The people poisoning Oregon, drip by drip, with a lethal compound of a failed and unpopular ideology, raw greed and incompetence do not want the rest of us to hope. To hope is to believe things might and should get better, which implies the current state of affairs is, at best, suboptimal.
Suboptimal is, of course, a drastic overstatement of this state’s state of affairs. I won’t run through the list of horrors that is Oregon’s performance on most every relevant metric relative to other states; if you’re reading this, you know them. Everyone knows Oregonians are struggling more with almost everything that can be measured than other states. It’s just a matter of whether you admit it, publicly.
Decision after decision, election after election, Oregon has not only tolerated but demanded more failure. It’s excruciating to watch a place you love collapse, in real time, before your eyes.
And yet, I have hope. I’d wager I spend as much time as anyone learning about and describing new and exciting ways in which Oregon’s government is failing Oregonians. My reporting process often begins with a hypothesis that the people who run Oregon do the things they do out of cynical self-interest the success of which depends upon an uninformed or intentionally misled electorate letting them do it. That hypothesis turns out to be right almost every time, unfortunately.
And yet, I have hope. The progressive coalition was able to do most anything it wanted in Oregon from 2020 to 2022, and the human wreckage we see today is the result. But since about 2022, there have been limits to progressives’ ability to reward antisocial behavior while punishing productivity. Hard drugs are recriminalized, sort of. Portland was headed toward a relatively sane city council before its new city charter made a mess of things, again. The great Oregon tax revolt is poised to repeal a giant tax increase next year, showing voters remain capable of expressing righteous anger at their government channeled through lawful political processes.
But, to be honest, I have hope not as much because of those logical reasons, but because I feel things simply cannot continue as they are in Oregon. There is too much governmental evil being visited upon Oregonians for things to continue as they are in perpetuity. At some point, the progressives will run out of tax revenue, if nothing else.
I see the comments on the stuff I write that nothing is going to change until we end vote by mail or clean the voter lists or get the wrongdoers to confess their sins. Maybe they’re right, but I have a little more faith in my fellow Oregonians than that.
I know what it feels like to be hopeless. When problems beget more problems, and it’s impossible to see a way out. I believe all we can do in that circumstance is to work on what we can control and make incremental progress toward our goal.
What I can do is report on things going on in Oregon other people, for whatever reason, don’t report on. I have faith that the resulting knowledge, combined with the efforts of others doing what they can, will make a difference in the big picture. I can’t explain why I believe that but I do, at my core. I can’t not believe that.
Christmas without hope is the ocean without water. A better Oregon awaits so long as we want it and work for it, and reject the hopeless complacency upon which evil draws its sustenance.
Merry Christmas.
This article originally appeared in the Oregon Roundup.