One of the more tasteless relics of Oregon history is a billboard that thanked people for visiting the state and then reminded them to please go home at the conclusion of their vacation. It ranks right up there with the bumper stickers that were patterned after the old license plates that said, simply, Native Oregonian. The real message behind the billboards and bumper stickers, I think, is this: We stole this territory, we exploited it for our own purposes, we treated the people who lived here before we arrived poorly, and now it’s ours and you’re not welcome. I’m not sure what hope we can hold out for an informed future that includes an honest perspective when we’re so willing to erase our history and carry on as if the land didn’t exist until we stood on it. At best it seems lazy, and at worst it strikes me as dangerous.
And yet.
For many months now the unemployment rate in Oregon has been above 12 percent. For a while we were behind only Michigan and South Carolina, but then they tried to balance the checkbook down in California, which caused Oregon to fall in the rankings.
The numbers, when they’re repeated often enough, fade to abstraction. They’re overwhelming, they exist independently of any context, but every now and then I hear something that sticks. In September a waitressing job was advertised by a café in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland that not too many years ago was verdant farm land before Intel blessed the town by building a chip factory there, which it promptly shut down last year. Even though it was a part-time job with no benefits, more than 250 people applied.
Then, this: approximately 36,000 people with college degrees have moved to Portland in the last 12 months. Assuming a commercial jet can ferry 150 passengers, it would take 240 of them to transport the new residents of Portland into town. I didn’t have a job when I moved here in 1994. Not only did I not have a job, I didn’t even have a plan. My move to Oregon was completely accidental. What I did have was a savings account, which I’d funded by setting aside a certain amount of money each time I got a paycheck. Savings accounts, I’ve learned, are about as outdated as love letters. They’re old-fashioned, quaint.
Not long ago a woman who has been desperately looking for a job for more than a year said on television that she thought people who have lived in Oregon for more than a year should be given a few bonus points during the application process. To me, that’s a horrifying sentiment, until, that is, I see someone with a degree from Brown or Yale or the University of Michigan smile across the television screen and say, “If you’re going to be on unemployment, Portland’s a great place for it.” Blaming problems on people based on their demographic is a cheap and easy way out, I think. The logic of it has led to atrocities from the beginning of time. But I’ve heard statements like that enough times that my thoughts now automatically leapfrog to wondering if that’s why a statewide tax hike is in the works.
I don’t really subscribe to the hype around here about Oregon’s “green economy” or our “creative class.” Instead I follow the math part of the story, which is blessedly free of talking points and messaging: There are more qualified applicants here than there are jobs. To put it into perspective, to give it a little color, last weekend the computer network that handles unemployment claims, along with the telephone service it relies upon, couldn’t process the number of transactions, which increased dramatically over the previous week because Sunday was the day to file for an emergency extension. In a very eloquent example of cause and effect, the system was so overwhelmed that it crashed.
And yet.
For many months now the unemployment rate in Oregon has been above 12 percent. For a while we were behind only Michigan and South Carolina, but then they tried to balance the checkbook down in California, which caused Oregon to fall in the rankings.
The numbers, when they’re repeated often enough, fade to abstraction. They’re overwhelming, they exist independently of any context, but every now and then I hear something that sticks. In September a waitressing job was advertised by a café in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland that not too many years ago was verdant farm land before Intel blessed the town by building a chip factory there, which it promptly shut down last year. Even though it was a part-time job with no benefits, more than 250 people applied.
Then, this: approximately 36,000 people with college degrees have moved to Portland in the last 12 months. Assuming a commercial jet can ferry 150 passengers, it would take 240 of them to transport the new residents of Portland into town. I didn’t have a job when I moved here in 1994. Not only did I not have a job, I didn’t even have a plan. My move to Oregon was completely accidental. What I did have was a savings account, which I’d funded by setting aside a certain amount of money each time I got a paycheck. Savings accounts, I’ve learned, are about as outdated as love letters. They’re old-fashioned, quaint.
Not long ago a woman who has been desperately looking for a job for more than a year said on television that she thought people who have lived in Oregon for more than a year should be given a few bonus points during the application process. To me, that’s a horrifying sentiment, until, that is, I see someone with a degree from Brown or Yale or the University of Michigan smile across the television screen and say, “If you’re going to be on unemployment, Portland’s a great place for it.” Blaming problems on people based on their demographic is a cheap and easy way out, I think. The logic of it has led to atrocities from the beginning of time. But I’ve heard statements like that enough times that my thoughts now automatically leapfrog to wondering if that’s why a statewide tax hike is in the works.
I don’t really subscribe to the hype around here about Oregon’s “green economy” or our “creative class.” Instead I follow the math part of the story, which is blessedly free of talking points and messaging: There are more qualified applicants here than there are jobs. To put it into perspective, to give it a little color, last weekend the computer network that handles unemployment claims, along with the telephone service it relies upon, couldn’t process the number of transactions, which increased dramatically over the previous week because Sunday was the day to file for an emergency extension. In a very eloquent example of cause and effect, the system was so overwhelmed that it crashed.
