Angela Uherbelau

By Angela Uherbelau
Uherbelau, a writer, lives in Portland and is a former elementary school PTA president. She is also the creator of oregonkidsread.com.

Oregon’s amazing elementary school students are capable of becoming readers. Oregon’s equally amazing teachers are capable of teaching them how. It’s time for the state to give them what they need to succeed.

By Angela Uherbelau

Portland Public Schools needs a clear-eyed disrupter to immediately address a five-alarm fact: Our city’s historically-underserved students with the highest-needs are still not getting the education they deserve.

Many people have abandoned traditional media because we're hungry for other perspectives, other insights, other voices. Paying women of color even a nominal amount per guest column could have a significant impact on submissions and published pieces.

By ANGELA UHERBELAU
The Portland Art Museum is dangerously close to convincing city elected officials to effectively privatize a public space that belongs to all of us. Last week, the Portland City Council took a step towards allowing the museum to obliterate an accessible, open space in the heart of our city. This decision runs directly counter to a stated, codified promise: that equity and equal opportunity is a priority of the Portland City government.
Last year, the Portland Art Museum an...

In his news conference Tuesday, responding to the violence in Charlottesville President Donald Trump once again encouraged us to look upon our country and see nothing but a sea of moral relativism.

Applying his “many sides” argument to our history, both recent and long-past, Americans might well ask ourselves: Southern slave owners? Imagine how hard it was for them to lose their culture. White mobs spitting on black schoolchildren? Think how difficult it was to share their neighborhood. A white man hurling racist speech at two teenage girls, one black, one wearing a hijab — and then stabbing three white men coming to their rescue? As one “alt-right” protester saw it, Jeremy Christian did “everything right up until the moment he started killing people.”

It's a gorgeous summer evening at Dawson Park.

Families laugh across picnic blankets, children monkey up ropes on the playground, couples sway to the sounds of Locarno, a Mexican folk band from Vancouver, British Columbia.

The crowd, like Portland itself, skews white but there's ethnic diversity here: Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, everyone enjoying the night. The nexus feels especially meaningful given the city's soul-searching on race following the MAX attack in May, when two men were fatally stabbed after confronting a fellow train rider shouting racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two teenage girls.

Outside the window of our Coast Starlight compartment, little towns along the track flicker in and out of view. They look forsaken and forlorn, but here in our private Superliner Roomette, we're feeling free.

Give it up for love.

How do we do that? How can we possibly do that, given the terrible serpent of a line running from the top of Micah David-Cole Fletcher's jaw down to the middle of his neck? Or the wife and four children left to grieve Ricky John Best?

Or the golden laurel on Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche's graduation cap, celebrating the hours of learning and labor devoted to his Reed College thesis?

How do we give it up for love when hate took away so much, in a matter of minutes?

When I was 20 years old, I got pregnant. For the first eleven weeks, I pretended it wasn’t happening. I made excuses for my missed periods. I rushed past pregnancy tests at the drugstore. I refused to acknowledge the changes in my body. If I did nothing, maybe it would all just go away. The one thing I couldn’t escape was a growing sense of dread. For two nights in a row, I was stalked in my dreams by a man with a cage for a mouth.

Anyone paying attention to the news on Monday could be forgiven for thinking that our country is going to hell in a Russian hand basket. FBI Director James Comey confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that his bureau is actively investigating President Trump’s ties to Russia.

Another lifetime ago, when I was 28 years old, I was the plaintiff in a small claims court case against the Oregon Department of Revenue. ...

I joined in the recent "A day without a woman," the national strike organized by the Women's March to celebrate International Women's Day and to honor women's labor. While wholly embracing the ends, it was hard not to feel ambivalent about the means.

The War Room, a documentary about the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, runs 96 minutes long and contains 2 seconds featuring the 20-year-old me. I’m standing on a desk, surrounded by staffers gathered to hear James Carville rally the troops for the last time before the presidential election.

Recently, The Oregonian/OregonLive ran a story called "Peek inside Google's secretive new Portland office." The accompanying slideshow featured interiors straight out of Dwell magazine: beautiful beverage dispensers filled with mint and lemon water, a Forest Park room with moody blue lighting and birch tree wallpaper, an oh-so-2016 living plant wall.

In all of the months leading up to election, I didn't have a single conversation with anyone who said they planned to vote for Donald Trump. Not in person. Not over the phone. Not with any of my 1,059 Facebook friends. Not with my family, my neighbors or my circle of loved ones and acquaintances that stretches across the country and around the world.

Shame on me.