[JPKab]

Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing.

It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???

It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.

[hcurtiss]

The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.

[JPKab]

So what I'm about to write here is I want to emphasize just groaning and complaining from my brother. He recently moved just over the line to one of those suburbs of Portland in Washington State. He told me he was fed up with Oregon and although he doesn't like the Pacific Northwest in general, he is divorced and needs to be near his ex-wife since she has custody of the kids.

His view of Oregon is that it's filled with people who are really not that bright. Obviously this is a stereotype but I will say that being out there what I kind of sensed was a bunch of people who were descended from pioneers who were very religious and are wired for religion but don't have it. I think COVID helped foster a new form of religion in the population, but perhaps it was always a sort of case where people on the coast were kind of doing that with progressive politics in general.

Human beings really are herd animals, and the vast majority of the population would rather do what is popular than what is right. I think that you have a toxic mix of this ideology combined with the rather unique Pacific Northwest cultural trait of never speaking your mind and primarily using passive aggressive behavior at all times. My brother worked at Nike for a while and was always told by colleagues that he was "too intense". He and I both worked in military intelligence in the past in the DC area and he's a driven worker like I am. He's only intense to people that really want to take it slow all the time. He always told me that the cultural traits in the region were really obnoxious and obstructed. Getting good work done. Nike is after all a shitshow of a company. Highly unproductive, very unefficient, with the dramatically larger workforce then it needs at its campus in Beaverton. We are talking about a state that has made the decision that people can't pump their own gas because it would hurt the economy by robbing people of the job of pumping their gas for them. That's a special kind of stupidity at the government level.

On top of this rather insane groupthink that you are referring to west of the Cascades, you have this other weird situation which is the rather extreme government measures at the state level have completely radicalized people on the right side of the political spectrum. When going to a grocery store in Sherwood outside of Portland, I encountered a bunch of boogaloo boys. Half the time I was driving around there I would occasionally see a truck with radical right wing stickers all over it, signifying membership in some group. (3 percenters or something like that?) I almost never see that anywhere in Colorado outside of Denver.

But perhaps the most memorable part of that trip was the interior of the state and the fact that the state government of Oregon clearly has zero authority anywhere east of the Cascades. It's really something to behold. You have this massive land area that is essentially ungovernable by the state government. The local population absolutely hates everything from the capital. They aren't at all subtle about it. It is basically a state of open, proud disobedience. It is the only place I've ever been since the pandemic started where there is a state law requiring wearing a mask indoors, but if I walked into a convenience store wearing one, they would get angry at me including the employees. It's a very good lesson to me about the fact that urban areas should understand that large swaths of this country will become completely ungovernable if they continue to use the government as a cudgel to force their values on a population that doesn't want it.

Another item that was shocking was the fact that we had visited Portland a few times before in previous summers, and the horrific degradation of Portland's downtown was tragic to see. It's really insane. Granted I was there right as the federal courthouse was being besieged, and it was pretty crazy having young men dressed in black threaten me and my brother when we were walking. We are both over 6 ft and over 200 lb and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we didn't get our asses beat. Complete lawlessness in that city. I just don't know how people who live there aren't completely embarrassed by it.