Stranded by bad weather the other day in Portland, Oregon, I took a walk.
The town still prides itself on its 1880s converted sawmills-and-saloons ambience. But, surveying central Portland from a nearby hilltop, I was struck more by the similarity to Dunkirk in 1940.
Several hundred homeless residents, looking like the remnants of a defeated army, were hunched together around braziers or lying in rows of cots on the pavement. No one in Portland bothers about the remaining laws against public drug use
