I don’t know what I think of it, or how I feel about it, and I’m not sure it matters. A friend of mine did ask me, nicely, how I might feel if people pitched tents up and down my street.
My initial response was that the question raised something of a moot point since my street is not a public park. The parks in downtown Portland where the camping took place are not, in my opinion, really parks: They’re one city block each (in a city of very small blocks) with statuary and, in one, a building with restrooms. While most people would be hard pressed to name them, during and following the campout these two parks have been discussed in tones and terms so reverent you’d think they were the birthplace of Jesus or one of his very close relatives.
The City of Portland is partly to blame for this. Shortly after the occupiers were evicted and parks employees came to work on a Sunday afternoon to enclose the parks with chain-link fencing to “keep everyone safe,” estimates for what it would cost to repair the parks started getting tossed around, and, as is to be expected, the local news people trumpeted the figures at the top of their talk shows. The most recent figure I heard was $180,000, and I have three things to say about that. First, why do these two city blocks warrant an arborist and a specialist to tend to one thing and another? Does every so-called park get that level of attention? A relatively large park in my neighborhood and the community center housed in it sure don’t. Second, as one occupier pointed out, the estimate for repairing the restrooms reflects what it will cost to restore those facilities to a condition that was lost long before the campers arrived. It’s distorted, in other words. And third, I’ve been on the receiving end of the city’s cost-estimating capabilities - $1,200 for three or four squares of sidewalk that absolutely did not need to be repaired in the first place and that were, ultimately, repaired poorly. I hesitate to bash a government entity, but in this case I think getting a few more bids would be a good idea.
But the more I thought about my friend’s question, the more I thought that I would find a strand of tents pitched up and down my street less problematic than the SUVs and 18-wheelers and pickup trucks sagging with refrigerators and washing machines and dish washers and other vehicles driven by generally careless idiots that roar through with zero regard for those of us who live here. People do need to sleep, and in order to do so most people need to be shielded from the elements. People do not, in my opinion, need to exceed 50 miles per hour on a street that is barely two lanes wide.
I think the revulsion brought about by camping is entertaining in a way. At the same time, I do wonder what’s behind it, or beneath it. Are we that disturbed by people going about the business of daily living, only outside? Does it remind us of where we came from? More troubling or more entertaining, depending, does it remind us of where we appear to be headed? Does it remind us that most of us have lost the instincts that would come in pretty handy if we were forced to survive without what we now consider the basics? Does it force us to ask ourselves as best we’re able what we would do without remote controls, without running water, without the God-given right to waste paper by placing a sheet of it on a toilet seat so that our ass cheeks don’t touch the surface that someone else’s ass cheeks touched before we do our business in a public or semi-public facility?
And what would we do without the perversion of Thanksgiving known as Black Friday? That was an interesting day this year, I thought, because it followed so closely the eviction of the occupiers from the sacred grounds in downtown Portland. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, I imagined that maybe the super sales would fall flat as people honored the time and energy the protestors invested in showing the country and the world that our economy is indeed a fairly tale. What, I wondered, under a trance of almost childlike delight, what if everyone simply occupied their own hearts, souls and spirits rather than rushing out and buying more stocking stuffers for next year’s landfill? But there was no such luck. Record sales, I believe, that actually boosted the stock market, the unintelligible details of which are now broadcast on an hourly basis, and it all got officially underway, as it usually does, with a good old-fashioned campout in the parking lots of malls across the land. And, if the breezy chattiness of the hosts and hostesses who sing the world on the television stations is any indication, that was just fine.
