This will probably take longer than three minutes, so I will post the full text on the internet at morningredrainbow.wordpress.com. There is a place for comments, and I would be interested in your thoughts, so feel free to post comments.
The last time I spoke here, I received a reprimand for not showing proper respect to the council.
As a practicing non-believer, I have to have the utmost respect for the truth. Showing respect to someone who is not respectable would be false action, and wouldn’t express my true feelings.
Fortunately for you, there is an easy way to earn my respect: Stop punishing innocent people. Stop punishing people for non-criminal behavior.
Here I want to note the distinction between criminal behavior and unlawful behavior. I think that criminality defines behavior that does harm. A crime has a victim. Fortunately, most crimes are also unlawful, which means that a government entity has passed a law forbidding them.
Unfortunately, there are some crimes that have not been forbidden. Most of these are white collar crimes, and making those actions unlawful would reduce the income of some rich guys. I think of these as “legal crimes”. These include polluting the environment, releasing genetically modified pollen into the ecosystem, amassing fortunes while paying starvation wages to your workers, lying to the public, and giving money to politicians.
Punishing innocent people is also a legal crime. It is a crime because it has victims such as people whose lives are ruined by being sent to prison for using an “unapproved” substance and the homeless people whose misery is increased with each police action .
On the other side of the coin, we have unlawful actions that are not crimes. I’ll refer to these as “non-criminal laws”. These are keeping the prison industry humming. The industry would take a big hit if they could imprison only criminals, and not people who have broken non-criminal laws.
This divide between legal crimes and non-criminal laws goes to the very heart of the social contract between the government and the people. When a government outlaws non-criminal behavior, it crosses (here is where my three minutes ran out) the boundary between a free, open society and tyranny.
The worst examples of non-criminal laws are in the theocracies in the Middle East. All sorts of behavior that we would consider normal has been banned. Things like women driving, girls being educated, and anything else that might pose a threat to the ruling patriarchy or go against the religious edicts of the rulers.
There is a hint of theocracy in some of America’s non-criminal laws. The laws banning gay marriage were enacted due to pressure from certain religious people. Another example are the laws banning the use of the natural sacraments, such as peyote, psilocybin, and marijuana.
As we can see from the example of the Middle East, creating a theocracy, or adding to the control that religions have over the government could be dangerous.
The city of Eugene has been using a non-criminal law, which is the ban on camping on public land. They do this, not to imprison the unhoused, but to pester and bully them. The only reason I can think of them for doing it is to make it so unpleasant for them that they will eventually leave town.
So the first step for you to gain my respect will be to stop citing people for trespass, confiscating their property, and forcing them to move from public land. Take down the “no trespassing” and “no camping” signs.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt for you to show more respect for the people you are theoretically working for. In order to solve the difficult problems we have today, we need to work together in mutual respect.

Finally, I would like to address the mayor directly.
I have been especially angry with you lately, and I think it is because you just were the proverbial last straw. It is especially disheartening when a progressive politician turns away from the people. First it was Lyndon Johnson escalating in Vietnam after being elected on a dovish platform. Then it was Barack Obama passing off a Heritage Foundation scheme as health care reform. Now you are complicit in the persecution of the unhoused.
I understand that you have the power to declare an emergency and suspend the camping ban. If you do have this power, you should have used it long ago. If you don’t have this power, you still have been lax in your oversight of the city manager. All your public statements about the April 4 police raid on Whoville back him up, and you stick to the official story while neglecting to mention things like how desperately the homeless advocates tried to meet with the manager to work out an exit plan that wouldn’t waste so much money on an extreme show of force. If no elected official has control of the city manager, the city manager position itself should become an elected office.
You need to do something to rescue your legacy. When I think of Lyndon Johnson, I don’t think of civil rights and the war on poverty. All I can think of is the old chant, “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Tonight I’d like to consider the word “public”. It is generally used to refer to the people or citizens of a city, state or country. I am concerned that our public servants (city government, police, etc.) have abandoned the people they have sworn to serve.

Finally giving up all pretense of serving the people, the city is now considering the final privatization of the last “public” area of Eugene, Kesey Square. They have slowly been taking this place away from the public and turning it over to for profit businesses. They tore down the only public place to sit, and rented space to food carts to use during the day.

These food carts fill the plaza with chairs for use by their paying customers, instead of the general public. ( As a person suffering from stenosis, sometimes after being on my feet for 15 minutes, I have to sit down until the pain goes away and I can continue on my way.)

These carts have worked out a sweetheart deal that basically allows them to run restaurants (using public land) without even providing rest rooms for their customers. This gives them a big advantage over other restaurants in the city.

Now the owners of the food carts want Kesey Square to be closed at night so they don’t have to clean up human waste that is left in the square due to the lack of restrooms. This is another direct attack on the unhoused people of Eugene, taking away the one place they can be. Instead of this, the city should ban food carts from the plaza and put in benches and restrooms for the people.

I can think of no public good that can be accomplished by waging a war on homeless people. The city has been spending a lot of the public’s money to do this. I hope soon to see a report on how much this endeavor has cost the taxpaying public. I hope that the city would release this information without requiring the people to file a formal request for these public records. I am especially interested in how much the city spent on the April 4 Whoville closure as well as the accumulated price tag for the continued harassment of the who’s.

Eugene needs at least one place where people can be without being arrested for being there. It doesn’t have to be Kesey Square, but it has to be somewhere.

After clicking on one of the latest online petitions (in response to Obama’s decision to help with the budget by altering the chained CPI for social security), I began to wonder how much our elected representatives actually pay attention.
I decided that there might be something I could do to emphasize my disappointment, so I changed my voter registration to drop my affiliation with the Democratic party. I also notified Obama and my congressional representatives that I did so.
If enough people will do this, our politicians might take more notice that they should start watching out for the general public instead of their donors.
If you agree that our elected representatives need a stronger message than online petitions, please share this post.
Thank you.