After scribbling a page on both sides, I didn’t stick around Thursday night to further vent, or finger point at the City Hall meeting regarding the Downtown exclusion revision discussions. What I felt, deep in my bones, well before the town hall meeting, was that city planners, along with business and legal interests, are in as much need to better embrace community-wide diversity as those who they previously set out to exclude.
Portland has been growing, and growing pains occur when the body is catching up to its new form. Growing into adulthood as a city means we must nurture and embrace a bigger picture of diversity for everyone’s benefit.
For example, bigger picture cities provide gathering spots where social class, race and background are all left at the doorstep. Central hangouts, indoors as well as outdoors. We all have important lessons to share and to be better able to see and share life from different vantage points is what the big picture means for bigger city life. It means daily exposure, up front and often personal, to other lifestyles and cultures we don’t necessarily subscribe to. Perhaps at the town hall meeting they laid out the groundwork to abolish the Great Wall, where doctors don’t just get shuttled into medical buildings; lawyers shimmy into their pods. Bankers and insurance people break off into their office space, pigeonholing everyone using the tired and inept crime model of good guy/bad guy. Maybe if we treasured everyone’s social position — pimp, prostitute, doctor, drug dealer, lawyer, artist, addict and outdoor survivor, we’d all be better informed and further enlightened.
There are many ways to intermingle and in doing so we’d find our similarities as human beings outweigh how we are different or separate. Rejoice in diversity. To label an individual, then exclude them from another group, happens to everyone. I call this the exclusion delusion. We all end up holding the short straw. Rich, poor, professional, blue collar, white, black, the list goes on. Until we tear down our own walls and learn how to communicate across racial, religious, social and professional lines, everybody loses. Everyone misses out. I have some ideas about how this could be approached. I will leave that discussion for another letter. I feel the town hall meeting was a promising first step, but there is much work yet to be done. It is time to roll up our sleeves and do the right thing. You see, the nation, as well as the rest of the world, is watching us grow through the corner of their eye.