Last Friday night about 200 of us gathered at the courthouse in Enterprise to show our support for Black Lives and Brown Lives Matter. Our community—the 7000 who live in Wallowa County, is very white. But there are a few of color—and now we are proud to have Mexican and Thai and Chinese restaurants.
I was proud too to be part of the Friday gathering. There were other graybeards like me, who had marched in the 60s, when we were young and thought we could change the world. But there were young people too, people with babies and teenage kids, students who had graduated high school that very day. An American Indian who grew up here told his story, and I stood next to another Indian friend. A white woman in her 20s rallied the crowd—she and cohorts made sure there were signs for those of us who didn’t bring our own
There were police everywhere—city police, state police, and the incoming and outgoing sheriffs, who walked the crowd together smiling and chatting. The theater owner and his family pulled a wagon full of popcorn sacks through the crowd—and I think took some to the cops and few onlookers who leaned against walls across the street. A few of them had guns at their sides—“to protect the police from us,” the news reporter told me.
Two or three pickups drove by with fingers in the air, but more drivers pumped fists and honked horns—some even had signs.
This morning a post from Carlsbad and Oceanside, California, where I went to high school sixty years ago, showed thousands marching peacefully to meet between the cities. It’s not just Minneapolis and Portland, but Enterprise and Oceanside, and hundreds of places in between.
It felt like the 60s, when Joan Baez linked arms with Martin Luther King, and white people joined our black and brown brothers and sisters saying “we’re all in this together; let’s do something.”
Maybe George Floyd will change the world, as the preacher said.
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