[from 5/26/10]
Before I get to the main subject of the week, I want to thank the person who thought of "Draw Mohammed Day" for flushing out some truth that had previously eluded me.
Until now, I thought all Muslims objected to depictions of Mohammed entirely because they respect Mohammed so much. Now I'm being told by those blocking Facebook and YouTube in Pakistan that the objection is that drawing Mohammed could lead to idol worship. It's the slippery slope argument, like that marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs, that premarital sex leads to bestiality, or that exposure to Neapolitan ice cream will make you a social libertarian.
Well. Now I'M offended. I'm an idol worshipper. I am a confirmed member of the First Church of Idolatrianism, Lost and Found Department. Please, to all you Muslims out there, (and Christians too, I know you read the same books) remember that we idolaters are "in the room" when you put idol worship down. It's one thing when you say idolatry is wrong FOR YOU, and I respect that you shouldn't have to see Mohammed subjected to idolization, but that is no reason to be bad-mouthing idol worshippers in general, including those who make their own idols that have nothing to do with your Prophet. Thanks in advance for understanding. The period at the end of this sentence depicts no one you know.
Now, where were we? Ah yes, Real Change is moving to Pioneer Square this weekend, so I have to write this column a full four days sooner than usual. This means I've hardly had a moment to think about what to write since last column, so to paraphrase a person in our management, I must suck one out my thumb.
I already live in Pioneer Square.The biggest change to my life is that I'll be walking to the office instead of taking the bus.
So it's with much more apathy than usual that I greet the news of a report by King County Metro on fare evasion in the Metro bus system. They did a study last February and March on the subject. The main findings: Fare evasion happens. Bus drivers don't like it. Maybe we should do away with the Ride Free Area. Also more security would be nice, and simplify the fare structure. Peak what?
According to the study, the cost of fare evasion is perhaps 2.5% of total fares, depending on some guesswork. Since fares don't hardly pay even half Metro's costs, that loss in fare income is less than the loss of gross sales income that big national chain stores endure from shoplifting.
When I first walked downtown Seattle streets in 19-fifty-freaking-7, there were twice the pedestrians there are now. It was shoulder to shoulder and there weren't nearly the loiterers. The reason is clear in retrospect. Poor people had a reason to pay bus fares to go downtown. There were Woolworths, Kress, and Sears Store. There were other Five and Dimes. There were 10 cent coffees. Nobody objected to taking poor people's money, and relatively poor people were mainly the people who packed the sidewalks.
Then somebody came up with the idea, probably in a Business Administration Class while hungover, that you shouldn't waste time making nickels and dimes selling goods to poor people when you could make dollars selling goods to middle and upper classes. So the idea was born that we don't need poor people in our economy, and gentrification happened.
Like so many good ideas, that one was crap. When the poor people stopped coming, the higher classes stopped, too, because they had better smelling cars made by MBAs and could now shop at regional malls, designed by MBAs.
So the Ride Free Zone was born. The Ride Free Zone was paid for by Seattle to draw business and workers downtown.
I've said it before. Go ahead, get rid of the Ride Free Area, and see who it hurts more. The few 2.5% who abuse it, or the businesses downtown.
Showing posts with label Pioneer District. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pioneer District. Show all posts
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Billy Bob Needs an Education
[from 4/7/10]
I want you to all know how I felt when I heard the Pioneer Square Community Association, which is a freaking BIA, of all things (I'll get to that later), doesn't want Real Change moving to Pioneer Square. They say they don't want us there because, although they've never met us, don't know who any of us are, have never bothered to learn how we operate or visited us, or spent a microsecond thinking about what we do, they heard we're a nonprofit that provides work for homeless people, so therefore, to them, we're a social service agency. Read: "low-lifes."
I'd like to appeal to all the fathers out there, for a moment. Say your beautiful daughter is fifteen, going on sixteen, and she's ready to date. OK, let's get real, she's been dating for years, of course, but you think this is new, because you're Dad, and you've had your eyes closed and your ears stopped up by advanced age and denial. Anyway, you're paying attention now, finally, and you learn your daughter has a blind date with some Billy Bob that lives a mile and a half down the street, and you happen to know the guy through his parents and all your thoughts are, "Why that loser?" and "He'd better keep his hands to himself" and "He should thank his lucky stars he's dating my daughter."
And then you get a call from Mr. and Mrs. Bob telling you Billy won't be there because he heard your daughter, whom HE'S NEVER EVEN MET, is a low-class skank? How soon are you at the Bob household, explaining to Billy his number one mistake through an intense one-on-one tutorial in rigid-body physics?
