100 Days of Protest: A Chasm Grows Between Portland and the Rest of Oregon. The Proximity of the left and right in Oregon has created a dynamic of fear, mistrust, and anger.

New York Times ^ | September 5, 2020 | Thomas Fuller

[karpov]

SANDY, Ore. — Trucks carrying bales of hay, horse paddocks and Christmas tree farms — drive a few miles out of Portland and the suburbs quickly give way to rural Oregon.

Barely a half-hour from the Portland streets where racial justice protesters on Saturday were marking 100 consecutive days of tempestuous, sometimes violent, demonstrations, there are plenty of communities where people dismiss the protesters as lawless hooligans.

“Portland is an island in Oregon,” said Stan Pulliam, the mayor of Sandy, a more conservative town of 10,000 people about 30 miles southeast of Portland that feeds off the economic dynamism of Oregon’s largest city but also strives to be separate from it. “We are scared to death that what’s happening in Portland will ever come out to where we live.”

The rural-urban divide is a reality writ large across much of the nation, a crucial dynamic as the Nov. 3 election approaches. But the proximity of left and right in Oregon, both moderates and extremists, has created a dynamic of fear, mistrust and anger that feeds the conflicts in the streets in ways that it has not in other states.

At Rapid Fire Arms, a gun shop along the main road in Sandy, the owner, Brian Coleman, has sold 4.5 million rounds of ammunition since March, when the arrival of the pandemic drove up sales. Demand for guns and ammunition soared even further, he said, when the protests in Portland turned violent in the weeks after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis.

“There’s panic buying every once in a while but nowhere near like this,” Mr. Coleman said at the entrance of his shop, fortified with steel bars. “There’s such a massive rush, people are taking anything they can get.”

[little jeremiah]

I live in rural SW OR. There’s been a push here and in northern CA to form a new state, been thought of for many years. The state of Jefferson, the rural half or so of OR and the rural top third or so of CA. Minus SF of course. There are maps.

[Rio]

Portland is making a fool of itself. The rest of the world, including the rest of Oregon, ridicules it.