Oregon Optimists
An Oregon Optimist is someone who sees what is broken and still believes we are capable of fixing it.
Erin Hanson · Northwestern Sunflowers · Open Impressionism. Painted by a McMinnville artist, whose gallery is in House District 24. erinhanson.com
Optimism is not the claim that everything in Oregon is going well. Most Oregonians do not believe that, and they are not wrong to feel it. A majority say the state is on the wrong track. An optimism that denies the problem is not optimism; it is inattention, and people recognize it immediately.
What is on offer here is narrower and more durable. It is the position that the problems are real, that they are specific, and that specific problems are the kind human beings have historically been quite good at solving. A pump station gets replaced. A water line gets upgraded. A county fairground stops running on a cap set decades ago.
It is also deliberately not a partisan test. A Democrat can be an Oregon Optimist. So can an independent, and so can someone who stopped paying attention to politics years ago. The question is not which party you belong to. It is whether you think Oregon is capable of better.
Proud of Oregon. Not satisfied.
That is the whole register. Pride and dissatisfaction held at the same time, which is how most people actually feel about the place they are from.
Not published · review · Needs a source
The wrong-track figure referenced in the opening paragraph is stated qualitatively here rather than numerically, because the underlying poll number is not yet sourced on this project. Source it or keep it qualitative.
What it is not
Optimism is not a prediction, and it is not a membership.
Believing Oregon can be fixed is not the same as believing any particular bill will fix it. The outlook says the work is worth doing. It does not certify the outcome, and nothing on this site will use it to.
Nor is this an organization. There is no pledge, no membership roll, no card. It is a description of a way of looking at the state, available to anyone who recognizes themselves in it.
Needs an asset