"Portland is broken."
Nicholas Kristof was quoting Portland's congressman Earl Blumenauer. Kristof asked the question in a current article about Portland and other West Coast cities: "What's wrong with West Coast Cities?"
Portland has a one-two punch of special misery. Portland has a conspicuous problem of unhoused people living on sidewalks, roadsides, and median strips. This creates crimes of nuisance and disorder: garbage, blocked access, trespass. The second punch is the protests-turned riots of the long summer of 2020. They left a residue of closed businesses and bad relations between police and the public.
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| Portland |
I am sharing two responses to the question posed by Nick Kristof. One is from a college classmate, Chip O'Hare. Chip is a mostly-retired businessman. He was formerly a Selectman (i.e. City Council member) for the city of Belmont. He volunteers in nonprofit work, including the Greater Boston Food Bank. "I'm a moderate who supports the poor, but I think the Progressive agenda and its politically correct narrative are a major part of the problem."
His comment on West Coast cities was:
I can’t tell you so much what needs to change as to what WILL change if the leadership vacuum is left to spawn solutions that clean up the mess without agreement on how to do it from both sides of the political aisle. I’m not sure that a constructive dialogue is possible, even on such a difficult issue. The right will eventually gain the support from the middle who want the problem solved and who have lost faith in the progressives and the Democratic Party. I don’t see how a more authoritarian approach is avoidable (like Rudy G. in NYC who cracked down on lower level criminals when he was mayor), only this time I see it being harsher and Trumpian. It may take a while for Portland to shift, but as of now, it’s rotting from the inside and the present situation is not sustainable. Even progressives will not tolerate dysfunction forever as the pursuit of happiness by law-abiding citizens will outweigh the policies of the far left.
O'Hare
In Massachusetts, where bad winters keep the numbers at lower levels, our new mayor, Michele Wu, cleaned up our only notorious tent city during the winter by offering alternative housing to those who lived on “Methadone Mile,” which had become a place where drugs were sold in public and overdoses frequent. A motel was offered, and housing at a closed hospital, which didn't solve the drug issue but at least kept the tents from remaining. The business community has been at their wits' end with everything, but for now it has improved somewhat.
We are heading for a more authoritarian and dystopian future, I fear. Hope I’m wrong.
Another reader, who goes by the pen name "Low Dudgeon," gives a parallel analysis. Democrats were like indulgent parents. I don't know who "Low Dudgeon" is. From previous comments I guess Low Dudgeon to be male, in his 50s, and an attorney living in Southern Oregon.
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| Dudgeon |
A couple of common misapprehensions and false distinctions need to be pointed out here. First, between the chronic homeless in places like Portland, and crime, including of the worst sort. Second, between Floyd protesters and Floyd rioters.
It has proven impolitic in area news media sources to note what is a matter of public record in two recent, otherwise well-publicized, topical and arguably emblematic cases: the arrestee in this professor's deadly beating AND the arrestee in the violent hate crime visited upon a Japanese tourist and child are longtime members of Portland's houseless community.
The Floyd riots were hardly sui generis, but a continuation of the Occupy and WTO-protest movements. Activist left-wingers, Black and White alike, Antifa and BLM alike, share convictions that America is so oppressive and corrupt that it must be burned down and built anew. Milder-mannered Democrats marched with and also cravenly deferred to these types as if well-intended, and their violent politicized excesses as unfortunate but largely understandable or unavoidable. Kamala Harris herself urged donations to bail funds for the worst offenders in all this, crowing that the mayhem must and will continue.
Suddenly many grown-up Democrats wonder, like bad parents, why the spoiled, tantruming adolescents continue to maim and destroy and degrade and demand, on ever more nebulous or unserious pretexts. They wonder why the people they indulged with tolerance and patience, from ingrate ersatz anarchists, to money-grubbing hustlers and hostile ignoramuses in BLM leadership positions nationwide, even after asinine calls to abolish police and prisons were uttered with a straight face in adult policy debates, NOW they wonder why these folks refuse to moderate their views and their conduct one jot for the common good.
Democrats sowed the wind, further wrecked the cities they have long run, and they will reap the election-year whirlwind.
