Hall Monitor

Portland is a city (and the Mercury a paper) that
occasionally erupts in bursts of vitriolic civic engagement over
issues that could not be less important. See: The Cesar Chavez
Boulevard rename. Also: Sidewalk tape arguments at the Rose Festival.
And of course: Major League Soccer. There are very few Portlanders, I
think, who are able to rise above the Rose City noise and focus on
issues of genuine life-and-death importance. Sadly, there is now one
fewer.

If there’s a heaven, Bonnie Tinker is probably already bored
up there. Unless there’s some raging injustice over the distribution of
harps and angelic foot rubs—in which case I guarantee Tinker will
be causing trouble in paradise. Still, “resting” in “peace” seems
inappropriate for Tinker, whose 61-year life was ended
prematurely last Thursday, July 2, when a Mack truck ran her over
at a Quaker conference in Virginia. I first met Tinker in 2007 after
she was arrested along with her partner, Sara Graham, for daubing the
walls of a military recruitment center on NE Broadway with
water-soluble fake blood, made from corn syrup and food coloring.
Tinker and Graham led Portland’s Surge Protection Brigade, a
group of politically active senior citizens who became known as the
“raging” or “pissed-off grannies.”

The first thing that struck me was that Tinker and Graham had
definitely done it. There was no denial. In addition they told me:
“We’re not sorry.” And still they beat the District Attorney’s
criminal mischief case in court, arguing under the first amendment that
the blood symbolized both Good Friday, and the blood of dying soldiers
in Iraq. I admired their ability to turn the court case into a public
discussion about the war.

Tinker and Graham were arrested again in June that year, after
lying down in front of a World War II tank during the Rose
Festival. “It’s not right, at a time of war, to have a tank on the
streets of this city,” said Tinker, making no reference to any ongoing
arguments over sidewalk tape that may have been also been “raging” at
the time.

I hope young and creative Portlanders like us can take a lesson from
Tinker’s life, now that she’s gone. It’s a shame we can get mad over
the noise regulations for food carts on Hawthorne or sucked into the
minutia of the mayor’s sex life while seldom directing our energy,
our indignation—or better yet—our guts, toward the really
dreadful shit.

On that note, the effort to recall Sam Adams begins in earnest this
week [rolls hipster eyes]. Bonnie Tinker, you’ll be missed.