“As a lifelong Portlander,” Alan Grinnell writes to the editor of The Oregonian, “I am shocked at what our city has become.”
Responding to a Steve Duin column about Portland, the “broken city,” Grinnell asks, rhetorically, “Who would have thought that our downtown would become a wasteland, that there would be homeless camps everywhere in the city, and that gangs of armed thugs on all sides of the political spectrum would run out our police?”
Duin defined the problem as one of “mob rule,” lamenting that “just about everyone I spoke to was terrified they might be the next random target of the mob.”
After months of riots and property destruction following the killing of George Floyd by police in distant Minneapolis, Minnesota, the focus of recent police and community attention turned to a house on Mississippi Street from which so-called “sovereign citizens” — the Kinney family (who are black and indigenous) — were evicted for not paying their mortgage (since 2017). Now the house is being occupied by “activists,” who have turned the area into a sort of autonomous zone — as was done for weeks this summer, dangerously, in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.
“[I]f you live or tend shop on North Mississippi, and fear for your own safety around the local ‘security’ forces,” inquired the columnist, “what do you make of the cops’ retreat from the neighborhood?”
While many appear sympathetic with the Kinneys’ plight, the takeover by the terrorists, er, activists, is another matter entirely. One black man on reddit calls it “one big scam,” suggesting folks “ignore these loons.”
But ignoring willful lawbreakers appears to be the problem, not the solution.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “The Portland Chaos”
Democratic socialism in action. The same thing they are trying to foist on the rest of America. I cannot help with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they asked for this, the inevitable manifestation of poor choices based on intent rather than results. On the other hand, they were never taught any better in their government-run schools so they were not really equipped for adulthood or really making responsible choices. A whole generation there ready to try to live in their imaginary world the way they would like it to work. Damaged goods, slated to forever make poor decisions and blame anyone and everyone else. And to perpetual anger that people and the world don’t really function like they wish. And an opportunistic group of delinquents now operating regularly to break and damage things. But the rest of the country shouldn’t have to be subjected to this miasma, nor to fund the expensive consequences. Things will get better when the children and the childish are no longer in charge. For now, as Golding surmised, “there aren’t any grownups”. Until there are , the productive will leave and things will get worse.