Author Archives: Pamela

Pamela Fitzsimmons lives in Portland, Ore., and was a reporter and editor at newspapers in California and Washington state for more than 25 years.

She grew up in Medford, Ore., a working-class town that was once populated with pear orchards and formerly home to lumber mills, fruit-packing houses and excellent public schools (among the required reading in senior year: Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”). She worked her way through the University of Oregon as a forest fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service, stationed on mountains in the Umpqua, Wallowa-Whitman and Willamette national forests.

In the decade of the 90’s, like hundreds of other reporters in Southern California, she wrote about gangs, drugs, deteriorating schools, urban sprawl, poverty and its offsprings: more babies, more poverty, more social problems. In her case, the focus was on San Bernardino where smog obscured the San Bernardino mountains, and there was never a hint of orange blossoms in the air.

By the time she returned to the Pacific Northwest, parts of it were starting to look like San Bernardino, minus the smog. Gangs, strip-commercial sprawl, declining schools, the meth epidemic, illegal immigration – California’s bad dreams had moved north. Didn’t anyone read the news and see this coming?

Living in Joan Didion’s Culture Shock

What kind of a man picks a fight with a woman old enough to be his mother? Daunte Wright. Just a poor black guy, with an arrest warrant and a previous firearms violation, trying to go about his business. And what kind of a woman apologizes profusely, sobbing uncontrollably, for trying to do her job […]

The Women Who Walk Away

In her classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes of a happy place known for a joyous Festival. A cheerful sweetness hovers in the air of the magical Omelas, and it is reflected in the citizens. “They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy…,” […]

‘Tiny Grass is Dreaming’

There are no statues of Todd Beamer in Newark, N.J., but there is one of George Floyd. For all of the extensive 20th anniversary coverage of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, this oversight seems to have escaped notice. On Sept. 11, 2001, Beamer, 32, boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark and headed for a business […]

Body Cams: A ‘Neutral Third Eye’

How perfect that the first U.S. police department to study body-worn cameras on officers was in Rialto, Calif., where Rodney King met his Maker. Years before King died in 2012 of a drug overdose at his home in Rialto, he became famous when Los Angeles police officers beat him following a high-speed chase – an […]

Moms Are Here, Nothing to Fear

With the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death behind us, will the nice white ladies return this summer with their protest signs honoring a man none of them would have wanted for a neighbor? “We can’t stop protesting,” the Wall of Moms tweeted over the weekend. “Like John Lewis said, ‘Find a way to get […]

America’s New N-Word is ‘Cops’

Hold the reparations. The debt America supposedly owes its black slave descendants will be paid for in kind – by destroying the criminal justice system. All black criminal suspects are hereby freed of all suspicion. You don’t have to pull over for any police officer. You don’t have to answer your door for any police […]

Dollar Signs in Their Eyes

George Floyd didn’t change the world. He made a fool of it. The man who bought a pack of cigarettes with an allegedly counterfeit  $20-bill, then refused to return the cigarettes, ended up leaving an estate worth $27 million. That’s the settlement his family received because Big Floyd didn’t want to give the cigarettes back […]

A New Face on the ‘Creep Sheet’

How do you know you’ve finally arrived after being a member of a marginalized minority? You’re treated like a white guy. Welcome to the privileged world of white power, Rep. Diego Hernandez.  How do you like it? Hernandez (D-East Portland) is facing expulsion from the Oregon House of Representatives after a Conduct Committee recommended he […]

What Could Go Wrong?

It’s hard to get excited over the insurrection in Washington D.C. after a year when rioting became acceptable in the U.S. If it’s OK to go on a rampage in service to Black Lives Matter, why can’t a QAnon freak like Jake Angeli roam the Senate floor showing off his bare chest, painted face and […]

Roughing It in Lake ‘No Negro’

Diego Stolz would have loved to trade places with Mya Gordon, a young black teenager who made a documentary about the racism she encountered in Lake Oswego, Ore. – also known as Lake ‘No Negro.’ That’s the title she gave her documentary, “Lake ‘No Negro.’” It could be a slur in the hands of a […]