[from 4/21/10]
As I write this it's the day the city council votes on the anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance, which its supporters believe will do a world of good by cutting back on the worst panhandling in Seattle. The ordinance is truly a work of art, whatever else you might think of it. I should know, I've been to college. In fact, when I attended our local U of W back in the hippy days, I passed through the Art Building frequently to avoid rain, and learned from seeing the stuff on the walls what art was. The anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance is that good. I'd run off a limited series, individually numbered and signed.
Speaking of hippy days, we had a law against begging back then in the U District. I forget his name, it may have been Killer, but our anti-panhandling law was a cop who had brass knuckles under leather gloves for any dirty hippy caught either begging for quarters or jaywalking. He was eventually caught at it. To make amends, the city later provided extra crosswalks across the Ave, which are still there!
By the way, the real reason you let cops ticket whoever they want is so they beat fewer people.
Whatever happens with the current law, we here at Real Change, particularly we "editors" of the "editorial committee", think it won't actually put a stop to panhandling, and we applied our great minds to solving the real problem. First, one of us observed that most panhandling in Seattle really only occurs during the last ten days of every month. We wondered, why is that? It must mean that the GAU checks they're all getting only lasts 2/3rds of the month. Therefore the solution, this one of us said, would be to increase the check by 1/3.
As a mathematician, I immediately noticed that 1/3rd of 2/3rds is 2/9ths, so 1/9th of the month would still be unaccounted for. Could Seattleites bear an average of 3.38 days of panhandling? Of course not. Something else would have to be done.
Then I realized that just increasing the GAU check wouldn't solve the problem, because we all know that the extra money would just get spent all the faster at the beginning of the month. But I had a brilliant idea: Instead of loading the GAU debit card monthly, load it every 2 hours!
If we give them $1 every 2 hours, that comes to $365.25 per month, on average, which would be an improvement over what they're getting now, and they couldn't spend it all on the 1st. I was thinking what a genius I was for coming up with this plan, when it dawned on me that the sneaky bastards would just panhandle their way through one whole month, saving their dollars, and start splurging on the first of every successive month. They'd do it just out of spite.
But I can fix that! We make it so each dollar that's added to their EBT credit has to be spent before the next one is added. They'll never get together enough for a six-pack again, and they'll have to hang out at dollar stores all day and all night. They'll be too tired to aggressively panhandle! Heck, they'll be too tired to aggressively roll over!
Some people would say that these proposals are mean, but I have one more suggestion that I think will mitigate the meaner aspects. All the ideas I've so far considered assume that the annoying panhandler would rather collect free money than work as panhandler. If so, why not be mean? But what if he/she has a strong work ethic and would prefer to work hard at begging instead of taking free money from the state?
The solution: give him/her a job in advertising!
Seattleites can't stand to be panhandled off of, but they'll go out of their way to find a big screen TV to watch obnoxious Super Bowl half-time ads!
Showing posts with label panhandling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label panhandling. Show all posts
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Bidened Up Sideways
[from 3/31/10]
Well. It looks like I'm not going to be talking about the health care reform business this week either. I mean, it's interesting and all, but how funny is it that people who haven't been able to get health insurance will now be able to? Snore. So instead I'll talk about how the Tim Burgess anti-aggressive solicitation proposal has been changing week by week, and day by day.
In fact, when I last wrote about the proposal, two weeks ago, the law changed between the time I wrote the column and when the column went to print. They (Burgess and posse) modified the law so that to be ticketed for soliciting within 15 feet of a person using an ATM you would have to be soliciting to that person, and not some third person. By making that amendment they made the law slightly better than it was and made some of my ridicule of it ungrounded.
Fortunately, for me and me alone, the law is still bad enough to ridicule. Or, in the new slang that's emerged this past week, the law is "Bidened up," or "Bidening stoopid".
For example, as now written it practically forces solicitors to shout from 15 feet or more away from customers all the time, to avoid accidentally breaking the rules. That will last just until the police decide to treat the shouting itself as "abusive language that would alarm a reasonable person."
Another problem is best illustrated by a scenario: An obviously impoverished solicitor shouts "red roses, only a dollar" toward a guy in a suit getting a parking sticker for his car. The guy decides he wants one of those cheap roses to, let's say, help him score. So he walks toward the rose peddler with parking receipt in hand. But there's a cop down the street watching, so the rose peddler has to back away and stay 15 feet from the prospective customer. When does the soliciting end and the transaction begin? The law doesn't make that clear so the peddler has to back away to be safe.
Pretty soon, the peddler is running with the customer in hot pursuit. Since it's a guy in a suit chasing a poor guy, the cop assumes a crime has been committed and orders the peddler to stop, but the peddler is deaf so keeps running, so the cop chases him down, screams "Why the Biden didn't you stop when I said to stop!" and slams the peddlers head against a wall to emphasize his point, causing permanent brain damage.
That's what happens when you have stupid laws in a stupid police state.
