Wyden and Bynum Town Hall

“Give em’ hell Janelle!” the audience yelled. 

The call-and-response chant was initiated by the first black member of Congress from Oregon; Rep. Janelle Bynum entered office in 2025.

LBCC’s Tripp theater was half full on a rainy Saturday morning, Feb 7.

“Mike Johnson knows who I am now. I wouldn’t say we’re besties,” said Bynum, a Democrat. “I told Speaker Johnson it’s Black History Month and I’m going to be all over you this month.”

Befitting the aggressive rallying cry, she added, “I’m your fighter and you send me into battle every Monday.”

“Last year I went to D.C. I got to talk to Janelle Bynum there,” LBCC Student Leadership Council Legislative Affairs Director Will Vellinga said later. “The education pieces she’s very supportive on. It’s great to be inspired, but right now I need results.” 

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden also attended the town hall. He is the longest-serving senator in Oregon’s history. The Atlantic has called him “The Lonely Hero of the Battle Against the Surveillance State.” 

“Why I took on the Epstein files is because no one is following the money,” Wyden explained.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement also was a major topic of concern. 

“We’ve got to get rid of these masks,” said Wyden. 

Jana Svoboda of LBCC’s Advising Center represented the concerns of LBCC, summarizing the dire pressures facing students and staff: “Number 37 in funding for community colleges in Oregon; 49th in mental health funding. I’m the one and only mental health professional working here with 5-7,000 students, who 50-60% of them are food and housing insecure. Life is expensive. Drugs are cheap. Education is out of reach for a lot of people. I really want to know what we’re going to do to try to keep us from hurting again for the probably 20th, 30th year in a row with cuts to our staff and our faculty and our services to students.”

Wyden responded by identifying what he said is behind the lack of funding, “Billionaires if they buy, borrow, and die they can pay zero in taxes for most of their life.” 

“Well, you know, I’m never going to get the answer I want,” Svoboda said after the event, “which is  ‘We’re going to do something and make sure that schools are prioritized.’ I look and see really heavy militarized police equipment, but we can’t afford to feed our students. Some of the ways we spend our money seems illogical.”

As Wyden said earlier – follow the money. Who gets the breaks? Who gets the checks? Who gets the bill?



Photo by Skylar Wilkerson

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Stale Prince: Will Smith's album "Based on a True Story."

Image
  While the album might not slap, Will Smith certainly does. The best thing I can say about Smith’s new album is the music is neither noteworthy nor objectionable. Being rich affords Smith the ability to buy decent beats. Additionally, the many guest singers are generally appreciated, as they provide a respite until Smith starts rapping again.  A couple of Smith’s previous hits had him on the soundtracks of his own movies to hype himself, using the movie titles in the choruses. If they are good, it is probably because he took an already popular old hit and changed and added words.  He stopped that 20 years ago. Why return to music? Because he is doing PR work for the Will Smith brand. It’s a family business.  The album's existence and its substance is a vanity project. “Whole world against me and it ain't even bothering me." We will see just how easily Smith can let things go. “Living in a world that attacks us. We stay centered with our hearts on axis.” If we learn ...
Read more

Hitting you with knowledge

Image
I was submerged in thought, stuck in science class, trying to calculate what earthly forces and universal laws mattered in my pre-teenage skull. All I knew was that my guesswork would get the teacher's red pen for cluelessness, so I clenched my paper handout of half answers into a ball and picked up my book.  The scientific tome had the bulk of a tool – or a weapon.  If nothing else, I could use it to fend off a burglar who might sneak through my bedroom window and steal my perfectly corrected homework, when the teacher next asked about it. It had size and heft, but the glossy cover proved slippery.  The balled-up instructions, meanwhile, were so light that when pitched by my friend and supposed study partner, the unsturdy, makeshift baseball took on a strange trajectory to the plate, catching odd breezes that welled up in the classroom. The paper fluttered and fell like a spitball, without, thankfully, any saliva.  I took several unsuccessful swings, studying the pa...
Read more

Time, Technology, and Change: History with LBCC Instructor Scott McAleer

Image
Inside his office, instructor Scott McAleer displayed the results of his slow exposure camera. When his class talks about photographs as historical documents, he says, he has the class pose. The period style recreation takes seven minutes or more and produces pictures that are “creepy and old-timey looking.” He details some of the trade-offs of technology and we discuss the differing perspectives between journalists, who look constantly at what is happening now and next, and the historian’s world, immersed hundreds of years into the past. “I just don't think of modern events in the same way that I think about the discipline of history. To me, they're separate.” McAleer showed interest in my background and future, though I have no training in history or experience in any of his classes. He also was pleased and eager to share the success story of his former student Sean Kinsey, a graduate, a history major and member of his history co-curricular. Kinsey, he explained, completed a ...
Read more