicuous by its absence in any of this was the plague of pornography to which so many men and boys have become addicted, and which contributes enormously to the dehumanization of women. That scourge was never mentioned.

At the March For Life

Last weekend there were two women’s marches in Washington. Friday saw the 44th March for Life. It was attended by a hundred thousand or more conservative women and a few men marching against abortion. Saturday it was the 3rd annual Women’s March with liberal women and many themes: Mostly it was a march against President Trump because the 1st march occurred the day after his inauguration. Second to that was a pro-abortion theme. Then there were climate change, black lives matter, and an anti-male theme. One sign called for the extinction of old white men. 

At the Women's March

Numbers were down at the Women’s March after a controversy over anti-Semitism — especially that of Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. One of the March’s organizers, Tamika Mallory, has a close association with Farrakhan and refused to denounce his Anti-Semitic statements. Ironically, it was Farrakhan who organized the Million Man March which drew more than 400,000 in 2005 and pushed themes of black unity, personal responsibility, and respect for black women — all good things it would seem. Anti-semitic remarks by Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian Muslim, drove down numbers as well.

At the Women's March

Meanwhile, $4.4 million in taxpayer money funded an American Psychological Association study that purports to define “traditional masculinity” and especially what it sees as negative aspects of it. Psychologists from Clark University and other institutions contributed to the "First-Ever Guidelines for Practice with Men and Boys," which includes, for example, a "Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form” by former APA President Ronald Levant — an analysis of how much “toxic masculinity” men have as determined by questions like: “Do you think men should be macho, or do you lean more to the metrosexual?” That is the highlighted question on his web site.

At the Women's March

Levant discounts biological differences between men and women, believing masculinity is entirely a social construct. I suspect that when men learn more about the APA’s new guidelines, even fewer will seek counseling from guys like Levant. They’d rather kill themselves.

Linguistic Annoyances

“Perfect.”

I’m hearing that a lot lately. If I tell a waiter or waitress my menu selection (s)he’ll say, “Perfect.” Talking to a with a technical support person or medical professional, I’ll identify myself by phone number or birthdate and hear: “Perfect.” How can my name or birthdate be perfect?

And then there’s “Yeah, no” to begin a response to a statement or a question. The first few times I heard “Yeah, no” I was thinking the respondent is confused or ambivalent, but after hearing them again and again I’m thinking maybe they’re a kind of preface designed to avoid giving offense to the interrogator — a way to keep one’s foot in the door so as to be able to backtrack if necessary and declaring from the start that you could go either way on the question.

Another trendy phrase is “having said that” or “that said,” which seems to be a signal that what follows builds upon whatever has been expressed. It leaves me thinking: “I know you just said that; I heard it.” Maybe it’s a clue that the speaker is about to go off in a different direction. Maybe it’s just superfluous, or a way to collect one’s thoughts before going on — a substitute for “ahhh…” which might sound foolish if repeated too many times. Or, that said, maybe the speaker thinks the phrase makes him sound cool and intelligent because he’s heard it used by others he considers cool and intelligent.

For years now I’ve been hearing “He signed off on it,” to mean “He approved it,” but the juxtaposition of opposite prepositions feels incongruous. “On” follows immediately after “Off” and disturbs my linguistic instincts. One can “sign on” to something, meaning to join with it, but to “sign off” would mean to quit. Those meanings are extant and have been for most of my lifetime so to hear “sign off on” for so long now is bothersome — almost as bad as beginning a response with “Yeah, no.”

And, lately “nuance” is being overused, especially when employed to describe a person when it was formerly limited to things like artistic performances or physical works of art. A synonym would be “subtle.” Now it’s used by progressives to disparage the president, as in: “Trump lacks nuance,” a condescending strategy to portray him as thick-headed and unable to recognize subtle shades of meaning that progressives and their ilk all perceive.

The tired expression “thinking outside the box” is finally in decline whereas “thrown under the bus” is still is wide use. I complained about the latter in a 2011 column in which I tried in vain to figure out where it originated. I’m learning to tolerate it though because it’s clearly not going away. I’ve stopped wondering: why a bus? Why not under a subway car or a truck? And, no more do I try to imagine what throwing someone under a bus would actually look like.

Many of us are careful to be fashionable in what we wear, drive, listen to, and say. There was a time I adhered to fashion trends like these but it was brief and long ago. As verification that I don’t any longer, one of my daughters sent me a Fathers’ Day card last year with a caricature of a geeky-looking man under which was written:

“Dad, your refusal to care who thinks you’re cool used to puzzle me.” (open card) “Now it inspires me!” 

At Whole Foods in Portland, Maine last week were men in various combinations of skinny jeans, man buns, facial metal, skin graffiti, and other trappings of millennial progressivism. They considered those accoutrements vital to their identities and I felt sorry for them, especially the older ones who hadn’t grown beyond all that. I like the multi-grain sandwich bread the store bakes on site every day, and it’s the only thing I buy there so I was in and out quickly. Had I stayed longer I might have heard samples of leftist language trends currently in fashion. 

For example, progressives have assigned new connotations to the familiar word “woke.” So far I’ve only encountered it in writing but were I to hang out at left-wing gathering places like Whole Foods I would probably hear it spoken. The new meaning has only figurative reference to sleeping or waking up; contextual clues indicate it’s a gauge of political consciousness. Merriamwebster.com confirms that, declaring: “‘Woke’ is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness… a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE).”

Also included was a caution from a New York Times writer that use of the word by white people would invoke charges of cultural appropriation — a definite linguistic/fashion/PC faux pas.