On the streets of Portland, a strange armed conflict unfolds night after night. It is raw, frightening and painful on both sides of an iron fence separating the protesters on the outside and federal agents guarding a courthouse inside.
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“Yo, Black kids are the future! Black kids are the future!” he shouted, until a beaming Xavier finally stepped out and into his father’s proud embrace. The courthouse, a stately building with large windows and a white marble interior, looked like a feudal castle under siege. The outside was boarded up with thick plywood; narrow slits at the top of the plywood, accessed by a mechanized scaffolding, gave the agents inside a view of the crowd and an opening through which to fire pepper balls.
To the protesters, the men inside the battened down courthouse are at best thoughtless political minions, at worst murderous henchmen. To the agents inside, the demonstrators that pack the downtown each night are violent anarchists, an angry sea of humanity bent on hurting — or even killing — federal agents doing their job.
The nation is seething with anxiety and deeply divided about the role of police, the value of Black lives and the limits of federal authority in an election season like none other. In Portland, on a single city block owned by the U.S. government, that anxiety has turned to turmoil. Behind the front lines, the drummers that had whipped demonstrators up at the fountain regrouped and led the crowd in dancing and chanting.
Thirty minutes later, someone fired a commercial-grade firework inside the fence. Next came a flare and then protesters began using an angle grinder to eat away at the fence. A barrage of items came whizzing into the courthouse: rocks, cans of beans, water bottles, potatoes and rubber bouncy balls that cause the agents to slip and fall.____
No one talked much over the whir of the industrial fans set up to blow the tear gas back outside. The men who weren’t on the front line sat with helmets in their laps but left their gas masks on so they could breathe, the air still thick with chemical irritants. “They can put out 10 seconds of something that unfolded over several minutes, and those are the 10 seconds that look bad for us, whereas the rest of it would look bad for everybody,” he said, speaking of the protesters. “They use what serves their narrative.”Outside, a young woman with long blond hair wearing a halter top and jeans who had been gassed threw up in the gutter.
“I think that using chemical warfare on civilians is anything but protecting and serving, which is what they’re supposed to be doing,” said Deschera, of Portland. “I think it is a good idea to try to plant some seeds in their heads for ... them to go home and sleep on. These are people’s kids and mothers and wives and daughters that they’re gassing and they’re going to have to go home to THEIR mothers and wives and daughters,” said Rogers, as explosive booms echoed around him. “I try to encourage them to think about the fact that they’re on the wrong side of history and that they will not be treated so kindly.
After each night of protest, they seize dozens of homemade shields, slingshots, blocks of wood and chunks of concrete. Kennedy Verrett, a composer and music teacher, had been teargassed twice and was ready to go home. He had to be up early the next day to teach piano lessons but planned to be back for again another night.
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