Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.
Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.
But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in.
Let's start local; Portland.
I wish I had a nickel for every "OMFG! Portland is OVER!!!" I've read in everything from the local digital fishwrap (since I can't recall the last time I saw an actual dead-tree Oregonian) to national opinion columns. This assessment seems to rest largely on two pillars:
1) The 2020 protests, and
2) the "homeless crisis".
Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:
1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And
2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.
Let's take them apart.
The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.
I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.
Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.
Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...
(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)
...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.
So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.
And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone.
And what happened after that?
Nothing.
Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.
But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.
It didn't make Portland better.
But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.
The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.
And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.
They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Now.
Homelessness.
This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.
Plus we had our very own homeless crazy lady parked in our little street, screaming and muttering, taking her clothing off...
(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)
...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.
Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.
I just want the problems to go away.
But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.
This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city.
The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.
It's not fucking rocket science.
Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.
Seriously.
That's it.
It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care.
Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.
But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.
We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home.
We're not doing anything to help with the job.
And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.
What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.
You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.
You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.
You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).
You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.
And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.
Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?
No.
Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?
Yes.
Will it happen?
No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.
Like so much else in the U.S. circa 2022, there's an obvious social, political, and economic solution to an obvious social, political, or economic problem.
But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried.
Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.
Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?
Don't make me laugh.
Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.
The country at large?
The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.
They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.
The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.
They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.
I have no idea what the hell you do about this.
It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.
Maybe just for shits and giggles.
Either way?
Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.
The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.
Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.
