Portlanders defend their own decline – IOTW Report

Portlanders defend their own decline

Oregon Catalyst:

by Jim Pasero
This article provided by Oregon Transformation Newsletter.

To paraphrase an old joke: What’s a good Oregon w(h)ine? Answer: I wanna move to Idaho

How did we get to this place – where every day a neighbor or friend brings up the idea of moving to Idaho or Arizona, or some other red state, in order to escape the overwhelming decline in Oregon? What happened to our independent streak, our pioneer spirit?

In his memoir, “Shoe Dog,” Phil Knight writes about Oregon culture through the words of his mythic mentor Bill Bowerman: “The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often (the Oregon Trail). It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate – our DNA. ‘The cowards never started,’ he’d tell me, ‘and the weak died along the way.’

“Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminishing capacity for pessimism – and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive.”

Men of Bowerman’s generation weren’t afraid to fight to preserve what their families had earned on the Oregon Trail. In 1945, Bowerman ended up negotiating a German surrender in the Italian Brenner Pass while serving in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, earning him one Silver Star and four Bronze Stars. more here

11 Comments on Portlanders defend their own decline

  1. Hey FDR in Hell, how come we never hear from LBJ in Hell. He screwed the country up worse than you did especially in the area of race relations. Are they trying to keep the truth about how much of a bigot LBJ was from ever leaking out? And Robert KKK Byrd as well.

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  2. G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

    And Oregon is so very, very full of weak men at the moment. Ted Wheeler, for instance…

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  3. Left Oregon. Only looked in the rear view mirror once and that was to make sure garage door was closed. Snuck across the Rio Salmon river into Idaho yesterday.

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