Beaverton Walmart - NO! Update

While I think it's awesome that people are fighting (and often winning) the battle against the corporate mono-cultural deserts that spring up when we allow big box, brand name stores to move in, I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the urban efforts to keep them out. The one on Burnside, for example. Man, I was so happy to hear that the people of Portland won that battle against home depot. I HATE home depot. But then, I realized what that really means. It means that a few city blocks won't be subject to the eyesore of a Home depot, yes. But the Home depots and the wal-marts will still be built. They will simply be build in outlying areas. Rural areas. Meadows and wetlands and woodlands.

Have you ever really looked at a wal-mart of a home depot? They're sprawling. They're surrounded by acres of asphalt parking lots, and the stores themselves are huge blocks of cement. When I think of it, I'd rather see something like that be plunked into downtown Portland, or Beaverton, than into the wetlands out by the Columbia, or the meadowlands out in the east and west counties. So I'm not sure I can support these campaigns any more until something REAL is done about them.

If you want to fight to make it illegal to build a wal-mart anywhere, or if you want to spearhead a national campaign to boycott these places, I'm down with it. If you want to build a grass roots, direct action-based struggle against this monster from the roots up, then count me in. But just banding urban folks together to fight them only means they will go in rural places where the people are not so organized and numerous, not so affluent, and where the damage will be much greater.

Until we stop supporting these places by shopping at them, by allowing them to destroy habitats for humans and any other beings, they will continue to spring up. I say, until that day, may they plop down in affluent, urban places where their impact will be felt by the ignorant humans that support them, rather than the innocent flora and fauna that do not.

however, if we can build urban support against these monster stores, if we can help your average sub/urbanite realize the damage that this kind of unrestrained capitalism (thank you Pope) is just bad stuff, if we can make them care, then perhaps they'll become interested in stopping it elsewhere.

if these everyday people can become interested in activism, then w00t! we need all the support we can get, however our supporters may start their activist careers.

Who really is most significantly instrumental in the conversion of the character of surroundings that residents of an area live in, may have grown up in, and hope to raise their families in? Who decides what the population of an area will be, what kind of industry will locate there, and what kinds of business will serve the people that live there?

As people need to live, care for their families, work and eat, they have traditionally welcomed income providing industry and business. Popluation growth is more or less accepted as an unavoidable consequence of....some mysterious, intangible formula related to people living there lives. Who has a say about the creation of the market that attracts to a community, the pox that is Walmart, HomeDepot, and the casino that has been approved for the Columbia Gorge?

I wonder, if people were able to see the larger view, see the incidious results of development over decades and understand how it has replaced so much life giving natural surroundings with hard-surfaced, toxic, synthetics, would they accept that primarily those having money for investment and a profit motive fueling it, should continue to pertpetuate such rampant conversion of their communities?

Cities such as Portland and Beaverton are already densely concentrated with development. Neither one of them are really contained, expanding as they are to all points of the compass with names such as Gresham, Progress, Tigard, Aloha, Cornelius, Wilsonville, etc., etc.. Where does this stop? Where do people finally say this shall not continue before we no longer have one cubic yard of fresh air within these cities to breathe?

How do we as citizens allow a good thing to be ruined? Example: Automobiles are a marvelous, wonderful, efficient, relatively non-polluting mode of transportation. Supplies of petroleum to fuel them should have been able to last centuries or even milleniums with very little impact in the way of atmospheric pollution. This did not happen because an unwitting and unassertive public has traditionally big business to sell them a bill of goods in the form of the idea that single occupancy motor vehicles are an intelligent means of mass transportation.

Worse than the pollution and resource depletion created by such notions, is the phenomena of population expanding exponentially and spreading physically with devastating consequences. The BigBox is just another one of these notions, as is the casino in the gorge, and the sick myth of gambling as a reasonable means of support for basic essentials such as education of children.

Dorothy English has won the right to desecrate her acerage up in the hills. In her remaining years, let her wallow in the short term revenue producing eyseore she seeks to create there. May the public see the end to this self defeating type of action, and seek to seize their right to have a direct hand in perpetuating life-giving, sustainable surroundings such as those welcoming the first guests to these lands.

walmart....homedepot....casinos....Take a hike into oblivion.

To Wanda: head's up, before you say "please, plant your Walmart here in Portland". That's the next level of this fight. Walmart is quickly running out of rural areas to place their stores. And, believe me, there is a shitstorm of a campaign planned to fight their growth - here and abroad. So, join us in the battle in Beaverton and Gresham, cause that's where the battle is now.