Below is my latest Oregon Eagle newspaper article.
The Oregon Eagle was founded by Email Players subscriber Richard Emmons that I bought some ownership in a couple years ago. And the advice below is to our state’s Republican politicians who are arguably the most incompetent & toothless, weak-minded & cowardly, and LEAST persuasive & influential people in the entire nation.
Much of this can be directly applied to your business & marketing:
How Oregon Republicans Can Stop Being Laughingstocks
Let me tell you a story.
A few years ago, the homeless coalition in Curry County wanted a grant to purchase hotels across the street from the Gold Beach high school to house homeless people. Gold Beach is a small, two stoplights town dependent on tourism. And at the time we already had some homeless leaving dirty drug needles & feces on the slide at the park where children play.
The proposal was controversial, to say the least.
But even more controversial was how they wouldn’t show the public their grant proposal.
Its supporters (including the Mayor) dismissively said to just trust them, and people in the local Facebook groups started debating it – including Oregon Eagle staff writer Stefania Settle. She grew up in Manhattan and experienced what happens – first hand – when politicians create such places.
Especially near children.
So, Stefania wrote a response to a post about it.
But it was all facts, statistics, and appeals to logic.
And I told her to set fire to that post and totally rewrite it in a way that gives readers a Vision instead. The example I gave her was Dr. Antony Levatino’s House Judiciary Committee hearing testimony about Planned Parenthood’s medical procedures after he performed over 1200 abortions.
He argued nothing and debated nothing.
He simply gave a Vision of the gruesome procedure by recounting an abortion performed on a 17-year-old girl who’d felt her baby kick for weeks. He showed the clamp used to pull out the baby’s legs, arms, spine, intestines, heart, and lungs. He also described the white liquid that was the baby’s brain draining onto a tray, and said:
“And if you have a day like I had a lot of times, sometimes a little face comes back and stares at you.”
It was pure Vision that was far more persuasive than citing 50+ years of dry data, statistics, or appeals to morality.
Thus, Stefania’s revised “Vision” post:
I grew up in Upper East Side of Manhattan, in one of the country’s wealthiest zip codes. . .and a townhouse was converted into halfway housing for the homeless by a similar coalition with similar reasoning (almost word-for-word), the street I grew up on quickly became hazardous and downright dangerous.
A few examples:
-A shelter “tenant” regularly masturbated right out on the street across from my building which I witnessed many times, starting when I was in middle school.
– Dodging human feces and drug paraphernalia became such a knee-jerk habit I still look at the ground to watch where I’m walking to this day.
– Going to the local pizza place with my friends after school always involved at least one of us walking in on someone shooting up in the bathroom.
– At just 12, I was regularly followed and sexually harassed on my way home from school (three blocks away) to the point I had to carry personal protection for my own safety. (Which has given me a level of hypervigilance that only until moving here did I learn is not normal.)
-Among other stories, many worse, I won’t share as they’re too graphic and personal.
This happened in a neighborhood with a median income of $150,000-200,000 – not an inner-city or “bad area”-with a police precinct only a few blocks away. And, while this was in the late 90s, it’s only gotten worse – for instance, someone was stabbed in front of that shelter last month, in broad daylight, on a Saturday morning.
I’m going to assume none of you want your kids to go through what I did, especially with the high school being so close to these motels that may potentially become a shelter like the one across the street from my old house.
I grew up far too quickly at too young an age due to this and would never wish this on any child in the community, and certainly not on my own son.
This initiative may be well-meaning, but they don’t know what they’re getting us into. I understand bringing up my childhood in NYC may seem extreme and even hyperbolic, but this was my lived experience.
I cannot fathom how this project will do anything but create these same if not more dangerous conditions: like Oregon, the homeless in NYC are protected as a vulnerable population with the police unable to do much of anything.
And considering this county doesn’t have nearly the tax revenue, police force, or political clout Manhattan does, I can’t even imagine how disastrous this could be.
If you think that didn’t move the needle, think again.
People started asking if the coalition was being paid per homeless person, with a financial interest to have as many homeless people haunting Gold Beach as possible.
Stefania’s post changed hearts and minds not with boring data, statistics, or posturing… but with Vision.
Which brings me to Oregon Republicans:
Whatever their consultants are telling them to do obviously isn’t working.
They’re laughingstocks who’ve been losing for 40+ years both at the ballot box and in the House and Senate chambers. I argue a big part of that is their milquetoast ads and toothless “strongly worded” press releases Tina & her media cronies laugh at.
But Oregon Republicans can start winning again if they use Vision – especially in their ads, interviews, speeches, emails, social media, and local outreach.
It’s never been about money, arguments, walkouts, or voting harder.
It’s always been about Vision.
Democrats have used Vision for decades to sell everything from socialism and gun control to pronouns, porn in children’s schoolbooks, men in girls bathrooms, drug decriminalization, magic dirt immigration fairy tale theories, crooked mail-in ballots, masks, fake vaccines, and so on.
And if Republicans want to win elections, they’ll start using Vision, too.
And so it is ’round these here parts.
More on the paid Email Players newsletter here:
Ben Settle
