It is so heartwarming to see many genuine white people in Portland Oregon standing up for “Black Lives Matter” this is very significant because Portland was considered one of the most racist cities in America. Unfortunately there are some who are using the demonstrations to create confusion and chaos for ulterior motives. Demonstrations should be peaceful, there should be no vandalism and violence.
The following are excerpts for a talk given by Abdu’l Baha
“The earth is one native land, one home; and all mankind are the children of one Father. God has created them, and they are the recipients of His compassion. Therefore, if anyone offends another, he offends God. It is the wish of our heavenly Father that every heart should rejoice and be filled with happiness, that we should live together in felicity and joy. The obstacle to human happiness is racial or religious prejudice, the competitive struggle for existence and inhumanity toward each other.
You must be free from prejudice and fanaticism, beholding no differences between the races and religions. You must look to God, for He is the real Shepherd, and all humanity are His sheep. He loves them and loves them equally. As this is true, should the sheep quarrel among themselves? They should manifest gratitude and thankfulness to God, and the best way to thank God is to love one another.
Beware lest ye offend any heart, lest ye speak against anyone in his absence, lest ye estrange yourselves from the servants of God. You must consider all His servants as your own family and relations. Direct your whole effort toward the happiness of those who are despondent, bestow food upon the hungry, clothe the needy, and glorify the humble. Be a helper to every helpless one, and manifest kindness to your fellow creatures in order that ye may attain the good pleasure of God. This is conducive to the illumination of the world of humanity and eternal felicity for yourselves. I seek from God everlasting glory in your behalf; therefore, this is my prayer and exhortation.
“if one offends another, he offends God.” Abdu’l-Baha used strong words to make a strong point: We must strive not to cause offense to anyone.
You might think this sounds almost impractically hard, given today’s climate of offenses, both given and taken. We all see and hear tremendous division and contention from pundits on news shows; where ideological factions fight with words and rockets against one another; where propaganda intentionally fires up the worse emotions in humans and consistently causes enmity and offense. But almost is not completely, hard is not impossible, and impractical is not un-doable. Although difficult, we do still have the means to talk civilly to one another—and we also have a rich history of diplomacy, where seemingly impossible alliances were made and wars halted.
Just as wars have ended in the past, today’s wars—both virtual and real—will not last forever if we believe and work toward peace. Time may not heal all wounds, but time can ameliorate the pain of conflict and strife. We do not have to put up with war and contention.
In our personal lives, for example, we need to simply take a step further to work effectively toward achieving peace. We need to forget and forgive, to put the past behind us, and to look to a glorious future as one human family no matter our creed or nationality. That’s difficult also—but it can be done.
Wall of Moms protecting p rosters in Oregon
“Love does not cost anything. Kind words and deeds do not cost anything. The real beauty of the world is equal for everyone to see. It was given by God equally to all, without restrictions.
Everyone, was given a beautiful vehicle in which to express love to others. Feelings are free to express and give to ourselves and each other through our willingness to give and care”.
What is complicated about this… Why have we made others feel they have to climb mountains and swim oceans in order to make a difference.
All we need to understand my friends, is that human life was given equally to us all, not partially but in totality.
The sun was given to all. It does not shine on the few. So, just has nature is indifferent to our station or situation, we need to know that we are all equal. We need to focus on the things that are constant and not place our values on things that can be blown away with the next, great, wind.
Value life in what ever house it dwells. For when it comes time that we are all stripped to bare bones before the divine and facing eternity, we will understand that the only law we were meant to follow, was to love ourselves and each other. Nothing more…nothing less.”
― Carla Jo Masterson
The injustices done to Black People is finally being addressed by the people, mothers are standing up for justice.
“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don’t share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive.
I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”
C. JoyBell C.
ABC News Daily: July 24, 2020Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.
PORTLAND, Oregon. — Protesters in this liberal, predominantly white city have taken to the streets peacefully every day for more than five weeks to decry police brutality. But violence by smaller groups is dividing the movement and drawing complaints that some white demonstrators are co-opting the moment.
As the Portland protests enter a second month, they have shifted on several nights from the city’s downtown core to a historically Black neighborhood in North Portland that’s already buckling under the effects of white gentrification and has the most to gain — or lose — from the outrage in the streets.
