It’s now been 19 days since Cameron Whitten set up his “hunger stump” outside city hall and gave up solid food and vowed to live on juice and water alone until he got his wish on a short list of very difficult housing-justice issues.
We’ve been checking in on him every few days. Here’s the latest:
1. Add Randy Leonard and Eileen Brady to the list of politicians and would-be politicians, respectively, who have shown up to chat with Whitten. Brady’s visit was more productive than Leonard’s, Whitten says.
Leonard didn’t say much at all. But Brady, who ran and lost the city’s most expensive mayoral campaign ever, said she supported one of Whitten’s goals: Stopping Dan Saltzman’s office from fining the lot that’s home to the Old Town homeless rest area Right 2 Dream Too. They’re kinda/sorta buds, Whitten and Brady, or at least they were when Brady’s campaign thought embracing Whitten, who also ran for mayor, was good for wooing progressives.
Whitten’s cause also has support from the Urban League, he says. And, so far, Amanda Fritz has been a staunch ally of his fight on behalf of Right 2 Dream Too. Very quietly, city hall is discussing solutions to the Right 2 Dream Too issue.
“I’m pretty sure, on the inside, there’s a lot of emails about me being out here,” he told me. “Which is good. The dialogue is happening.”
Not all of it is to his liking.
2. Whitten wants more love from Occupy Portland. Whitten wrote a long post to Occupy’s Facebook page yesterday lamenting that while “many occupiers haven’t stopped by yet, others refuse to help with small assistance that I ask for, such as handing out a few flyers…. If you really believe in the power of broad social Movement, please help me by making it look like more people give a damn that a person is starving themselves in order to highlight this injustice against the poor and homeless.”
Not that he isn’t attracting interesting visitors. The Associated Press came for an interview. And he said a “mystical,” vibey Portland woman who wrote play about a similar hunger strike a couple of years ago came to see him. He chalked it up to “cosmic confluence” that “now she’s doing a film” about that play, right when he was doing his very real hunger strike. And he has company. Another hunger striker, Jason Scheer, has been with Whitten for nearly two weeks.
3. The strike is taking a physical toll. Duh. Whitten’s looked more and more tired over the past weeks. He’s found helpers who keep him plied with water and all sorts of fruit juice, and he keeps jugs of the stuff in a crate next to his chair, but he’s still losing weight. He wakes up some mornings feeling nauseous. And after two weeks of not missing food, “I dream about it every night.” He’s weighing himself weekly, with the next update due later this week.
Worse, the liquid diet is playing hell with his digestive tract. Whitten confessed (and explicitly said it was okay to print) that he’d had a back-end accident when relaxing himself while peeing a few days ago. It was embarrassing, but “I got taken care of pretty quickly.”
Whitten insists he’s not moving any time soon, especially since he’s been hearing rumblings from city hall about acting on at least one of his goals.
“I’m out here as long as it takes,” he says, “and people are starting to realize that.”
Reminds me. Time to go grab some lunch from King Burrito.
I would like to donate some Depends diapers
@2: stjohnsrules doesn’t need your charity!
Gayser needs a diaper. For his head. For all the shit that comes out his mouth.
Do your parents know you’re using their computer like this?
OKAY, SHUT UP BOTH OF YOU. Don’t make me turn this thread around.
Eileen Brady didn’t embrace Cameron because her campaign thought it was good politics; you weren’t there, and you don’t know shit about that. she did it because she’s a good person, she admires Cameron’s spirit, and because Hales & Smith made a practice of looking down on the outsider candidates. Eileen, and her campaign (of which i was part, both as part-time staff & volunteer), embraced not only Cameron but became friends with Bill Dant. Eileen actually cares about Cameron; that’s why she visited with him.
Well of course Mr. St Johns wouldn’t have anything positive to say, especially since Cameron is Black ‘n all. But at least Cameron is doing something POSITIVE, and clearly he gives a damn!
My hat’s off to him.
Steve, you should’ve let ’em fight it out, they were like two dying pigeons fighting over a shriveled kosher dill, thinking it was a sausage.
“Hales & Smith made a practice of looking down on the outsider candidates”
Todd, please shut up.
Hell at least Todd brings comedy into the mix. Stay golden, PonyBoy. And just for clarification, Duhmosa prefers shriveled dill sausage from the Pride Festival.
The “other” Todd, St. John… Eileen’s un-funny energizer bunny, Todd Barnhart.
P.S. I see what you did there, Merc, on your Enemies List. AARP!
Out of curiosity I still want to know if this is a genuine attempt to help others, or to garner publicity. Pardon my crude question but it is the elephant in the room.
It is a genuine attempt to gain publicity to the issues. I’ve been part of the sleep action and vigil for housing justice for 4 1/2 months every other night. These homeless people, or unhoused people if home is where the heart is, and the housed people in solidarity with them, are on a sidewalk instead of soft ground because we need the public to have this problem in their minds as expectation of their leaders to solve. The number of homeless families increased 30% in 2011 during this 7th year of the *renewed* 10 yr plan to end this epidemic. I have a channel on ustream called “vigil-tv” if you’d like to see interviews of individuals, housed and unhoused, on the causes and effects of this problem. In 20 days, Cameron has brought more press to a problem and these specific solutions than hundreds of people have in our action for the 6 1/2 months we’ve been making more sacrifices than you could possibly know. Press means awareness, which has brought people down to see him, and to us who are ready to work on this just like Occupy did at the camp across the street. And when people get together to talk solutions, in front of City Hall, it has the natural effect of the public voicing their expectation of leaders. Right2DreamToo should be praised for being a self-funded solution to communities in danger and a model for the city that has failed us. Evictions do not need to be enforced as a priority for the police – the moratorium gives homeowners a chance to get lawyers who investigate illegal greedy mortgage shuffles by lenders which is why evictions of entire families to the streets are so rampant, and a levy for the city for different levels of “down-and-out” to help stop the immediate change of status from financial distress to this life-threatening condition (you don’t see or hear news on the death caused by homelessness but put two and two together) is a better use of money than that many opulent aesthetic, wasteful, stupid and probably shady projects our taxes pay for now. So come down to city hall and talk to him, and us, and on odd nights late be live on vigil-tv as you do- and join us in voicing our expectations. Our point in sleeping there is that city hall’s endless harassment of homeless people pushing them into dark dangerous corners for the portland business alliance’s comfort is resulting in them forgetting about the people this incompetence and greed causes. Remember that politicians Require public priorities to be focused before putting time and money into solving problems. We’re helping their office do the right thing by getting your attention, education, and compassion. And Cameron is doing something difficult and potentially risky to get that. Please come talk. We often have free fair-trade coffee and he has a lot of knowledge to share and good communication skills including listening to you.
@Marynichols1. tl;dr