The Grown Up Revolution Begins in Portland
- Izaak David Diggs
- Jan 7
- 3 min read
This is not a proper city, this is dystopian hellscape: You don’t have people turning sidewalks into KOAs in a proper city…or using them as a restroom. You don’t have scores of exploded white, plastic bags vomiting trash onto the pavement. You don’t have strung out people in the fetal position taking over outdoor seating. Most importantly, you don’t allow fellow human beings to fall through the cracks like this. I’m done, are you? Are you tired of people shuffling up to you asking for a “spare dollar’? Are you tired knowing that if that vagrant gets that dollar it could fund a fentenyl overdose. Seriously, one dollar. It’s time for a revolution, a grown up revolution. Maybe it should start here in Portland.
We have people with serious mental health and addiction issues left to fend for themselves; it’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to us. They need to be removed from the streets and placed in a facility where they can recieve care. We remove these fellow human beings who need help from the street, and then we deal with the predators, the muggers and the dealers and the hustlers. You want to stay in the city? Fine, we’ll make sure you have a warm place to stay, food, a bathroom—but we will put you to work cleaning the trash off the streets and doing other manual work to beautify whatever town you’re in. You will be randomly drug tested. You fuck up, you are out of the program and we change the laws so we have more options with respect to dealing with these people. This is how grown up do things.
Before you label me as some right wing person stop right there. I believe in a strong social safety net, I would never vilefy someone who needs food stamps or whatever because they are down on their luck. I’ve collected food stamps, I’ve been on unemployment. While I believe identity politics and cancel culture have gone too far I would never demonize “wokeness” because it serves a purpose. Yes, criminals have come across the border but mostly it’s people escaping a shitty situation back home just as our ancestors did from Europe and Asia. These people coming up from Latin America are doing the jobs us gringos won’t do for a wage we won’t accept: You see many white folks mowing lawns in Phoenix during the summer? Didn’t think so.
The Grown Up Revolution will clean up the urban streets, it will deal with “corporate welfare.” It will deal with the fact we pay for car insurance every month and, if we need help, we have to spend an hour in phone tree hell only to speak to someone we can’t understand. This is not against the person in Mumbai taking the call, this is against the big insurance company who, instead of employing an American, they are increasing their profits by outsourcing to a country where they can pay much less per hour. We—Left and Right folks—spend so much time at each others’ throats we don’t see that the real adversary is the way this country is run, how everything is geared to serve the wealthy and not us working people. The national minimum wage has not been increased in over fifteen years ($7.25!) but the cheapest new Toyota has gone from $11000 to $23000. In 2008, we rented a two bedroom house in Sacramento for $1000 a month. Now, it is $1200 for a studio apartment in Sacramento.
And how is it fair that our “representatives” in Washington—our employees—have the best healthcare in the world while you and I have to pay a big chunk of every paycheck to have mediocre coverage?
So many issues, so many things to address during the Grown Up Revolution.
How are we supposed to “Make America Great Again” when we allow education to be so expensive?
Make it free…unless an individual doesn’t get their degree and then they pay for it.
So many things we could do to make our country better, to make it more fair and livable.
It all starts with us, with us saying “Fuck this, all this shit needs to change. Yesterday."
Hey, before you go, I also have books for sale on Amazon:
Thanks~some good ideas.