Dear Portland, You are a beautiful city full of art, culture and fine foods. A city filled with intelligent progressive thinkers constantly creating new and innovative ways to keep their home clean and beautiful. TV shows and documentaries have been made about you and I myself idolized you as a place I could only dream to be a part of. But your beauty and wonder is a lie. You are beautiful in the way an old well designed and antique furnished home filled with termites is. You have an epidemic that grows by the day and is being ignored. The less fortunate, the impoverished, the down on their luck, the hungry, the poor. No matter how you choose to label them, your homelessness issue is something I've personally never seen so intensely in my life. As I drove in, my dream of what you were collapsed immediately. Small communities of overused weathered tents lined the grass by the highways. As I entered, people in tattered clothing held signs begging for my help. Your parks were built with statues and playgrounds for everyone to enjoy but nobody does because countless people with nowhere else to turn sleep upon the benches, the grass and even the statues.
No Portland, I am not naive or idealistic. I am aware that many, if not the majority of these people ,made poor choices. I realize that several continue to make those poor choices. What I want to ask you, the city as a whole, is this. If we tell a child "you are bad, you are worthless, you will never be anything and nobody cares about you" day after day, week after week, creating a lifetime of never thinking anything more, what is likely to happen to that child? I suppose we could all answer this differently but personally I would imagine that child would be all of those things we convinced them they are. Why? Because they are human beings, because they are at our mercy and helpless. Because they trust and depend on us. Not unlike the HUMAN BEINGS living on the streets of your fine city. The ones you won't look at. The ones you step on, laugh at, scoff at and belittle. The ones you reinforce the feeling of worthlessness in by treating them like a species lower on the grand scale of life than yourself. They are all someone's child, possibly someone's mother, father, sister, brother, or best friend. Some are severely mentally ill. Others took a wrong turn and became seemingly hopelessly addicted to things that leave no funds to afford a life. And as time drags on, sadly, some don't know any other way of living.
I want to solve your problem, but I know I can't. I want to give you the answers and make you what I thought you were, Portland. I racked my brain every day since I left trying to think how I can help, how someone else can help. Sure, I came up with a lot of small ideas to make things a little better but in the end I noticed one common theme in all of my plans. Restoring dignity, giving these people back their humanity. Whether it be through having lunch with them, getting them a shower, giving them a book to read or just talking to them like people...because they are people. Just like you, just like me. We are not made of anything different, we are not worth more than they are. I haven't given up hope of making my way back to help or even doing so with the far smaller population of less fortunate people here. I'd love to start my own movement, but until then at the very least I will remember to look people in the eye. Smile and say hello. I will treat each human being I meet as an equal and do whatever small kindnesses I can to restore any dignity they may be missing. I urge you all to do the same. It doesn't always require money or foundations. If each one of us can help one other person feel worthy, confident, strong and deserving of a better life then we each helped to create a huge movement. In short, if you want to see people do better, maybe you should do better as well.
Thank you Portland, thank you for opening my eyes, for showing me the truth and for making me want to do better.