But I digress. All that concerns two-week-old amendments. But the proposed law is still in flux and I wanted to talk about a couple of interesting recent changes.
The first addresses a question I've mentioned before, namely, would the ordinance apply to Girl Scouts selling cookies? Would it apply to rich people asking one another for Grey Poupon while strolling the Sculpture Park? Language has been inserted into the ordinance that spells out that "solicitations by individuals not appearing to a reasonable person to be in desperate financial need would not constitute aggressive solicitation unless the individual engaged in threats of violence." So go ahead and ask for the Grey Poupon, just look the part and don't pull out the stiletto, and you'll be OK.
That's certainly an improvement of the law, but a more recent amendment really clarifies the intent of the ordinance and, I think, makes it a law that every Seattleite can support. Previously the ordinance limited the definition of aggressive solicitation to that which is intimidating or causes fear in reasonable people, and then confused matters by immediately listing situations that might not cause fear or intimidate at all. The amendment makes the connection sensible by simply defining aggressive solicitation as "solicitation that is intimidating... or causes a reasonable person to feel guilt." [Italics added.]
Good laws are laws we can all understand!
Well. It looks like I'm not going to be talking about the health care reform business this week either. I mean, it's interesting and all, but how funny is it that people who haven't been able to get health insurance will now be able to? Snore. So instead I'll talk about how the Tim Burgess anti-aggressive solicitation proposal has been changing week by week, and day by day.
In fact, when I last wrote about the proposal, two weeks ago, the law changed between the time I wrote the column and when the column went to print. They (Burgess and posse) modified the law so that to be ticketed for soliciting within 15 feet of a person using an ATM you would have to be soliciting to that person, and not some third person. By making that amendment they made the law slightly better than it was and made some of my ridicule of it ungrounded.
Fortunately, for me and me alone, the law is still bad enough to ridicule. Or, in the new slang that's emerged this past week, the law is "Bidened up," or "Bidening stoopid".
For example, as now written it practically forces solicitors to shout from 15 feet or more away from customers all the time, to avoid accidentally breaking the rules. That will last just until the police decide to treat the shouting itself as "abusive language that would alarm a reasonable person."
Another problem is best illustrated by a scenario: An obviously impoverished solicitor shouts "red roses, only a dollar" toward a guy in a suit getting a parking sticker for his car. The guy decides he wants one of those cheap roses to, let's say, help him score. So he walks toward the rose peddler with parking receipt in hand. But there's a cop down the street watching, so the rose peddler has to back away and stay 15 feet from the prospective customer. When does the soliciting end and the transaction begin? The law doesn't make that clear so the peddler has to back away to be safe.
Pretty soon, the peddler is running with the customer in hot pursuit. Since it's a guy in a suit chasing a poor guy, the cop assumes a crime has been committed and orders the peddler to stop, but the peddler is deaf so keeps running, so the cop chases him down, screams "Why the Biden didn't you stop when I said to stop!" and slams the peddlers head against a wall to emphasize his point, causing permanent brain damage.
That's what happens when you have stupid laws in a stupid police state.
But I digress. All that concerns two-week-old amendments. But the proposed law is still in flux and I wanted to talk about a couple of interesting recent changes.
The first addresses a question I've mentioned before, namely, would the ordinance apply to Girl Scouts selling cookies? Would it apply to rich people asking one another for Grey Poupon while strolling the Sculpture Park? Language has been inserted into the ordinance that spells out that "solicitations by individuals not appearing to a reasonable person to be in desperate financial need would not constitute aggressive solicitation unless the individual engaged in threats of violence." So go ahead and ask for the Grey Poupon, just look the part and don't pull out the stiletto, and you'll be OK.
That's certainly an improvement of the law, but a more recent amendment really clarifies the intent of the ordinance and, I think, makes it a law that every Seattleite can support. Previously the ordinance limited the definition of aggressive solicitation to that which is intimidating or causes fear in reasonable people, and then confused matters by immediately listing situations that might not cause fear or intimidate at all. The amendment makes the connection sensible by simply defining aggressive solicitation as "solicitation that is intimidating... or causes a reasonable person to feel guilt." [Italics added.]
Good laws are laws we can all understand!
Attack of the Mind Sucking Bubbles
[from 3/17/10]
Once again, I am going to talk about the so-called anti-panhandling ordinance, AKA the anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance, AKA the Tim Burgess mayoral campaign bid. As before, NO OPINIONS are to be expressed in this diatribe. You won't be able to tell if I'm for it or against it, that's how much ironic adventure we're going to have.
This time, let's focus on The Bubble. The Bubble arises under proper conditions, say, if the planets are in alignment, if papers are in order and filed on time. It will be illegal to attempt an interpersonal transaction within 15 feet of someone, on account of said proper conditions.
I like The Bubble. In saying that, I am not violating my vow to express no opinion. I'm saying I like it, in the sense I like horror pictures, or I like speculations about which species will take over from humans, whether rats or cockroaches. Will the cockroaches have to evolve opposable thumbs and giant brains, and failing that will the rats have the edge? I wouldn't want to be IN a real-life horror picture, or be replaced by rats, I just enjoy the concept. Likewise the concept of The Bubble is cool.
