“Nonviolent resistance,” Martin Luther King wrote, is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love”
The protesters who vandalized and graffitied the Portland State Library must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We also need to know not only who these people are (especially the non-students), but WHAT they are. These people lost my support with the initial vandalism before they even entered the library, but now the damage is much more severe. The library is a sacred place to me and so many others; but perhaps more pertinent to the current discussion, it is a place where we can go to read about the history and indeed the plight of the Palestinian people since 1948. Now we won’t be able to do that at our library for an indefinite period. Even if you look at it from a radical’s perspective, the library was a poor choice compared to what radicals did in the Vietnam war era, burning draft cards and torching National Guard buildings; it’s not strategic, it’s just stupid.