June

I am in awe of people like Tim Harris, who updates his blog almost daily. How dose he do it? Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe "he" is actually a committee of writers and idea people who get paid to sit around in a well-stocked office space in the new greatness of downtown Seattle and collectively create the output of "Timothy Harris, editor in chief of Real Change News." That must be how it is. I’m not lazy – "he" just doesn’t exist.

Or does he.... http://apesmaslament.blogspot.com/

I am in Portland right now, at the Pharmacy Coffeehouse – bad music and free wi-fi. Used to be open 24 hours now they close at one am. Fine with me. It’s been raining for days and will probably continue to do so. I love rain so that’s also fine with me. But there’s a lot of homeless people here and they often have a hard time getting in out of the rain. Rain isn’t friendly when it hurts like that. It’s a lonely splash in the face. Car horns laugh at you, sorority girls make you feel unclean, and the flaunting wallets of the parasitic over-class are like criminal fingers at your throat. It’s a mean world out there when you live in the margins.

Still Portland is a good town and I’ve always liked it here. In many ways it seems to be smart where Seattle is just plain stupid. We’re staying at a friend’s house near the city center – a great big place over a hundred years old on a tree lined street. Across the way is an apartment building for low income people. My friend tells me that every neighborhood in Portland has to have a low income housing unit. They also tell me about a group called City Works (or something like that…) which is basically just a bunch of citizens – and they go around putting in benches where they see a need. Benches! And the city is not taking them away. They have been painting intersections. Imagine that, painted intersections and benches. No wonder Utah Phillips played in Portland every year for the Sisters Of the Road benefit concert and not in Seattle.

Check out Sisters Of the Road Café: http://www.sistersoftheroadcafe.org/
And while you’re at it check out Dignity Village: http://www.dignityvillage.org/content/
And then try to imagine Mayor Greg Nickles showing his over-fed face in either one of those places.

Greg Nickles. Sitting out on a West Seattle pier with a fishing pole and getting it all tangled up the blades of Paul Allen’s own private sub marine. Paul Allen.

In the great playbook of my mind I would like to get my hands on Paul Allen. I would physically knot his collar and hand him over to the angry friends of the disappeared. They might take him into some concrete peoples’ courtroom somewhere where justice would be done. That would serve him right. That pathetic over-moneyed creep has no idea what happens on the other end of his self-serving behavior. And that is the classic definition of a sociopath. Or he knows but he doesn’t care, and that’s the classic definition of an asshole. But of course it’s not just Paul doing all this, he can’t get away with it all by himself. No – he’s got thousands of happy drooling Seattlites cheer leading him on. And a clone army of Fortune 500 wannabees carving their own troughs through the human landscape.

I think that in a few years you could fly up and look back at Seattle and you would see the city-built profile of Paul Allen’s face. He is that egotistical, and they love his money that much. What a sight that would be, how embarrassing for the great ancestors of this place. What once gave us the Wobblies and the Great General Strike now gives us high rise condo/bank/shopping combinations and goon squads of SS troopers whose sole mission is to search and destroy the camps of the homeless. What an expensive mess.

So…………. This is now Saturday and tomorrow there is a camp-out in front of City Hall to try yet again to push the issue and draw attention to the crisis in humanity that we call one of America’s Most Livable Cities. All sorts of people will go out there and sleep over night in tents or just on the ground in sleeping bags. There is an assumption that people in Seattle are capable of absorbing what they see. That they can appreciate social contradictions. Personally I have my doubts. A lot of people seem to think with their wallets these days, and their wallets are in their back pockets where they sit on them. You can draw your own conclusion on that.

There is a famous picture from the end of World War II in Germany. The allies have just liberated the camps and have been horrified at what they found. So many bodies. The "Good Germans" in the village claimed to know nothing about it. Of course. The bodies had to be disposed of, so the soldiers gave the villagers shovels and ordered them to get to work. It’s an amazing picture. You can see the looks on the faces of the Good Germans as they work to bury the bodies that they knew nothing about. That is a future that we can avoid if we want to. But we have to want to real hard.

So please………. Stay on top of the situation. Go here: http://www.realchangenews.org/index.html

Don’t wind up in that picture.