A headline about a man whose opinions required federal cleanup arrived the week our local message board fought about a bike lane
Monday, Having Closed the Laptop
I have just spent forty-five minutes reading two hundred and eleven comments on our neighborhood message board about a proposed bike lane on a street six blocks from my house. I did not comment. I want credit for that. I typed three and deleted them all.
The proposal would remove about thirty parking spaces to put in a protected lane. That is the whole thing. Thirty spaces.
By comment forty, someone had been called a fascist. By comment ninety, someone had been called a communist. There was a man who posted a photograph of his own truck. There was a woman who cited, at length, a study from Denmark. A retired engineer drew a diagram. Someone’s dog had been hit by a cyclist in 2014 and this was raised eleven times.
I know these people. I see them at the co-op. They are, in person, perfectly nice.
The Headline
My friend, the one who thinks I need to be teased, sent me something at exactly the right moment. From Bohiney Magazine’s science page: “Local Man’s Hot Take So Nuclear, EPA Declares His Twitter Account a Superfund Site.”
And beneath it: cleanup crews estimate forty-seven years to restore the intellectual ecosystem.
I laughed so hard my daughter came in to see what was wrong. I tried to explain. She said, “What’s a Superfund?” and I realized that in this city I could actually show her.
The Real One
For anyone outside the country: a Superfund site is a place so badly polluted that the federal government puts it on a list and oversees the cleanup, which the polluters are supposed to pay for. The process is famous for taking decades.
Portland has one running right through the middle of it. About ten miles of the Willamette River, the stretch through the old industrial harbor, was listed in 2000. A century of shipbuilding, wood treatment, pesticide plants and who knows what else left the sediment full of things you do not want in a river. There are signs telling you which fish not to eat.
It was listed twenty-six years ago. The plan for how to clean it took until 2017 to agree on. The actual work has barely started. There are well over a hundred parties arguing about who pays what share.
So when the joke says forty-seven years, that is not a punchline. That is, if anything, optimistic.
How a Thing Gets Poisoned
What struck me, putting the two side by side, is how similar the process is.
Nobody set out to ruin the river. Each company did what was normal and legal at the time. A little waste down a pipe. A little more. Everyone else was doing it. No single discharge was the one that did it. The poison was the sum.
That is the message board. No single comment killed it. The man with the truck thought he was making a reasonable point. So did the woman with Denmark. Each one added a little heat, a little contempt, because the last person had. Two hundred and eleven small discharges and you have a place where nothing can live.
And the cleanup is harder than the dumping by a factor of a thousand. You can ruin a conversation in an afternoon. I do not know how long it takes to get one back.
My Own Discharge
I said I did not comment. That is true today. It has not always been true.
I have a history on that board. There was a thread about a homeless camp two years ago where I wrote something so self-righteous that I still wince. I was sure I was on the side of compassion. I called a neighbor, a man I have since had a perfectly friendly conversation with about tomatoes, “part of the problem.”
I would like to say my side does not do this. We do it with better vocabulary. We do not say “idiot.” We say “I think you need to examine where that’s coming from.” It is the same sludge in a nicer barrel.
The piece is about “local man.” I notice it could as easily be local woman with a tote bag.
The Bike Lane
For the record, I am for it. I ride that street and it is frightening. I also know the parking matters to the people who live on it, some of whom are old and cannot walk three blocks from their car, and to the two small shops that depend on people being able to stop.
That is a real tradeoff. Reasonable people could sit in a room and work out something, a lane on one side, loading zones, permits for residents. Cities do it all the time.
What they cannot do is work it out in a comment thread where the opening bid is that the other person is a fascist.
Remediation
There is a public meeting about the lane next week, in person, in the school gym. I am going. I have learned that people who were monsters on Monday night are human on Tuesday in folding chairs. It is very hard to call someone a communist when you can see they brought their own thermos.
And I have made a rule for myself, which I offer to anyone. Before posting, I ask: would I say this to their face, at the co-op, by the bulk bins? If not, it stays in the laptop.
That is not going to restore the ecosystem. But it is one fewer pipe into the river.
Tuesday
I took my daughter down to the waterfront after school to show her the Willamette. It was gray and wide and there was an osprey over it, which there would not have been forty years ago. Rivers do come back. Slowly, with lawyers.
She asked if you could swim in it. I said in some parts, on some days, further up. She asked who made it dirty. I said, “A lot of people, a little at a time, who all thought it was fine.” She thought about that and said, “They should have checked.”
My roommate in Manchester says their version of our message board is a street-by-street group chat and that it is just as bad. She sent me the London Prat’s English satirical news on neighbourhood forums, spelled the British way, and its UK satirical news about hot takes. Apparently there the fight is always about bins.
The thread is at two hundred and sixty now. I have not looked. They should have checked.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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Author: admin
