A perfect day for bell peppers (and pies and apples and ...)

The Hillsdale Farmers' Market always offers a feast for palate and eye. The visual banquet today was a stunner.

Vulnerable Voting

In their desperation, McCain and Palin are following the Karl Rove playbook of turning to fear, smear and lies.

If, as the economy crumbles around them, they are left to hammer away at Obama’s passing relationship to a reformed ‘60s radical, what else might their campaign be prepared to do to seize power?

The obvious answer is the proven Rovian ace-in-the-hole of rigging the election results.

Listening to the latest raving of Palin and McCain got me to sit down with Black Box Voting’s “Tool Kit 2008, “ a little 72-page booklet that tells how we can help ensure a fair election. Many of the problems cited in the Tool Kit don’t apply in Oregon because of our mail-in voting.

Then again, just enough do to give me the creeps.

And then, of course, even if Oregon can conduct a clean election, what we do here doesn’t matter if other states scam the results. Significantly, the book lists several “swing states” that also happen to be “problem states” when it comes to voting irregularities and abuses.

Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and Indiana are notable among them.

Here in Oregon, our own Multnomah County is singled out as a “watch county.”

As it turns out, I’ve been registering voters in Multnomah County at our Hillsdale Farmers Market. Over the past four weeks we have registered more than 100 and sent dozens of others off with registration forms to be filled out later or by others.

Most of those we have registered have actually re-registered, having changed addresses since the last election. That said, quite a few are new to the state. One couple from California didn’t know that they don’t report to a polling place on election day, that the ballots are mailed.

The spooky part of our experience is that even the seemingly simple registration process can get murky.

For instance, the registration form asks for a driver’s license number as a form of verification. At the market this past Sunday, someone raised the question about what they should do if they left their driver’s license at home. I cited the form, which states that if the registrant has no driver’s license they should mark a box stating that. Instead they should use the last four digits of their social security number.

But that doesn’t precisely address the situation of the person who HAS a driver’s license but simply doesn’t have it (and hence the number) with them.

I replied that I’d check with the elections office but directed the person to provide the last four digits of the social security number and simply not blacken the box indicating that they don’t have a driver’s license.

When I turned in the forms today at the elections office, the clerk said they preferred that the person take the form home and fill in the driver’s license number.

“Preferred”?

Nothing in the directions to amateur registrars indicates this “preference.”

So, somewhat unnerved, I asked, what about those who filled out the form using the SS# because they didn’t have their driver’s license with them?

I was assured they’d be OK.

After reading the “Tool Kit” and the various ways elections administrators screw up registrations, I have my doubts.

Any Oregonian reading this might sleep better tonight after a visit to the Secretary of State’s web site to check on your status.

After you’ve done that, you can make yourself wobbly again by going here to look at Black Box Voting’s 2008 Tool Kit.

The Hillsdale Farmers' Market — less the farmers

A farmers' market is so much more than, well, a farmers' market.

I spent most of my time today in the Hillsdale Farmers' Market cajoling patrons into donating books to our Hillsdale Alliance summer book sale on July 27.

Today, bearing boxes and bags full of books, they filled a pick-up truck with tomes.

Fortunately there was plenty of food (and water) around me to sustain me. But there was also infectious volunteer enthusiasm for a number of other causes: Peace, indigenous plants, Joan Quinn's birthday, music, voter registration and the Food Front Cooperative.

Up top is the Food Front table. Below are other fellow volunteers. Salude!

“Deep Economy” meets “A Pattern Language” at the corner grocery

Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” stresses the urgency of building small communities, nurturing local economies and living simply. The driving force is global warming and the planet’s limited resources.

Reading his book, I’m struck again by how much, and how quickly, we in Hillsdale need to change.

(By the way, “Deep Economy” is the choice this month for our Hillsdale Book Club. We discuss it this Thursday, June 7, at 7 p.m. at the Multnomah Arts Center. You are welcome to join us, whether you have read the book or not.)

As I see it, the first needed change is to connect with our neighbors, taking back time that is now “screen time” spent with mediated, fictitious people and places.

To bring about such a change requires those of us trying to build communities to make community life and involvement manageable, attractive and, yes, more important than screen fantasy.

In Hillsdale, we have a prototype for what I’m talking about in the Farmers’ Market. A sheltered civic plaza (with solar panel shelter) would build on the community center concept.

We also made great progress when, in the mid-'90s, we reconfigured neighborhood boundaries, creating a Hillsdale neighborhood with a Town Center at its a center. Another step forward came with the resolution of boundary overlaps with the Southwest Hills Residential League last year.

But Hillsdale, with 6,000 people, is too big to be a true neighborhood. In recent years, considerable research has shown that much smaller numbers are needed for a community to be cohesive and effective.

One source for this observation is the remarkable book “A Pattern Language.”

The book’s authors (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel) recommend that neighborhoods should not be “more than 300 yards across, with no more than 400 or 500 inhabitants.” They go on to say that cities should “give the neighborhoods some degree of autonomy as far as taxes and land controls are concerned.”

Actually, cities should give autonomy to what we now call Town Center neighborhoods—Hillsdale being one of them. They should be rightly called "Town Center communities" consisting of smaller neighborhoods.

I’ll return to the Town Center Community concept at a future time.

For now, let’s focus on one aspect of those small neighborhoods. They are really defined by how far we can comfortably walk with a small push-cart full of groceries. We would buy those groceries from a great American institution that was killed off by the automobile and the supermarket: namely, the locally-owned corner grocery store.

More than small businesses, corner groceries were meeting places where neighbors would linger and get caught up on local news. They were, and once again would be, seven-day-a-week, small, indoor, neighborhood farmers markets. The owners, far from being some giant corporations in Delaware or New York, would be the family living upstairs.

A community like Hillsdale would have 10 to 12 neighborhoods, and 10 to 12 corner grocery/local gathering places.

And yes, not surprisingly, the authors of “A Pattern Language” had something to say about corner groceries. McKibben doesn’t mention them per se, but you can feel their presence in much of what he writes.

Of course to revive corner groceries means major revisions to Portland's zoning codes. And that means dealing with City Hall, not an institution prone to empowering neighborhoods, let alone a new civic entity called “a Town Center Community.”

But perhaps the Herculean challenges of these times will shake up the city's planners and powers that be.

We’ll see.

Mothers' Day and Peace

In the Hillsdale Farmers' Market on this Mothers' Day, my friend Martie Sucec enlightened me on the American origins of Mothers' Day.

And, no, she said, the day is not a Hallmark Holiday, although sadly, for many, it has become one.

In this country, Mothers' Day's beginnings go back to the years immediately following the Civil War when mothers grieved the loss of sons and husbands.

Mothers' Day was a call to peace initiated by Julia Ward Howe, known for her "Battle Hymn of the Republic." In 1870, Howe wrote a Mothers' Day proclamation calling for mothers to convene to oppose war and to nurture a world of peace.

What better time than now, this very Mothers' Day, to renew her call? What better way to honor mothers than to rededicate this day to the cause of peace?