Bleatings from Oregon

I still have the New York Times delivered, on paper, every day. I rarely get through the whole thing, but I do flip through when I can, to see what's up. I started my subscription back up when Orange Caligula took over the White House. Yeah, I can read the stuff on a screen, but I get tired of looking at screens all the time. 

Anyway, yesterday Oregon showed up quite a bit, including on consecutive pages inside the first section.

On one page they had a shot of Peter DeFazio, as a sort of poster child for gerrymandering. The accompanying article explained that his new district is so safe for the Democrats that he felt he could retire. The politicians are fixing it so that nearly every seat in Congress is as safe as can be.

On the other page was a story about the tsunami that's coming when the big earthquake happens off the Oregon coast. The towns along the water will have only 15 minutes' warning before 10 feet of water, or maybe 100 feet, comes roaring through. There are tsunami escape routes, but for a lot of people, higher ground is a lot further than 15 minutes away. Particularly if the roads are trashed from the earthquake that just happened. Seaside gets prominent mention as doomed.

They're actually talking about building towers that people can climb up on. Earthquake-proof towers that could hold 20,000 people at a time. Hard to picture that.

But the biggest story involving our state started on the front page. It was about the many people who are showing up in therapy suffering from anxiety about what's happening to the earth, particularly as regards climate. Mostly it was about one Portland psychologist who's seeing so many people with this problem that it's become his practice specialty. He's using techniques derived from, among other things, the experiences of Nazi concentration camp prisoners.

I get it. The more you know about the environment, the sadder you become. But don't obsess over your "footprint." As the article suggests, that's just a line made up by greedy, dirty industries to shift the blame from them to you.

So there we were, a little Oregon snapshot, but boy, I can't say it's a happy one.