OK. Let's have us a rant. When we arranged to move to Pioneer Square we knew that the BIA had a deal with the city that no new city-funded social service agency could set up in that neighborhood. But guess what? We're not the Seattle Channel! We're an independent news source that gets no funding from any government entity! And we DON'T recruit panhandlers and give them our papers for free to use as props for panhandling, contrary to the uninformed notions of those who haven't been paying attention to anything we've done FOR FIFTEEN YEARS. We recruit people who don't WANT to be panhandlers and set them up to sell the papers on commission.
Our vendors don't even have to be homeless. If Bill Gates ever decides he wants to be a Real Change vendor, we'll let him.
And who told the Pioneer Square Community Association they could pass themselves off as a community association? They're a "Business Improvement Area" association. That means it's an association of businesses, not a community organization.
I'm on the board of directors of this skank organization, I'm a former vendor, and I've been personally living in Pioneer Square for 13 years (4 years longer than the PSCA has been in existence!) and they've never asked me what I thought of their negotiations with the city for a moratorium on social service agencies in my neighborhood.
Do you live anywhere besides B-way, the UD, the ID, Downtown, West Seattle Junction, or Pioneer Square? You could start your own BIA! The city has an on-line handbook that says how!
It comes down to this: You go around and try and get the other businesses in your neighborhood to sign on to your proposed BIA. When you've got enough to represent 60% of the revenues of the neighborhood, the city lets you found a BIA. So a freaking BIA is NOT a community organization, and has no right to call itself one. It does not represent the community of its neighborhood democratically, it only represents businesses dollarwise. Which is fine, if it sticks to its own freaking business, which is improving the business of the neighborhood. Hence the name, Business Improvement thing.
Real Change isn't the social service agency PSCA thinks it is, and PSCA doesn't represent any community.
I want you to all know how I felt when I heard the Pioneer Square Community Association, which is a freaking BIA, of all things (I'll get to that later), doesn't want Real Change moving to Pioneer Square. They say they don't want us there because, although they've never met us, don't know who any of us are, have never bothered to learn how we operate or visited us, or spent a microsecond thinking about what we do, they heard we're a nonprofit that provides work for homeless people, so therefore, to them, we're a social service agency. Read: "low-lifes."
I'd like to appeal to all the fathers out there, for a moment. Say your beautiful daughter is fifteen, going on sixteen, and she's ready to date. OK, let's get real, she's been dating for years, of course, but you think this is new, because you're Dad, and you've had your eyes closed and your ears stopped up by advanced age and denial. Anyway, you're paying attention now, finally, and you learn your daughter has a blind date with some Billy Bob that lives a mile and a half down the street, and you happen to know the guy through his parents and all your thoughts are, "Why that loser?" and "He'd better keep his hands to himself" and "He should thank his lucky stars he's dating my daughter."
And then you get a call from Mr. and Mrs. Bob telling you Billy won't be there because he heard your daughter, whom HE'S NEVER EVEN MET, is a low-class skank? How soon are you at the Bob household, explaining to Billy his number one mistake through an intense one-on-one tutorial in rigid-body physics?
OK. Let's have us a rant. When we arranged to move to Pioneer Square we knew that the BIA had a deal with the city that no new city-funded social service agency could set up in that neighborhood. But guess what? We're not the Seattle Channel! We're an independent news source that gets no funding from any government entity! And we DON'T recruit panhandlers and give them our papers for free to use as props for panhandling, contrary to the uninformed notions of those who haven't been paying attention to anything we've done FOR FIFTEEN YEARS. We recruit people who don't WANT to be panhandlers and set them up to sell the papers on commission.
Our vendors don't even have to be homeless. If Bill Gates ever decides he wants to be a Real Change vendor, we'll let him.
And who told the Pioneer Square Community Association they could pass themselves off as a community association? They're a "Business Improvement Area" association. That means it's an association of businesses, not a community organization.
I'm on the board of directors of this skank organization, I'm a former vendor, and I've been personally living in Pioneer Square for 13 years (4 years longer than the PSCA has been in existence!) and they've never asked me what I thought of their negotiations with the city for a moratorium on social service agencies in my neighborhood.
Do you live anywhere besides B-way, the UD, the ID, Downtown, West Seattle Junction, or Pioneer Square? You could start your own BIA! The city has an on-line handbook that says how!
