Animal Rights Message Mysteriously Appears Downtown
author: Matilda
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Earlier today, as I was traveling down Alder Street, something caught my eye. In a sea of billboards competing with each other for my consciousness, I almost missed it. I almost went right by without registering it. But the face staring out from the huge, seemingly commonplace billboard was one that deserved attention, and quietly demanded it.
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I had already looked away when it struck me. I almost couldn't believe what I had seen. I had to back up and look again.
Sure enough, in a city where every bare surface is covered with the cold face of commerce, where murals are illegal unless they're selling something and Clear Channel serves as gatekeeper of our collective consciousness, I had stumbled upon something different. This jaunty little pig was not selling anything. More revolutionary still, the little rogue was actually imparting an animal rights message! Surely I must be seeing things, I thought. After all, doesn't Clear Channel own every billboard in the city? Clear Channel once refused to sell ad space for a sign promoting vegetarianism, claiming that such a message was "too controversial." (Though, of course, "public service" slots for the forest industry, claiming that logging saves forests from fires, are not considered controversial at all by Clear Channel. Nor are signs advertising for the meat industry, or billboards selling women's bodies along with the cheap products they adorn and are adorned by.)
Upon closer examination, I discovered that this was not a billboard at all, but an expertly executed banner. The same size and shape as a billboard, with the same production values, and stretched so tightly across the face of the building, it was as respectable an entry into the urban subconscious as a full page spread in the Wall Street Journal. Very impressive.
Apparently skirting the edge of allowable expression, the billboard/banner actually dares to criticize mega-money-maker OHSU, pointing out the hypocrisy of "healers" needlessly causing suffering under the mantle of the Hippocratic oath. "First, Do No Harm," the written print proclaims in an ironic reminder that healers should not hurt. "Stop the OHSU live animal lab." Indeed. Thousands of animals are harmed, made to suffer, and killed at OHSU every year. Hospital public relations staff say that all this suffering is necessary in order to "help people." But the evidence suggests otherwise. No meaningful human cures have resulted from animal experiments at OHSU, and the university hospital has refused to debate this issue publically because the facts do not support their position. While animal experiments have not cured anyone at OHSU, animal lives have been relentlessly expended in the thriving business of chasing a lot of redundant grant funds for such important projects as research into whether or not cocaine is addictive, whether or not known toxins are harmful, whether or not cutting out internal organs is painful, and whether or not removing infant primates from their mothers and raising them in isolation is stressful.
The message on this banner is an important one that begs to be heard. But it is also one that is usually silenced in public discourse. Given the strange and nepotistic relationship between Portland city officials and OHSU brass, not to mention the power inherent in all those mega-dollars flowing through the highly profitable medical-industrial complex, this is not a message that the city makes room for under ordinary circumstances. It is a message usually deemed "too controversial," too contrary to commerce, and perhaps too compassionate to be good for business. Such messages are almost uniformly excluded from, for example, Clear Channel billboards.
Somehow, though, someone managed to get the message through. Bless the mystery truth-sayers who dared to find their own voices, and who used those voices for the animals.
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