One of the tiny headaches of my soon-to-disappear profession has been working weekends. It's necessary, it's important, it has to be done ... and I always hated it. At least in Raleigh, there usually was a story or two, some car accident after a football game or a robbery. In nearly five years in Portland, though, I have found our little Shangri-la to be, in general, a pretty sleepy place. The reason may simply be the difference in population sizes. But I don't think so. I have found Portland to exude a very peaceful ethos, much more so than Bible-loving North Carolina. It's amusing to me how much nicer human beings are to each other when you drain god from the equation.
But these are strange times in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, at almost exactly the same time, fire destroyed a beautiful old elementary school in Southeast, then a man who didn't want the divorce his wife filed last week went into her Tualatin workplace and shot her dead, injured two others than killed himself. They have two kids. ... Layer this on top of the woman who cut a fetus from another woman back in June and the kid who went downtown one February night and started shooting, killing two, injuring a bunch more and then killing himself.
The dogs of war do not stay locked up in their pens of the battlefield. When we unleash them, they run across the earth on the winds of their howlings. The sad and the sick and the desperate hear that call as license to join the pack and spread their own personal form of havoc. Oregon has sent the highest per-capita number of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan of any other state in the country. Should we be surprised that we are seeing such blowback?
It's got to say something when the LEAST horrible thing that happened in Portland yesterday was that 435 kids lost their school building. It's got to say something that no matter what we do, we can't seem to stop a distraught, troubled man from imagining that his only measure of control in his world is to buy a gun and kill his wife. It's got to say something that two teenagers now are scarred for life by the madness of the man who gave them life.
The fire was one thing; eventually, we'll find out that it was an electrical short, or something like that. But the shooting is something else. Here's what it says: We are willing to do anything as a society except deal with mental illness in a comprehensive, intelligent, compassionate, universal manner. We don't listen to the people who actually take care of the mentally ill; we just do whatever we please, which usually means cutting off whatever meager sources of money mental-health care gets. It's an absolute sin on the soul of Portland, Oregon, that the best mental-health facility in the county is the jail. As we gain more knowledge about the human brain and the human psyche, the more urgent the problem becomes. We ought to be screening every kid for mental illness three or four times during her primary and secondary schooling. Businesses ought to find a way to pass employees through some sort of check-up. The Oregonian has been requiring us to get physical checkups every year. I can't see why we wouldn't do something similar for mental health.
I'm not looking for more work on weekends, to be sure. I don't mind it when Portland passes a quiet day. I wish we had more of them now.
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