Beavercreek Road intersects with OR 213 in Clackamas County. It is a major intersection which feeds Estacade to the East, Mollala to the West, Canby to the South and I-205 to the North. But it has another distinction.
Since about March 2016, it has been the site of one of the longest, continuous flag waving protests in the State. Since then, two groups have come to occupy the opposite corners of where these arteries intersect.
And that may be an apt metaphor for heart health of our nation. On those corners, each Friday between about 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., a kind of stress test takes place where a group calling itself GodSquad and supporters of Donald Trump stand opposite of an unnamed group of LGBTQ activists. Both blare their music. Both get honks of support and waving middle fingers of disgust. And both believe they are doing what they can to best serve the future of the United States.
I present to you my conversations with them, recorded over a 6 month period. They are presented in their entirety, unedited except for the removal of extended silences as I moved from one group to another or as I waited for spokespeople to decide to talk to me. And about that, they were both very suspicious of me because neither group seems very trusting of somebody with a microphone and headsets.
That made me feel sad, because both feel the media has been unfair to them. But, I was also gratified when both referred to media reports as justification for their views of the people across the street. And I thought, "Both need some kind of arbiter and right now, the media is the only one they can find even if they use it for opposite reasons."
Total time is about an hour ten minutes. I recorded four people, two at a time from the LGBTQ group, and four people, seperately, from the conservative group. So I'll present the conversations in a staggered format, meaning I'll go back and forth between spokespeople. This breaks up the points of view. There are about six conversation blocks altogether. And when a new group is speaking, I'll identify which group it is but other than that, I'll be quiet and let them explain their own motivations.
Beavercreek Road in Clackamas County is the biggest hotbed of political angst in a hamlet you probably never heard of. Visit my blog - https://dmassociates.wordpress.com/ - to see my first story, "Culture War on Beavercreek Road." After this one, I'm planning another one with details later. I'm doing this, partly, because all of us can do something to help tell the stories of people we may not totally understand, and help lower the temperature a little. This is what I can do. I'm also doing it because I love it.
Afterthought:
LGBTQ spokespeople talk for about 20 minutes while the GodSquad group talks for about 40 minutes. I'm not sure why that is. The intention wasn't to have one group share more of their feelings than the other, though the liberal group may have been more suspicious of my intentions, to which Mitch, Bella and Ginger all alluded. They all had been lied to by such approaches in the past. That may say something about how much more under attack they felt and feel. The GodSquad group spokespeople, by contraxt, seemed to feel much more in their element and much more supported by the community; the LGBTQ group said they felt comments were 60% positive/40% negative, while the GodSquad group felt their interactions were 90% positive/10% negative. So the GodSquad group felt freer to talk more expansively about themselves. I'd thought about going out one more time and talk to the LGBTQ group, but that would've made the already long piece even longer. So I decided against it. But perceptions are everything. When diesel trucks would pull up beside the LGBTQ group, they would pop clutches, spew exhaust and roar away as I was recording, which, circumstantially, certainly felt like harassment to me, though Steve of GodSquad, wasn't convinced that's what was happening. Again, and to the point of this protest, it's all about POV.
- KBOO