Dystopic Portlandia

Unless you have been there recently, it is difficult to imagine the extent of houselessness that exists now in Portland. Missoula has its camps but in the Portland metro area, tents and tarps are literally everywhere. Any public space- freeway right-of-ways, parks, downtown sidewalks, underpasses, empty lots- is occupied by those living rough. And after three days of hard, cold rain I mean unbelievably rough. At the practical, policy, municipal level, this population is a "problem". Garbage piles up, police and ambulances are called, neighborhoods adjoining the camps get robbed,services must be provided, etc etc.. On this level, as the camps grow, the "problem" grows. But if you stop for one second to realize these are human lives, that in a country of unimaginable wealth and gross over-consumption we have normalized a totally disposable population, the whole soggy, muddy landscape becomes insanely obscene. White people used to whine about "ghettos" and "the projects" and urban blight. But those people at least had a roof over their heads. We now accept that people live in tents and shit in the bushes. They are exiled to the outside of the margins, banished from the community. The Other Portland goes to day spas and eats organic yogurt at seven dollars a pop. They drive past the camps on the way to the stores and restaurants and donate to United Way, all the while blocking from their tolerant minds the increasingly unavoidable fact that the system, their precious liberal capitalist "democracy", is crumbling before their eyes. The facade is being ripped off and all they can do is wonder how to fix "the problem".