Growing up in the late 70's and 80's, Portland was a working class, blue collar city. Like Kennedy Democrats, before the Democrat Party jettisoned the working class. People were really courteous and decent, a little more hedonistic than other parts of the nation in the way the west coast has always been known for. But by and large, people had orders of magnitude more common sense than they do now. I guess any amount more than zero is a big difference, though, right? A lot of people early on flocked here from other parts of the country, like my parents in the early 70's, to get away from all the standardized, centralized, homogenized culture that had eaten up already so much of the country by then. My parents were very conservative and religious, but my dad would sometimes listen to 60's folk music, or watch public broadcating with me. That type of thing. People liked big home lots with modest-sized homes, so they could have a beautiful yard filled with our famous local trees and bushes. Lush was once the aesthetic. Now they chop all the trees down and build homes where people can shake hands with each other out their windows. People were never particularly warm, but they were always very civil. Now it's just a free-for-all of pathetic, lobotomized navel gazers or California transplant assholes.

Growing up in the late 70's and 80's, Portland was a working class, blue collar city. Like Kennedy Democrats, before the Democrat Party jettisoned the working class. People were really courteous and decent, a little more hedonistic than other parts of the nation in the way the west coast has always been known for. But by and large, people had orders of magnitude more common sense than they do now. I guess any amount more than zero is a big difference, though, right? A lot of people early on flocked here from other parts of the country, like my parents in the early 70's, to get away from all the standardized, centralized, homogenized culture that had eaten up already so much of the country by then. My parents were very conservative and religious, but my dad would sometimes listen to 60's folk music. That type of thing. People liked big home lots with modest-sized homes, so they could have a beautiful yard filled with our famous local trees and bushes. Lush was once the aesthetic. Now they chop all the trees down and build homes where people can shake hands with each other out their windows. People were never particularly warm, but they were always very civil. Now it's just a free-for-all of pathetic, lobotomized navel gazers or California transplant assholes.