There’s a joke that’s not a joke that you’ll hear if you hang out at Portland’s protests, as of Tuesday in their 54th consecutive day since police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd over a possibly fake $20 bill by kneeling on his neck while he begged for his life.
“We’re all gonna have some serious PTSD from this shit one day,” a dude standing nearby said Friday night with a laugh. He’d just seen me jolt when someone threw the plastic cap from a water bottle and it hit the side of my neck. I was edgy from an earlier round of flash bangs and tear gas.
I’ve been covering protests since Donald Trump was elected. Mostly in Portland, but I also went to Washington in 2017 because I felt like I had to witness his inauguration and the Women’s March that followed firsthand. I needed to understand what was happening in our country. And way before I was a journalist, I participated as a 20-something activist alongside tens of thousands of other young Oregonians, labor and religious leaders, kids and parents and grandparents. Protest is pretty normal here. A staffer in the George H.W. Bush administration didn’t nickname us Little Beirut for nothing.
On one memorable May Day march downtown, a friend was trampled by a Portland police officer on horseback. Another time, I marched around the circular interior of the mall just blocks from the Multnomah County Justice Center where the protests are centered now. It was October 2001 and the Afghanistan war had just begun. “While you’re shopping, bombs are dropping” echoed through the cavernous five-story interior, my chanting voice dissolving into those around me. And there were the marches and rallies after Portland police shot and killed 21-year-old Kendra James in 2003 as she tried to drive away from a traffic stop.
I’d been sporadically covering the recent protests against systemic racism and police brutality for Courthouse News Service when Oregon Public Broadcasting revealed that federal police in combat fatigues were whisking protesters off the streets into unmarked minivans without probable cause, explanation or apparent constitutional authority. I knew I needed to take another turn offering a set of journalistic eyeballs to watch the streets. So I went out this past Friday.
But I was surprised when the days that followed were marked by unexplained crying jags, forgetfulness and depression. I’d open a cupboard door and not know why — and then do it again. Painting and ballet class — my normal non-news decompression activities — seemed utterly pointless. Suddenly, everything did. And I was growing increasingly angry at the cops who’d taunted me late that night, as they chased and scattered ever-dwindling groups of protesters around downtown.
After hours of peaceful protest, Portland police and federal officers with the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service rushed a crowd of a few hundred demonstrators, shooting off deafening flash bangs and round after round of tear gas. They lined up across the street, running shoulder to shoulder at the crowd. Their batons were aloft, ready for anyone who couldn’t run fast enough. Some held guns that could shoot rounds of rubber bullets, pepper balls, or tear gas canisters — which a federal cop used on July 11 to shoot a protester in the face, putting him in critical care after facial reconstructive surgery.
At one point Friday night, a line of cops sprinted behind the protesters I was following for five or six blocks straight. They didn’t stop until well past the street they’d announced earlier was the boundary of the part of downtown they’d just deemed “closed.”