It comes down to this: You go around and try and get the other businesses in your neighborhood to sign on to your proposed BIA. When you've got enough to represent 60% of the revenues of the neighborhood, the city lets you found a BIA. So a freaking BIA is NOT a community organization, and has no right to call itself one. It does not represent the community of its neighborhood democratically, it only represents businesses dollarwise. Which is fine, if it sticks to its own freaking business, which is improving the business of the neighborhood. Hence the name, Business Improvement thing.
Real Change isn't the social service agency PSCA thinks it is, and PSCA doesn't represent any community.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Thanks for the Memories
Usually on Thanksgivings I won’t give thanks for anything, because the whole concept of a day set aside to apply peer pressure upon everyone to force them to give thanks for every damn thing was dreamed up by the same bozos who invented uniforms, flags, floggings, genocides, and wars. Come to think of it, whenever anyone tells me to “Have a nice day!” my natural instinct is to say, “Take a hike, bozo – you’re not the boss of me.”
So the fact that I feel like giving some thanks this Thanksgiving tells you I might be coming down with something. All the more reason to share: I am thankful to Bill Speidel for introducing me to my home, the Pioneer Square District, and for teaching me so much about Seattle and how Seattle works, with a little help from my Dad.
Bill Speidel was a local author. When I met him in the middle of the Sixties I was a teenager who had never read anything he had written. I had to take his word for it that he was an author. Fortunately, he wasn’t shy about it.
I met Speidel in connection with a project he was doing. He wanted to get parts of Seattle that had been buried in the Jackson-Yesler regrade dug out, so he could draw tourists to them and so revitalize the Pioneer Square neighborhood. He got word out that he was looking for high school kids to volunteer for the excavation, and I was one of the ones who showed up.
The beginning of the first day we crowded into his office just off 1st Avenue to listen to him talk about the underground and what his plans were. One of the things that struck me was that the walls were exposed bricks. During his talk Speidel took credit for that interior decorating innovation that has since become de rigueur in that part of town. He admitted it wasn’t historic (historically the walls were plastered and wallpapered) but it looked historic, and looks are everything, he said.
As a suicidal sixteen year old with bad skin, crooked teeth, and disproportionately long legs, nicknamed grasshopper of all things, I resented that remark. Beauty had to be more than skin deep or I was screwed. Bill and I were not hitting it off.
But I hung in there, and I helped dig out what we now call the Seattle Underground. I spent several hours on two separate days in those dark dusty tunnels shoveling dirt and debris into wheelbarrows.
The dust got so thick we could only see a few feet in front of us. Sometimes I couldn’t see my feet. I had a cough for several days later and it made my mouth taste like dust. Even my Father, who usually didn’t care about me breathing or not, noticed. He asked me how I got like that.
When he found out I had excavated tunnels without the benefit of hard hat, face mask, or minimum wage, he got all union-y on me and started screaming about chains and slave-masters and something about “line them all up against the wall” and I don’t remember the rest, except that he said he wouldn’t let me go back.
Then my Father pointed out something that I had totally missed. He said that after the Underground was cleaned out it would be possible for Speidel to charge tourists to see it. So by helping clean it out without pay or safety gear I was investing my labor toward Speidel’s future wealth, and I had not been guaranteed any financial return on that investment. All I was getting for my sweat and my bad health was a little bit of a history education.
My Dad said, “You want an education? Come here and I’ll whack you upside the head with a board just like they did the strikers in 1919. It’ll teach you what it’s all about.”
Just then, I experienced satori. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Bill.
So the fact that I feel like giving some thanks this Thanksgiving tells you I might be coming down with something. All the more reason to share: I am thankful to Bill Speidel for introducing me to my home, the Pioneer Square District, and for teaching me so much about Seattle and how Seattle works, with a little help from my Dad.
Bill Speidel was a local author. When I met him in the middle of the Sixties I was a teenager who had never read anything he had written. I had to take his word for it that he was an author. Fortunately, he wasn’t shy about it.
I met Speidel in connection with a project he was doing. He wanted to get parts of Seattle that had been buried in the Jackson-Yesler regrade dug out, so he could draw tourists to them and so revitalize the Pioneer Square neighborhood. He got word out that he was looking for high school kids to volunteer for the excavation, and I was one of the ones who showed up.
The beginning of the first day we crowded into his office just off 1st Avenue to listen to him talk about the underground and what his plans were. One of the things that struck me was that the walls were exposed bricks. During his talk Speidel took credit for that interior decorating innovation that has since become de rigueur in that part of town. He admitted it wasn’t historic (historically the walls were plastered and wallpapered) but it looked historic, and looks are everything, he said.
