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PORTLAND, Oregon – This city is in the national spotlight this week because of the violent antics of Antifa with their attacks on the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center after President Trump’s plan to send in federal law enforcement. But this once-great city’s real problem is an affluent population that seems indifferent to the twin scourges of human misery and domestic terrorism that have come to define it.
The two problems may well be more related than they seem.
PORTLAND SET TO SEE TRUMP CRIME CRACKDOWN RECKONING AFTER 2020’S HUMILIATING VIOLENCE SPREE
On Monday morning, downtown Portland is a ghost town by the standards of most major American cities. There are basically only two types of people walking around, those who have a lot of money, and those who have none.
This is very much a West Coast phenomenon, similar in many ways to the mess that San Francisco is in. In both liberal enclaves, it is normal to turn a corner, off of a block of high-end shopping, and walk into a row of homeless tents, the smell of human waste and burning drugs commingled.
I asked John, in his forties, who mans a parking garage in the area, if it’s just something you get used to. “I guess so,” he told me. “I’ll get here and have to kick homeless out, dispose of needles, it’s all over the place.”
On the corner, I stopped and lit a cigarette, a bedraggled man walked by pushing a bike with a sign on it that read, “Bike for Sale, Make Offer.” As I pondered the provenance of the used Trek, a very pretty, though obviously homeless and addicted young woman asked to bum a smoke.
When I gave her one, she said, “Thank you, you’re wonderful,” with big eyes. I stammered back a “thanks,” and then watched as she caught up to the man with the bike, gave him the cigarette and moved on to another mark. I had to admit, it was a sophisticated little grift.
For anyone from a northeastern American city, this all feels very, very strange. Dystopian, even.
There are homeless people sprinkled around center city Philadelphia, for example, but you have to go looking for the pure human misery that is Kensington with its needle park. In Portland, it is omnipresent.
Since President Donald Trump announced that he would send federal authorities to clean up the city, we have seen much of that most useless form of discourse, pictures from Portland of lovely brunches or a pretty storefront put on social media by liberals to say, “Look, it’s fine.”
This weekend, Democrat Gov. Tina Kotek assembled a crowd in Battleship Oregon park and posted images of how beautiful it is. I went there Monday morning, only to find it adorned with a homeless man passed out at its base, cigarette dangling from his hand.
What these extremely privileged, as a progressive might put it, social media posts of supposedly pleasant Portland reveal is a general callousness to suffering that has set in, borne of such constant exposure to it.
The have-everythings and the have-nothings basically ignore each other.
And it’s not just the homeless that Portlanders have grown accustomed to. At the local CVS, which looked like something out of the Soviet Union, 90% of the stock was behind lock and key, not just razors and deodorant, but bags of chips.
I asked the armed security guard — like San Francisco, you almost never see armed police, just private armed security — if he stops a lot of theft. “Look around,” he told me, “There’s nothing they can steal, I’m mostly here for crazies or violent people who might come in.”
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The crystal-clear message that this sends to the citizenry is that they live surrounded by thieves who cannot be trusted, so they should go to the protection of fancy restaurants, or their high-rise apartments and let the streets be the streets.
That is where Antifa comes back into the story.
Why does Antifa feel empowered to simply take over square blocks of Portland and harass whomever they want to? In New York City or Philadelphia, the police would eventually shut it down. Where I live in West Virginia it wouldn’t last 10 minutes.
The obvious answer is that the city doesn’t stop them. Just as the city does nothing to clean up the vagrancy and open drug use, it is just total surrender as, day by day, people die on the streets beneath the beautiful pine trees overlooking what should be a wonderful city.
Trump’s efforts to make Washington, D.C., safer, cleaner and freer of vagrants have been met with some begrudging gratitude even in the deep blue capital city, but don’t expect to see that here in Portland.
The wealthy here just don’t seem to care much if people have needles sticking out of their arms, or if Antifa is assaulting journalists. There is kombucha and there are cute shoe shops and the like, and as crazy as it seems to me, a lot of people here really do think the situation is just fine.
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