Politics in My Fair City is bananas, you guys. In these types of articles, it’s customary for The Author to make some pretentious argument for why his slice of the U.S. is a microcosm for the Nation as a Whole. But given all the geographic and demographic factors at play, Portland, Oregon, might as well exist in its own pocket dimension.

We’ve got real estate speculators, both local and national, driving home prices through the roof, the rent really is too damn high, and there aren’t enough jobs to go around. No surprise, we’ve got a homelessness crisis. We’ve had one for years, but the Current Crisis only became a “crisis” when our current mayor told the cops to stop jailing people for camping on the sidewalk. The city’s gray bar hotel is already packed beyond capacity (once again, as it has been for years), and the County doesn’t want our over-spill. No one does. Most would rather the homeless just die quietly, somewhere no one has to watch, and if they could avoid contaminating the water any more than it already is on the way out, that would be just swell. So massive camps have started forming on city-owned property, triggering absolutely nothing but sane, compassionate responses from the local middle class. (Random-but-actual quote from my city’s major daily newspaper’s website: “You have to get tough on the homelessness problem or we will all end up paying for for some lazy drug addict/alcoholic, non motivated individual’s private room somewhere, where they can party on our dime, because they don’t want to get sober and work.” Time it took to find that quote: thirty-five seconds, including the time it took to Google that article.) Continue reading Election 2016 – Oregon Primary Day – An Exercise in Over-analysis →