Downtown Portland and the Screaming Silence

I visited downtown Portland yesterday.

I was in downtown Portland, Oregon from mid-morning until mid-afternoon yesterday.  My eldest daughter, Leila, has just started her first year of university.  I can already tell she's going to get a lot further with higher education than her father ever did.

We live east of the Willamette River, which is to say, east of the area known as downtown.  To the west of downtown, the hills get very steep, and the wealthiest residents of the city, traditionally including all of the politicians, live there.

Downtown itself is often talked about, because it's reminiscent of a refugee camp with no bathrooms, but oddly juxtaposed with an urban setting.  It's as if the buildings are all props on a set, with half of them abandoned and not being used except as props. 

Those that are being used are off-limits to the people living in tents just outside their entrances.

The stench throughout downtown is stifling, especially on a warmer day like today, even though it's clear the street-cleaners had been through recently.

Union Station, the train station where Amtrak stops, is a center of the dystopia, and has been for many years.  In  every direction from the station, it smells strongly of urine.  If there's a storefront or office building without a tent in front of it, it's because that place has hired private security, whose job it is to keep people from camping in front of the entrances, as far as I can tell.

Their job is not to bother anyone putting stickers on all the street signs, they ignored that sort of activity very well.

The clear commonality with everyone on the streets you see in every direction, whether they're standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, is distress.  The clear common denominator -- whether they're recently homeless and about to have all their stuff stolen, chronically homeless and had all their stuff stolen a long time ago, whether they're on fentanyl and unable to keep their pants on, or they're shouting at themselves and anyone who might care to listen about their constant condition of unmet needs -- is distress.

I met Leila at the train station, along with her three fellow travelers from the university in Salem, and together we drove in my car through block after block of tent after tent and all the people living and dying in plain view on the sidewalks in front of us, past the boarded-up buildings, and we talked about what the streets are like in the parts of the US that the other students were from -- Texas, California, and Hawai'i, all places where the housing crisis is at breaking point, or would be, if there were such a thing.

Our destination was the waterfront, and the Saturday Market, which actually happens on both Saturdays and Sundays, and has for a long time now.  People with their booths were there, selling jewelry and pottery and food and all sorts of things.

I rarely go downtown, but the crowd was very small compared to any other time I went to the Saturday Market in past years.  It's usually too crowded, so I didn't mind that it wasn't, but it was certainly a notable absence of people coming for the occasion.

Just past where the market is there are jets of water coming out of the ground during the summer, which all the kids enjoy very much.  Folks living on the sidewalks can also wash a bit of the grime off.  Others just sit nearby, among the parents of the children like me.  One woman nearby is alternately shouting and laughing and crying about the terrible state of her life, living on the streets of Portland.  I don't know if anyone else was listening to what she was saying, but I was.  I can't ignore that kind of thing, even if I wanted to.  I didn't try to talk to her, though.

Near the market there was Mercy Corps, which has a big multi-story building there on Naito Parkway, featuring a huge sign supporting Ukrainian refugees.

Someone waiting in line for tamales with me complimented my t-shirt, which said Palestine Action on it.  He was visiting from Texas. 

My t-shirt was the only indication of any kind anywhere in downtown Portland today that Palestine exists, let alone that there's an American-sponsored genocide taking place there for the past 11 months.

In every city the size of Portland that I've been to since last October in all the other countries, there are weekly protests, at least.  At least there is a visible presence of the existence of a movement in opposition to this genocide.

But in downtown Portland, there's me and my t-shirt, and some stickers people might find appearing on poles in the area.  Nothing.

Nor do we find any indication that there might be people in this society who think the idea of a society where thousands of people live and die in tents on the sidewalks in the center of town is something crazy, that represents a broken system that needs to be radically transformed.  

There is not a single person in downtown Portland this Sunday trying to recruit anyone to any group, no one raising money for a charity, no one standing around with an unfolded copy of their party's newspaper, prepared to talk with passersby about alternatives to capitalism — and no more-radical-than-thou punks to make snide comments about the socialist with the newspaper, either.

Back when Portland was a thriving city full of musicians who lived here because it was a nice place to live cheaply and be with other musicians, the Saturday Market would always have amazing performers at it, some of whom I knew.  The city was full of people who were obsessed with old-time music, which included my neighbors and roommates, at various earlier points in my time here.

Now, the market had a stage with a sound system that had been set up by some company that sets up stages and sound systems on contract, by the looks of it.  There were a couple of people standing around dressed in Robin Hood kind of outfits, but they didn't seem to be using the stage.  

One young person plugged in and sang a few songs on the stage.  There were a few people sitting on the tables nearby, eating, and ignoring the performer.  Me and everyone I was with did the same thing.  It was the only merciful way to be, since the individual on the stage could neither play the guitar nor sing on pitch, even though the evidently original songs they were trying to render were not challenging to pull off in the first place, none involving more than three notes or more than two chords.

I'm not really sure how to describe what I saw today in downtown Portland.  But I know what I didn't see -- so many things, whose collective absence in this society, in this reportedly cultured and progressive city, is hard to fathom.

---