Triple Bypass

It seems the story last week was less about the Kim family than, “How can you and YOUR family avoid dying if trapped in your car on a back road in Oregon in a blizzard?” TV news teams showed us how to assemble survival kits. On CNN, Anderson Cooper said, “Next hour: the survivalists’ Rule of Threes and what it means for you.”

That sounded very important so I had to wait for it. I often use a Rule of Threes when writing this column. For example let’s say I wanted to call attention to the fact that the winter solstice is approaching and how that means we can expect colder weather. I might remind you of three fun winter solstice events. There’s the (1) Annual Pigs Balanced On Their Noses Gala, the (2) Annual Pigs Squealing and Running Away Festival, and the (3) Annual The Planet’s Tilting the Wrong Way Again Observation.

It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are Goldilocks or if you are the Council of Nicea or if you are you, or whoever, threes are going to get your attention better than twos, fours, or seventeens. Threes are just enough to make you notice but not enough to induce a trance and result in your being possessed and dancing wildly until the god is done with you and leaves you exhausted and near death.

Which reminds me, we were talking about survival. So when Anderson Cooper told us about the survivalists’ Rule of Threes he mentioned the three rules: (1) You can survive only three hours in severe weather without shelter, (2) You can survive only three days without water, and (3) You can survive only three weeks without food.

Therefore, they say, it’s essential to get shelter first. Where have we heard that before?

While I’m trying to remember, I’ll let you all contemplate (1) the report by the Public Health Department that said they had to deal with 94 deaths of homeless people in King County last year. Or (2) the fact that we’ve exceeded that number this year. Or (3) the fact that if the same percentage of all housed people died in King County every year it would be declared a disaster area.

Oh, I remember. I said it. We need shelter first, because it doesn’t take a blizzard to kill you if all the doors in the city are locked to you.

They now say there was a well-stocked lodge within two miles of the Kim’s car that they could have reached had they known about it. But in the city there’s only enough shelter space to shelter about half the people who are homeless.

Meanwhile, Tom Rasmussen recently told a bunch of activists that the Human Services Department told him, when he asked, that the city’s shelters have no capacity problems.

I have three comments concerning that.

(1) The Human Services Department doesn’t keep track of shelter turn-aways, so their opinion on the subject is baseless. It would have been better if Tom Rassmussen had asked somebody who knew something about it, like the countless homeless people who have been turned away from shelters, who are all just trying their best, every cold night, to do what Anderson Cooper told the vast American TV viewing audience to do. So as not to end up on the Public Health Department’s roster of the dead.

(2) Rasmussen probably bases his perception in part on the truth that some homeless people won’t apply for shelter. What he chooses to ignore is that those who avoid the shelters cite dangerous overcrowding as their chief reason. So large numbers of non-applicants or zero turn-aways would not be evidence that the shelters are operating at capacity, but that the vote from the street is that the overcrowding has become intolerable.

(3) Because he was aiming for a triple, Anderson Cooper neglected to mention rule (4): You can survive only three months without love.

I’m not feeling the love.