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Wendy Willis

Wendy Willis is a writer, lawyer, and advocate for democracy. She is the founder and director of Oregon's Kitchen Table, which is housed in National Policy Consensus Center in the the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University and the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Wendy has served as Executive Director of the City Club of Portland, as an Assistant Public Defender for the District of Oregon, and as a law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr., of the Oregon Supreme Court. She is the author of a textbook, a book of essays, and two books of poems. Her most recent two books, A Long Late Pledge and These are Strange Times, My Dear, were both finalists for the Oregon Book Award.
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    Democracy Pie

    Tut, tut: Notes on an invitation to solidarity

    Wendy Willis
    April 22, 2022
    Solidarity with Ukraine
    Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

    Willis is the founder and director of Oregon's Kitchen Table at Portland State University and executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. She is the author of a textbook, a book of essays and two books of poems.

    Blessed are those
    who break off from separateness
    theirs is wild
    Heaven.
    -Jean Valentine, “The Harrowing”

    They told us what was coming. So I — like so many others around the world — coiled myself into a fatalistic ball waiting for the Russians to roll across the border into Ukraine. Two days, Vladimir Putin supposedly told his troops. Two days, and the Russians would be, if not greeted as liberators, at least accepted as neighborly occupiers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his cabinet would flee to some sympathetic nation in Central Europe, and the world would move on. That was the plan, at least. And it was a plan that, somewhere in the back of my head, I accepted.

    Of course, as we all know now, that was not what the citizens of Ukraine had in mind. Zelensky stayed. The Ukrainian people have banded together and delivered babies and fed neighbors and torn down street signs, and fought and fought. Russian troops have grown increasingly brutal. They are raping and murdering civilians. They are shelling hospitals. Thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, many of them dumped into mass graves dug on the edges of suburban neighborhoods. Millions more have fled.

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    So what are we to do? Of course, President Biden and Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland and Chinese President Xi Jinping and the U.N. Security Council have real decisions to make. But what about the rest of us?

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    Democracy Pie

    Forget your perfect offering: In praise of brokenness

    Wendy Willis
    February 04, 2022
    America is broken
    Tetra Images/Getty Images

    Willis is the founder and director of Oregon's Kitchen Table at Portland State University and executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. She is the author of a textbook, a book of essays and two books of poems.

    A couple of Sundays ago, I stayed in bed late — or at least late for me — texting everyone I know. To person after person, I sent the link to a Globe and Mail op-ed with the ominous title “The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare.” The piece was written by Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and had been knocking around my Twitter feed for a few days before I finally got up the gumption to read it. Here’s the lede:

    “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” As if that wasn’t enough, Homer-Dixon, a scholar of violent conflict, spent the next several thousand words describing what he calls “the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.”

    The reason I carpet bombed — to use a horrible, violent metaphor — my friends and family with a Canadian news article barely after dawn on a Sunday morning was not just that the piece was stark and terrifying but also because everything Homer-Dixon described was so recognizable and rang so true — structural and institutional injustices, persistent income inequality, emboldened white supremacy, elite selfishness, all combined with 400 million firearms. He reflected back to us what we already see and affirmed our worst fears about the potential consequences.

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