Late last week, some protesters barricaded the doors to a police precinct a half-block from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and set fire to the building, which also houses Black-owned businesses, including an Ethiopian restaurant and a barber’s school. Two nights later, a potluck at a park in the heart of the Black community morphed into another violent clash with police, who unleashed tear gas to quell the crowd of several hundred people.
On Friday, a Portland man was arrested for his role in an overnight attack on the Hatfield Federal Courthouse, U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams said. Rowan M. Olsen, 19, aka Kiefer Alan Moore, was arrested by Federal Protective Service officers early Friday morning, he said in a news release. Olsen is scheduled to appear in federal court on Monday, Williams said.
The change has angered and frustrated some in the Black community, who say a “white fringe element” is distracting from their message with senseless destruction in a city where nearly three-quarters of residents are white and less than 6% are Black.
“This is NOT the Black Lives Matter movement. This is chaos,” Kali Ladd, executive director of KairosPDX, wrote in a Facebook post. “These white actors are enacting dominance in a different form under the guise of equity … White supremacy has many forms.”
Demonstrations elsewhere in the city have also grown increasingly violent. Early Friday, someone broke the windows of a federal courthouse and threw fireworks that started a fire inside the building.
One prominent Black leader wrote to Mayor Ted Wheeler and said some clashes had unfolded three blocks from his house. He said the problem was with “elements” that were “99% white” and did not represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It has nothing to do with helping Black people. These hoodlums are needlessly scaring neighbors and their children,” said Ron Herndon, who has fought for racial justice in Portland for four decades and led a school boycott in 1979 after the city closed predominantly Black schools. “At some point, enough is enough.”
Newly appointed Police Chief Chuck Lovell, who is Black, said the violence in North Portland was “offensive and hurtful” and has cost the city at least $6.2 million in overtime for its officers.
“People in that neighborhood were upset. That’s not something they’re going to tolerate … and they came out and were very vocal,” Lovell said. “I think people sometimes look at the protest movement as one homogeneous group — and there’s definitely a segment here that is very violent.”
The tension over the protests comes amid increasing conflict within the movement itself. Rose City Justice, a coalition that for weeks galvanized thousands of people for peaceful marches and rallies every night, announced last week it will no longer do so after it was criticized, among other things, for sitting down with the police commissioner and mayor to discuss police reform.
The Rose City Justice marches and rallies attracted a diverse crowd of 10,000 people a night at one point. High school students marched arm-in-arm with the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard across the Burnside Bridge, and people gathered along the Willamette River to listen to hours of music and speeches. Aerial photos of the crowds, which filled the massive bridge from end to end, made national headlines.
“The purpose of making noise is to have a seat at the table, to be heard,” the coalition said in a statement announcing its decision to stop marching nightly. “As with every movement, we realize that there are people who actively work to discredit momentum and change.”
Now, as clashes with police have become more violent in the business district and moved toward the residential neighborhoods of North Portland, Black residents are watching in dismay. Many are concerned that those watching police precincts burn and businesses get vandalized will wrongly assume Black people are doing the damage.
Jerome Polk has operated his business, J.P.’s Custom Framing, for 26 years from a building he shares with the North Precinct police offices that were set ablaze. As he carried supplies into his business on a recent day, char marks, graffiti and police tape were still visible outside the building, and half of Polk’s own windows had been boarded up as a precaution.
“I don’t know the motivation of why people do what they do,” he said. “I know when the damage is done, they blame that on what the movement is supposed to be. And that’s unfortunate and unfair.”
A few blocks away, Carl Baskin sat next to his drive-up car wash station and worried that the message of racial justice was being taken away from the Black community by “young white children.”
“This is where they’re losing the narrative. In the midst of all this other stuff, they’re not really showing anyone sitting down with the police, actually talking and getting some of this stuff made into laws,” Baskin said. “That’s the stuff we should be talking about.”
The sting is made even deeper by the fact that the North Portland neighborhood has, over the years, seen an exodus of Black families and businesses as white people have moved in. On a recent day, just a few blocks from boarded-up buildings and anti-police graffiti, white families with strollers walked past food carts selling sushi burritos as fliers advertising micro-greens fluttered in the wind.
“Get to know us and get to know the pain that we feel with gentrification in this neighborhood,” said Elaine Loving, who has lived in her family’s North Portland home for 59 years. “Now it’s mostly white folks, and they don’t even speak to us half the time — and that hurts.”
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