Citizenship in the Dystopia

I drove west down Powell Blvd after my first shift volunteering at faith-based food pantry. There I interacted with several friendly homeless people and learned something of their food pantry preferences. One of them had a cute elderly mutt who rode shotgun in a baby stroller with various pantry items.

It was raining like heaven as I drove. (I will never associate rain with hell.) I could barely keep my eyes on the road because of the homeless encampments along Powell Blvd and the staggering amounts of garbage in and around them. Why the city hadn’t dropped off a dozen dumpsters along this thoroughfare was beyond my comprehension. It should have been a simple and logical act of governing. Maybe a private citizen should just cut the red tape and do it herself. How much trouble could you get into with that act of citizenship?

Squalor. More squalor. Human and manufactured detritus washed ashore in Portland from some type of enormous black sticky tide that baffles scientists, sociologists, solons and scribes. It also baffles and frustrates and vexes the citizens who walk daily along the wrack line of this tide. The tide is always high, never receding. Thus it isn’t really a tide at all. Call it a flood that perpetually remains at flood stage, which is an impossibility with rivers but not with the American homeless population. These are not Hoovervilles and whenever I think of Hoovervilles I remember that I am a distant relative of Herbert Hoover and thus need to somehow cosmically atone for his indifference toward the poor and dispossessed during the Depression.

(How does one atone for being related to Herbert Hoover? I am also a distant relative of Anne Bradstreet and became a writer, so maybe I have it covered.)

I turned off the radio and stared at the free degradation sideshow of our three ring circus known as capitalism. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, degrade people and allow others to degrade themselves in public (maybe it’s the public part we can’t abide).

I wasn’t going to look away and bitch about it on social media.

What the hell would Bob Dylan do with this sight in song?

Something caught my eye. I slowed down. I beheld an elderly couple wearing yellow slickers and orange safety vests in the middle of one of encampments, picking up garbage and placing it in a large green plastic bag. They were not a team part of an organized cleanup. They were going solo on a rainy weekday afternoon in the throes of an urban dystopia.

What in the name of…?????????

I almost started crying. I thought about pulling over and joining them but of course made an excuse not to.

They were out there practicing full blown American citizenship in almost total anonymity.

Almost.