These Invisible Wounds
If an officer beats you in the middle of Portland, and no one is there to see it, did it happen?
“I don’t know why I feel I’ve got to tell you this.”
Like most Portland protesters, she’s young and fully committed to fixing the broken world we’ve handed her. Brave enough to take to the streets despite the brutality of Portland Police and federal agents alike. She’s been protesting from the start.
Let’s call her W.
It is early August and I am not doing well. Four hours of sleep is a luxury I barely remember. It’s not nightmares exactly, just a failure to fall asleep and waking up wide-eyed three hours later. Benadryl isn’t working anymore and I’m reluctant to try stronger stuff. It feels like weakness. Not that this is strength, drinking beer at one o’clock in the afternoon and squinting at the computer screen.
W wrote me initially with a strange thing a cop had said to her — a response to a question I’d asked on social media about the police’s slipping veneer of professionalism. What I remember months later, however, was the way the conversation immediately, organically shifted to the night the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) broke her nose and snapped her wrist.
