Obama protest or How I was verbally attacked by right wingnuts
author: joyofresistance
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President Obama appeared at the Convention Center today for a quick fundraiser, where his supporters paid $500-1,000 to hear him speak. Over 100 protestors showed up and demanded an end to the wars, killing people with drones, and environmental destruction, a ban on assault weapons, legalization of marijuana and the erosion of our civil rights, as well as other issues.
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President Obama appeared at the Convention Center today for a quick fundraiser, where his supporters paid $500-1,000 to hear him speak. Over 100 protestors showed up and demanded an end to the wars, killing people with drones, and environmental destruction, a ban on assault weapons, legalization of marijuana and the erosion of our civil rights, as well as other issues. The protest was pretty low key, and the turnout was disappointing, unlike the anti-Bush protests, which attracted thousands of protestors, and were much more intense, and infused with more energy and conviction.
On a personal note, I was verbally attacked by a group of right wingnuts, Americans for Prosperity, as I tried to photograph them on the sidewalk. One woman asked me who I was photographing for, and when I answered, "Occupy Portland," she immediately went apeshit. She shouted in my face to "Get the hell out of here! We don't want you here, why don't you go back to where you came from!" She went on screaming about how horrible Occupy is, "All you people did was to destroy Shemanski Park and cost us thousands of dollars to clean up!" I was naïve enough to try to reason with her by pointing out that in a real democracy, you don't throw people out just because they disagree with you, but I soon learned that they had absolutely no interest in having a reasonable dialogue. By then, several of them surrounded me, one of them was filming me with his video-camera although the screaming woman tried to block my camera the entire time. They were all shouting at me to get the hell out of there, how I started all the trouble, even though it was one of them who started shouting at me first as soon as I said, "Occupy!" One man kept poking me with his American flag, and when I confronted him about it, he pretended that he didn't do anything. Finally, I decided it was best to leave since this was clearly going nowhere. I called them "Fascists!" as I left. I've been to hundreds of protests in Portland, and this is the only time when I've come across people who are so vicious and intolerant, and so full of hate for others who don't fit into their boxed-in beliefs. I shudder to think what this country will be like if people like them ever seize power over us!
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link to www.newsday.com) I'm just waiting to see the local Tea Party go so insane they declare Sam Adams their savior or something while at the same time bashing LGBT folks. This is getting really weird.