What to expect in 2019
By Midge Pierce
It can only get better, right Portopia? Consider:
Ubiquitous Airbnb host Nadia Everywhere delivers an award-winning Ted Talk.
Big Bertha bores down from tunneling Seattle to chunnel the Beneath Columbia River Crossing.
Portopia’s Tesla dealership closes as the City bans cars in favor of e-scooters that return from storage seeking revenge on the elderly, otherly-abled and moms with strollers.
Up With People, here to sing, is declared a terrorist organization.
The state supermajority gerrymanders the tattooless to Vancouver. Scandinavian visitors decode Hygge, Woonerfing and the flaws of progressive astroturfing.
A Pocahontas mural on an elementary school wall gets a pardon from the easily offended eager to paint over politically incorrect images. (Here’s looking at you Glencoe.)
Tina Kotek announces her run for President based on a platform of ridding America of all homeowners. Mayor Wheeler swaps campaign buttons for a flak jacket.
OCCL starts every special interest meeting with mindful reminders that equity means now I get yours. Open-door meetings close as inclusionary diversity excludes the bikeless, anyone who has lived in Portland more than a moment or is over forty with a living wage.
The Belmont Goats mellow out Portland State. Adulting classes supplant extremists and the self-righteous in Shrunk Plaza.
Moss consumes P-towns unrecyclable recyclables. The H-Mart really does open.
NIMBYs yield their garden kale to YIMBYs who, in turn, stop slandering those who own a swing set. The PC police get as riled up about needles on playgrounds as they do about property shaming.
Climate refugees swap Portland’s rain and ruin for progressively iced-in Minneapolis, which, having beat Portland to the RIP town apart punch, is home to spanking-new, Soviet-style housing hives where once stood stately, single family homes.
The West Hills collapses under the weight of savings stashed in mattresses more sound than banks, the Big One or the Cayman Islands.
On the cash-strapped Eastside, infused Reese’s Pieces are rationed.
Acai bowls go the way of pumpkin chai, Portlandia and plaid. Food carts, conviviality and breathing room vanish beneath the Zombie Building Apocalypse.
Awash in PERS debt, students and teachers are set adrift as schools, lacking cash to pay fair wages or fix door latches.
Betsy deVos rescues Portopia’s class of 2028, sending its members to charter schools with promises that Mexico will pay their gender conformation classes.
A gray wave rises to protest the tsunami of bonds pounding nest eggs. Millennials, rushing in to send elders off on ice flows before they melt, seize the spoils of grandma’s bone china to trade for minimalist Billy Bookshelves.
