There's something happening in Portland, much like there is something happening in various (mostly urban) pockets around the country, and the spirit is probably analogous to what was happening in places like San Francisco in the 60's, though now the ideology is slightly more refined and weathered...less naive. It seems to be quietly spreading in places like Long Beach and Berkeley as well: semi-urban places where the money is less concentrated (though still present) but the landscape resists the isolation and resulting social alienation of the suburbs.
The actual downtown area is mostly like other cities' downtown areas: there are pockets of resistance but as a whole and as a function of our current economic system, the city is dominated by the moneyed types. It is the only way to subsist in an area where the rent shoots sky-high in accordance with population saturation and the universal human desire to be where the action is. The wealth concentrates and shoots up in the form of sleek glass towers, much like the inverted version of a cave full of dripping stalactites. It is saddening to view high end businesses displaying huge colorful messages like "Peace, love, unity" in their windows, the product of the relentless marketing impulse to shapeshift to meet the surrounding conditions of its environment to draw in as much customers as possible. The messages, while nice on their face, merely reflect the sensibilities of the surrounding progressive neighborhoods and end up becoming contradicted by the very operations they are trying to promote: to sell aggressively in competition with others in the area and become enriched and as a consequence serve to further divide the surrounding environment. The homeless sit on the streets right outside, cups in hand, mostly ignored but occasionally recognized with nervous glances by much of the fashionably-dressed passerby.
But just across the bridge amid the sprawling green neighborhoods lies the authenticity I've been hearing about. This arrangement reminds me of Long Beach: centralized concentrated wealth surrounded by neighborhoods where this "new stuff" springs up in shoots like the first greenery out of a winter thaw. All of the most earnest restaurants are supplied locally by nearby organic farms. The underlying ideology is familiar: conserve energy while taking care to take from the environment with minimal disruption, while attempting to share the wealth with even distribution and re-injecting it into the places from where it was taken, as opposed to extracting as much of it as possible and then moving on when stores are exhausted, which is an impulse that has gotten us in so much trouble today. Such an ideology reflects an inversion of values that have become corrupt, values that upon taken to their extremes, only served to destroy. Small restaurant owners now experiment with communal seating and flexible pay-what-you can price sets, all indicative of a deeper instinct to mend a social fabric that has been frayed. And such trends are at least rubbing off on the larger commercial businesses, which is good enough of an effect for now. Though more must be certainly done.
The winters are colder with much more rainfall than California, but I definitely want to go back and learn more, as well as continue to understand the other areas around the world that embody such ideas, and grow due to the magnetism their cultures generate. It is the best one can do at the moment.
