How We Met

SFs seeking globally conscious SMs who are interested in reviving the endangered art of conversation for Sunday Salons at The Heathman. Send self-description, telephone, thought provoking topics. We're lively, healthy, over 21, professional, eclectic and ready for conversation. Are you?

On Feb. 21, 1991, the above notice appeared in the personals of Willamette Week, the longstanding alternative free weekly paper in Portland. The women who placed it had gotten the idea from the latest issue of the Utne Reader, whose cover essay addressed the revival of “salons” for intellectual and cultural conversations.

I had just arrived in town with the new year, barely seven weeks before. For more than three years, I’d been a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper downstate. Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market plunged 22.6 percent in one day, was my first day of work at the News-Review … a happy day for me! I left Roseburg “in a hail of bullets” 39 months later (with three off to tramp around West Africa).

The Willamette Week ad had been placed by a group of women of a range of ages who knew one another either in a yoga group or from skiing together. One owned a local restaurant. Another was an aide to Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz. The ad received a huge response, and when the women chose whom to invite to the first meeting, they had a wealth of suitable males … far greater than their pool of SFs.

An Open Letter to Second Amendment Enthusiasts

Has it occurred to you that you might have committed a fatal strategic error by throwing your lot behind the National Rifle Association?

Could you consider the possibility that over the past 40 years, the NRA chose a strategy that guaranteed it will ultimately lose the war to set domestic firearms policy?

Let’s not get into any of the specific arguments you’ve undoubtedly seen and defended in recent months and years: the nature and scope of the Second Amendment, the notion that guns protect one’s home, how many lives are supposedly saved by armed citizens versus lives lost, that guns will ultimately defend you against some sort of government tyranny.

Put those aside.

I want you to take a brief look at the big picture.

Please consider the possibility that the NRA’s never-give-an-inch approach to U.S. firearms regulation might ultimately have set up you and other gun owners for failure in getting to have a say on the design of U.S. gun policy.

In order to understand this, you’ll have to try to view the situation from the perspective of the majority of your fellow citizens who are not so enthusiastic about gun ownership and national firearms policy as it’s been driven by the NRA in recent decades.