As a suicidal sixteen year old with bad skin, crooked teeth, and disproportionately long legs, nicknamed grasshopper of all things, I resented that remark. Beauty had to be more than skin deep or I was screwed. Bill and I were not hitting it off.
But I hung in there, and I helped dig out what we now call the Seattle Underground. I spent several hours on two separate days in those dark dusty tunnels shoveling dirt and debris into wheelbarrows.
The dust got so thick we could only see a few feet in front of us. Sometimes I couldn’t see my feet. I had a cough for several days later and it made my mouth taste like dust. Even my Father, who usually didn’t care about me breathing or not, noticed. He asked me how I got like that.
When he found out I had excavated tunnels without the benefit of hard hat, face mask, or minimum wage, he got all union-y on me and started screaming about chains and slave-masters and something about “line them all up against the wall” and I don’t remember the rest, except that he said he wouldn’t let me go back.
Then my Father pointed out something that I had totally missed. He said that after the Underground was cleaned out it would be possible for Speidel to charge tourists to see it. So by helping clean it out without pay or safety gear I was investing my labor toward Speidel’s future wealth, and I had not been guaranteed any financial return on that investment. All I was getting for my sweat and my bad health was a little bit of a history education.
My Dad said, “You want an education? Come here and I’ll whack you upside the head with a board just like they did the strikers in 1919. It’ll teach you what it’s all about.”
Just then, I experienced satori. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Bill.
Thursday, March 8, 2001
My Very Successful Prognostication
I'll confess, I'm not a terribly physical kind of guy. I'm not into rough competitive sports like baseball or rugby or marbles. I don't object to sports altogether, but I prefer the solitary sports, sports in which it's just me competing against myself.
My favorite of those is Olympic Style Nervous Pacing. Incidentally, my best score ever against myself in a pacing competition was 9.6 (it would have been a 10 if it weren't for the Russian judge.) Not to brag, but I did so well I cost myself a medal. Myself was deeply chagrined and never competed again. Really. No, not really, I just wanted to say "chagrined".
So naturally, whenever I am in an earthquake, which seems lately to be whenever I am lying in bed naked in a vulnerable position, or at least once per decade, my feeling about it is not unlike the feeling of a student who, having tried out for the varsity band, was instead picked to be a center for the football team. My feeling is that there has been a horrible mistake, I don't do contact sports. I don't even watch them!
Not that earthquakes can't be entertaining to me. Hey, I can be amused as easily as the next guy. It's just that they don't amuse me for very long. It's like sticking your finger in an electric light socket, isn't it? The fun part is pretty much over when you've realized that you have done it and you haven't suffered massive cardiac arrest yet. So, well, that was an earthquake, wasn't it? Hey, I'm not dead! What fun!
Those of my friends who are sports enthusiasts tell me that part of the value of taking part in sports lies in testing their limits, learning what they can accomplish when they throw themselves into something.
I can see that now. I mean, it isn't often that I become so distracted that I forget where I put my pants. Ordinarily I am on top of those sorts of things; "life's little details." So I guess you could say that the earthquake allowed me to discover new depths of self-distraction, great new vistas of blind panic...
Speaking of senseless violence, how 'bout that Fat Tuesday? There's another contact sport I can live without.
The first few nights of the Mardi Gras violence had no impact at all on me, even though I live in the Pioneer District, because I ignored it. (Some things deserve to be ignored, I believe. Like the practice of confounding the District and the Square. I simply don't let myself hear such idiocy. It's the Pioneer District, damn it. Or the Pioneer Square District, at the worst.)
But Tuesday night, as I was riding the bus home at about 11:30 pm with Anitra "not an actual Italian Duck" Freeman, we were unable to not notice the crowds, as they were slowing the bus so much that we were better off walking. So we continued to our Pioneer District apartment building on foot, and I had to notice the way the police were deployed. Not interspersed with the crowds, but on the periphery, in fact, just next to our building.
So I told Anitra (I'm not making this up), "First, I am going to watch Letterman. Then, I am going to do my Real Change duty, and go out there and see what is going on in those crowds. Then I am going to come back, and together we we will be tear-gassed by these police at about 2 am, when they can't think of any better way to control the crowds, which will be dispersing at about that time, under our very windows."
Did I guess wrong? No, I did not. I did exactly what I said. I watched Letterman. Then I wandered out into the Fat Tuesday crowd. I saw the beginning of the brawl that was filmed so well from the police helicopter. At that point I returned to my apartment, and waited to be tear-gassed. We were tear-gassed right on schedule, at about 2 am.
OK, there is a sport I love. I love predicting what Seattle will do next. It's poetry in motion.
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