Not sure who started this but I really want to state my appreciation. We have been out there on Beaverton-Hillsdale every night (as far as I know) at 7:00-7:30 for almost 5 weeks. That is starting to seem like a long time but I compare it to how long blacks have been considered second class citizens. Then it doesn’t seem to bad.

It feels like a smaller accomplishment than marching and maybe being injured downtown. But I hope that if we keep reminding people like us every day then more white Americans will accept it as a new normal. We get honks, waves. thumbs up and black power fists. We also get catcalls, middle fingers and blank stares. We even had one man pull into the left turn lane and lecture us for 4-5 minutes. It feels good having neighbors from outside Cascadia join us, sometimes to continue with us and occasionally to see what it feels like and go back to their neighborhoods.

The time holding signs and waving is also a good bonding feeling for me. Since I connect more with people by doing things than talking I particularly enjoy this time. So if anyone wants to join us we have extra signs and congregate at the CH about 6:45.

In compiling The Compleat Cascadian, I had a realization similar to Gretchen Westlight’s when she rebooted the newsletter after several years hiatus. I miss having a place where memories of community life are captured in the amber of a publication medium.

Newsletters are mostly passé these days and, sadly, we’re engulfed by the culture of TL;DR. Our attention spans are shriveling.

I believe the best medium for a communal diary these days is a weblog, and wouldn’t you know it, CascadiaCommons.com is powered by WordPress, and WordPress happens to be the most popular blogging platform; by far. A blog can have many contributors, just like the old newsletter, and there are editorial roles to publish posts submitted by contributors. It’s pretty slick.

Rather than being issue focused (as in vol 9. Issue 7), I envision the weblog as a gentle stream of content, trickling here and babbling there. No pressure, no deadlines, 100% guilt free. And, where the old Cascadian was internally distributed and shared with some other communities, I’m proposing that we feature this on our website under what is now the Stories link in our site header. Yup, let’s bring The Cascadian out of the communal closet.

Here is what the new Stories page can look like. Content for the posts was snatched from our Facebook page or created by me. As new posts come in, the older posts roll on down, with the top post a sticky one to act as an introduction. Feel free to share your thoughts just below my bio in the comments section of this post. Note that you can’t post comments from the blog roll page, only from within a post.