Tuesday, Nov. 27, 7pm at the Growers Market Round Table, 454 Willamette St.
OEMG has a new office at the Growers Market! To celebrate, we will be having a Grand Opening at 7pm, November 27. Come watch Occupy Eugene Media with us, share food, drink and conversation. Let’s celebrate our accomplishments! As Occupiers, we have had a great year and came a long way!
Occupy Eugene activists are staging a protest Friday 10:30 – 11:30 AM at the Eugene West 11th Walmart to bring attention to 1% media blitz targeting the 99% to buy buy buy on Black Friday. Unfettered consumerism leads to debt and time away from the family while at the same time large corporations reap record profits. Many of these big box stores, including Walmart, have abysmal employee wages and benefits.
Please join Occupy Eugene in buying nothing and challenging the Corporate Status Quo.
Bring a Sign
Here are some Ideas:
• OCCUPY CHRISTMAS
• STAND UP AND LIVE BETTER
• STEP OFF THE CONSUMER TREADMILL
• SHOP LESS LIVE MORE
• KEEP CALM AND DON’T SHOP
This is a companion action to the protest taking place simultaneously at the Green Acres Walmart , which is being held by the Eugene Solidarity Network, Pacific Green Party and United Food and Commercial Workers.
Contact: Gwendolyn Iris
Photo credit: Gregory Walker
On Saturday, November 17, Occupy Eugene activist Gwendolyn Iris climbed a $70,000 chain link fence that bars access to Eugene’s old City Hall near 8th and High and chained herself to it in protest of the City’s lack of action for the unhoused.
“This is a symbolic action on my part,” Iris said. “I want to call attention to the fact that there’s been little to no progress made on the agreements that the city made with members of Occupy Eugene last year around the closing of the site [Washington-Jefferson Park]. There was supposed to be $100,000 allocated towards a new wet bed facility.” A wet bed facility is a shelter that provides a place for chronically alcoholic homeless men and women to sleep.
Iris also said a women’s and children’s shelter had been discussed at the time the City closed the Occupy Eugene site at Washington-Jefferson Park.
The breaching of the old City Hall’s new fence came after a day of activism, called Act Against Apathy, spearheaded by Iris and others in Occupy Eugene. The day’s events included a rally during which homeless people and their advocates spoke, recited poetry, marched, and held a memorial at the steps of the old City Hall for the homeless people who have died on the streets of Eugene in the last two years. Activists also served hot meals at a kitchen set up in the Park Blocks to anyone who needed one.
Iris plans to stay until Monday when she has to return to her job. She encourages people to come see her and talk about the problems of homelessness and possible solutions. “While we’re angry,” she says, “at the same time we are also solution-based. We want to help make things right. We are not expecting it all from the city.”
This press release is from the Communications Committee of Occupy Eugene that has been empowered to speak on behalf of the larger Occupy Eugene body.
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A day of action in the defense of the Unhoused
When the Occupy Eugene site was closed in December of last year, we went peacefully, and when we went, we went under the impression that certain promises made by our city council would be followed through on. We went under the false understanding that those who had no place to call their own would be taken care of, that they would not face another winter, sickness and probable death, alone on the streets without at least the option for a warm place to sleep. When we went we thought that despite everything, we had made some small but solid victories.
We now face another winter and what we took as promises have yet to be made good on. There was never a wet shelter provided, nor the women and children’s shelter that was talked about, and all the work people have done to create an Opportunity Village was not enough to encourage the city to take appropriate action. Virtually none of the things that were discussed as solutions by our city and task force on homelessness have actually been followed through on and we are now looking forward to the cold months of winter with little more to offer the unhoused community but our regrets that we did not fight harder to keep the site and our own promise that we will keep fighting for them. When people are allowed to die on the street because of bureaucracy and apathy it can only be described as murder. Whose hands will the blood be on when the temperatures begin to drop and the deaths begin to pile up, if not our own? We must make a stand and demand our local government respect people over policy.
This year there will be no site, no camp, no hope for the most downtrodden and marginalized of our community, men and women who have served in our military, suffer from severe mental illness, or have serious drug or alcohol addictions, as well as families who have suddenly found themselves evicted or foreclosed upon. Our social services are already maxed out and the numbers of unhoused people in Lane County keep growing.
For those of you who share my concern, who have compassion for the less fortunate, who are as angry as I am that we were tricked into believing certain steps would be taken in the defense of the unhoused by our local government–what seems now to be a ploy just to get us off their backs, just to keep us silent, and will undoubtedly result in the unnecessary deaths of fellow human beings–I invite you to join me and other concerned citizens on November 17th to march against the apathy and the bureaucracy that is used as an excuse to do nothing in the defense of people’s to raise awareness and demand more from our local government.
It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.