Protecting Paradise

When we left off, a combination of natural resources, leadership, and some luck combined to make Portland highly livable and favorable towards creative types. Even the rain, while making things green, may also help keep the cost of living down by making the land less desirable to Californians.

There was this threat hanging overhead: what might cause the creative types to move away? And the not fully explained response would be if something changed that they couldn't live with.

As the lack of racial diversity had kept coming up, I initially thought it could be perhaps related to minority issues, like if that somehow became worse. The Portland Police Department does not have the best reputation with some groups (though the more I look at it, the more the common denominator appears to be mental illness). If we were to start persecuting homeless people more, or if panhandling increased, would that do it. Would you move if they put fluoride in the water? Or would you move if they didn't? While I do see many points of concern, I don't know that any of them would be better elsewhere.

We do not have the most racially diverse society here, and I suspect there is more latent racism than we like to admit, but at the same time, no one has been trying to rig elections or eliminate expanded voting hours so working people can't make it to the polls. There are a lot of states that look worse on that issue.

While I have decided that I am against the death penalty and would rather see it eliminated, I have to admit that we are much more judicious and careful with it than most states. And really, that's more of a reason to be alarmed about other states, but okay, at least we try.

Perhaps the worst potential threat is the underfunded education system, because while the ramifications may be more of a concern for parents, the quality of local education affects everyone. It affects the possibilities for jobs and businesses by how it feeds into the workforce, and it affects the civility of the society. It will affect crime rates, because it affects how people engage with society.

Funding goes back to money, and that social mobility and ability to buy houses goes back to money, and there are other ways money has an impact too.

For example, a big part of keeping our nature preserved is keeping environmental regulations followed. The Department of Environmental Quality often finds itself not very effective, whether because of underfunding, or caving to pressure from the powerful, it can be hard to say.

Most of what I know about DEQ issues comes from Steve Duin, a columnist for the Oregonian, our local paper. They just sold off part to a media company, laid off 90 people, and are radically changing their practices. They have done some really powerful reporting in the past. I feel like that's ending.

Nike's main campus sits just outside of the Beaverton city boundaries, though in an odd, island kind of way. They do provide jobs, but it is silly that they are for all intents and purposes inside the city, except for paying city taxes. Beaverton did try to fix that, and Nike used all their considerable power to successfully squash that. Now, I don't deny that Beaverton was clumsy about it, and that the mayor involved was being a tool, but that doesn't make Nike's attitude right.

(A lot of foolishness has come via Portland mayors too. Too much to get into.)

Usually, when I am worrying about something going on politically or socially, a large part of the problem is corporate influence. That's not it every single time, but money influences a lot, and for bad reasons.

I absolutely do not think that Portland is worse than any other area for this. We're probably better than most. Even with some of those cities that were mentioned in the entrepreneur article yesterday, okay, if you're in Austin, you're still in Texas. If you're in Madison, your governor is still Scott Walker. Sorry.

These problems are bigger than Portland, and I am not quite ready to go off on politics and economics yet. My personal reading right now is all civil rights and mental illness, and I probably need to get quite a bit more read before I can even go there.

What I will say is that we need to make conscious choices about what we value. A lot of the choices that get made now work primarily to consolidate money and power more and more in the hands of those who already have it, and it is disastrous. How to make things better is something I think about a lot, and I don't really have any good answers yet, so tomorrow I'm just going to talk about Rose Festival. Sort of.