The Dream Of The '90s Died In Portland

Once an up-and-coming city, Portland was destroyed from within by radical activism and political ineptitude.

- By Nancy Rommelmann

A typical night in Portland 2020. The sun is down and a few hundred people, nearly all in their 20s and 30s, start to congregate, by twos and threes, at a prearranged location, usually a city park but sometimes at the U.S. Immigration and Customs building, or City Hall, or, as they are tonight, on the strip of downtown that is home to local and federal courthouses and the city’s central police station, known as Justice Center. The drumming starts, there are some Black Lives Matter slogans shouted but mostly it’s calls of “FUCK THE POLICE,” none of whom are in evidence. They almost never are during the nightly protests, or not until things get hot, when windows are smashed and, for what will end up being nearly 200 nights in a row, fires started.

On this night, I do see one officer. He is sitting alone inside the lobby of the back entrance to Justice Center. Beside him is an industrial fan. When I ask why, he explains that the night before, a group of protesters sloshed in a giant bucket of diarrhea into the room where he sits. The fan is to try to get the stench out. Behind me, five teenagers stand at the curb gawping.

“What happened? What happened?” they ask. They’re not black bloc—the darkly clad anarchists roaming the streets— but random teens with random energy who came downtown, maybe, to see what all the fuss was about, to lightly taunt a police officer before running off. The J.V. team.