9 comments:
“Liberal” used to be a word with good connotations. But then liberals overreached, a backlash ensued, and it became a word with bad connotations. This required the invention of a new word, “progressive.“ That new word is, however, heading down the same track.
Here's a thought..
How about we get Betsy to run for mayor of Portland before we hand over the whole state?
I know, I know...brilliant!
Mr. "Dudgeon" sounds like a partisan hack parroting right-wing propaganda. One small example: Kamala Harris said she supports protests, not “mayhem.”
What she actually said was: “It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets and I support them. We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”
Obviously homelessness and the lack of affordable housing are huge problems in the United States.
It would be helpful if we talked about how we got into this situation, including closing the state mental hospitals; gentrification; cuts to social programs; cuts to housing programs; our ongoing health care crisis (cost, access, quality); the Baby Boom; major economic changes; etc.
Even something like the decline of the Catholic Church. I remember when the Catholic Church had a notably stronger presence, particularly in our cities. The church was active in helping the poor and the sick.
By the way, poverty, disability, addiction and homelessness exist in every city in America.
Cities that punish the sick and the poor drive those people to other places.
Mr. Sage—I don’t know how you managed it, but you captured my soft yet manly ur-mullet to a tee. Taking the liberty in THIS blogpost of replying to a specific commenter?
Michael S.—As with Jussie Smollett, concerning whom she began with “A lynching!” before discovering mature circumspection as facts emerged and public opinion evolved, Harris was also pretty strident and unequivocal about the Floyd riots after the first wave of arson, looting and violence arrests in Minneapolis and elsewhere, when CNN for instance was still calling them “mostly peaceful protests” with a straight face. At other times she has decided to try and clearly draw the categorical protester-criminal distinction most Democrats prefer, and which I have already argued is at best an opaque and moving target.
These riots of the last few years are child’s play compared to the riots of the 60’s.
The 1960s saw the most serious and widespread series of race riots in the history of the United States. Major riots occurred in Birmingham, Alabama , in 1963; New York City in 1964; Watts in Los Angeles, California , in 1965; and Chicago, Illinois , in 1966. In 1967, alone, Tampa, Florida ; Cincinnati, Ohio ; Atlanta, Georgia ; Newark, Plainfield, and New Brunswick, New Jersey ; and Detroit, Michigan , all had riots. Riots erupted in more than 110 U.S. cities on April 4, 1968, the night civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was assassinated.
I think the homeless in the streets are nothing compared to the homeless sofa surfing every night, reclining front seat sleepovers,
relatives in trailers in the driveway and back 40, transformed garages with blackout windows, park and move, park and move throughout the neighborhood …ghosts …..most who work who will never rest. Populated with so many children, so many children.
I've been to hundreds of protests on various issues, including anti-Vietnam War, anti-Iraq War, Occupy, and BLM. There are always a few people on the fringe who come looking for a fight, or to trash something. Sometimes the crowd leaves by midnight and the bad actors take over. During the main event, peacekeepers restrain the violent ones, but late at night they won't risk getting between the criminals and the police. As for the issue of homelessness, we need to go back to Reagan. He cut affordable housing programs by 80%. The single-room-occupancy hotels where most very poor people lived shut down. Instead of a few people too drunk to stay in the SROs, suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of people living in the street, including families. Before you judge that the millions now homeless are all lazy drug addicts, think about what you would do if the only jobs you could get would not pay for rent, and how you would deal with the anxiety, shame, and anger you would suffer. Don't even get me started on all the poor women trying to support children by themselves. This is a cruel society where inequality has gotten steadily worse for 40 years. Many of our problems can be traced to the mean-spiritedness of Republican administrations. Blaming liberals is a cynical move; classic Trump, really, to accuse your opponents of what you yourself have done.
Jane--
The after-midnight bad actors in our cities are almost all leftists, like the before-midnight folks are. That's the point, and why the before-midnight folks have been soft on them, including so-called social justice prosecutors.
"Blame Reagan" is a canard. Progressives sought successfully beginning in the 1970s to empty facilities and raise barriers to involuntary civil and criminal commitment, and to normalize and empower those with mental diseases and defects, with well-intended civil rights motivations, but ultimately disastrous results.
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