The Future? Dystopia Manifests Before Our Eyes in Everyday Ramblings

Except for walks and the occasional medical appointment and trips to visit Mrs. and Mr. Sherlock at home the only place I go anymore is the grocery.

This is “my” bus stop this morning. The Oregon Maples are putting on their annual show. I have been going to this store and taking the bus home from it at this stop for 12 years now, so I have seen it in all kinds of weather with all kinds of fauna. I have been walking the 3 ½ miles there and taking the bus home the last couple of months since we started our Delta variant surge.

Our case counts are finally going down. We are still losing over 20 people a day in our state, and we hit the 4,000 total deaths marker over the weekend. It is beyond heart breaking. And we are lucky based on our population.

Mrs. Sherlock and I drove through our downtown area twice on Saturday to get to and from the flat neighborhood that overlooks the river on the other side we wanted to walk through.

I have lived in urban environments since I was 15. It takes a lot to shock me.

On Saturday I was shocked. Welcome to our dystopian future. A large percentage of our police force has retired or quit since the civil unrest last year. We have this bizarre form of city government that is proving itself to be ineffective.

Our downtown is full of mentally ill, and or drug addicted, and or unhoused people suffering quite publicly. It is bad. The things I saw in our two short trips through were disturbing and haunting… At 10 AM, a thin woman walking down a sidewalk no shoes, no pants or skirt, no bag, filthy legs, wearing a man’s jacket with the distinct possibility of nothing underneath talking loudly to herself right across the street from our central police department.

Two blocks away, a tent encampment with trash everywhere but no sort of ordinary people anywhere to be seen. There was another block with housing and services but people wandering around in every kind of mental distress you can imagine. The above woman was not the only person I saw that was mostly or partially naked. We had 13 shootings over the weekend.

And just in case you think I am being dramatic; we have a lovely Chinese Garden in the area we call Old Town. It is a one block walled garden, serene, it honors all the Chinese laborers who did so much of the work of building this city before they were excluded.

This morning the director sent out a frantic email to anyone who had ever been a member asking us to contact everyone we could think of in government to do something about the crime in the area. She can’t keep her staff safe from those that are desperate and those that prey on them. There was another email later in the day with email addresses of all our elected officials.

I do not know what I am going to do come January if the church reopens to classes and I could start teaching there in person again. The area around the church is as bad as all the other areas down there.

We have always had unhoused people and drug addicts, I am not a shrinking violet but this, this is at a magnitude I have never seen before.

They are setting up three “safe rest villages” with toilets and showers and some cooking facilities in the next few weeks. One is six blocks from where I live. It is supposed to take about 60 people. At least there will be trash pickup and some rules. There are about that many people living rough, near there, now.

This is collateral damage. From the pandemic, from the polarized politics, from our shameful racist history as a state, from greed and from late-stage capitalism.

In the meantime, I am grateful for all I do have. Whether we like it or not, we are all connected through all the seasons. All this makes me realize how insanely easy I have had it in my life compared to people throughout history and born into other circumstances.

How the heck do we turn this ship around? How do we safely care for others as we safely care for ourselves? Is that even possible?

It is like a Zen Koan. I keep asking the question. I will keep asking the question.

Last updated October 12, 2021