The coolest Bubble-related provision (not the only one) of the Burgess Bid, is part A.4.f.(iii) which basically says there's a bubble around anyone "immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, [who] is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction." It's important to note that the law as now written is not about prohibiting solicitations only to the person who creates The Bubble. It's about prohibiting solicitations to anyone at all within The Bubble that person creates.
Here's the cool part. It creates a mechanism whereby people who engage in solicitation (not only panhandlers but also Real Change vendors, Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies, petitioners, and others) are compelled to look suspicious. Because they will have to engage in watchful behavior that will alarm people.
It will work like this. For everybody but the Girl Scouts, who will be immune because the police so love them, you could get a ticket if you aren't paying attention to whomever nearby has money, or a bank card, or a receipt, etc., out. In the past, if you were honest and polite, you would have indicated as much by deliberately avoiding glaring at users of ATMs and pay stations, lest anyone think you were targeting them. But, once the law is passed, you'll have to watch everybody coming and going from every ATM and parking pay station on your block, specifically watching their hands, trying to identify whether they are holding a check or receipt or if it's just Chapstick, and seeing when it gets put away.
Failure to spy on people using ATMs and pay stations could result in inadvertently breaking the law.
To make this all concrete, let's say I was on the streets selling naming rights to my body parts, something I've actually done. Nothing in the law requires a solicitation be verbalized to constitute a solicitation. I could just have a sign around my neck, "Name my body parts -- $1 each".
As soon as I see someone step away from a parking pay station with a parking receipt in hand, I have to know that they are there. I have to see the receipt to know that the law applies. I have to gauge the distance, and before they get to within 15 feet of me, I have to hide my sign until the threat is past. To know when I can go back to signing, I have to watch that person and keep an eye out for anyone else like him.
I'm going to look like I'm marking every single person paying for parking or using an ATM, even though I'd rather politely ignore them.
It's a bad law that stigmatizes those who obey it.
Once again, I am going to talk about the so-called anti-panhandling ordinance, AKA the anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance, AKA the Tim Burgess mayoral campaign bid. As before, NO OPINIONS are to be expressed in this diatribe. You won't be able to tell if I'm for it or against it, that's how much ironic adventure we're going to have.
This time, let's focus on The Bubble. The Bubble arises under proper conditions, say, if the planets are in alignment, if papers are in order and filed on time. It will be illegal to attempt an interpersonal transaction within 15 feet of someone, on account of said proper conditions.
I like The Bubble. In saying that, I am not violating my vow to express no opinion. I'm saying I like it, in the sense I like horror pictures, or I like speculations about which species will take over from humans, whether rats or cockroaches. Will the cockroaches have to evolve opposable thumbs and giant brains, and failing that will the rats have the edge? I wouldn't want to be IN a real-life horror picture, or be replaced by rats, I just enjoy the concept. Likewise the concept of The Bubble is cool.
The coolest Bubble-related provision (not the only one) of the Burgess Bid, is part A.4.f.(iii) which basically says there's a bubble around anyone "immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, [who] is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction." It's important to note that the law as now written is not about prohibiting solicitations only to the person who creates The Bubble. It's about prohibiting solicitations to anyone at all within The Bubble that person creates.
Here's the cool part. It creates a mechanism whereby people who engage in solicitation (not only panhandlers but also Real Change vendors, Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies, petitioners, and others) are compelled to look suspicious. Because they will have to engage in watchful behavior that will alarm people.
It will work like this. For everybody but the Girl Scouts, who will be immune because the police so love them, you could get a ticket if you aren't paying attention to whomever nearby has money, or a bank card, or a receipt, etc., out. In the past, if you were honest and polite, you would have indicated as much by deliberately avoiding glaring at users of ATMs and pay stations, lest anyone think you were targeting them. But, once the law is passed, you'll have to watch everybody coming and going from every ATM and parking pay station on your block, specifically watching their hands, trying to identify whether they are holding a check or receipt or if it's just Chapstick, and seeing when it gets put away.
Failure to spy on people using ATMs and pay stations could result in inadvertently breaking the law.
To make this all concrete, let's say I was on the streets selling naming rights to my body parts, something I've actually done. Nothing in the law requires a solicitation be verbalized to constitute a solicitation. I could just have a sign around my neck, "Name my body parts -- $1 each".
As soon as I see someone step away from a parking pay station with a parking receipt in hand, I have to know that they are there. I have to see the receipt to know that the law applies. I have to gauge the distance, and before they get to within 15 feet of me, I have to hide my sign until the threat is past. To know when I can go back to signing, I have to watch that person and keep an eye out for anyone else like him.
I'm going to look like I'm marking every single person paying for parking or using an ATM, even though I'd rather politely ignore them.
It's a bad law that stigmatizes those who obey it.
This Column Is Inoffensive
[from 3/3/10]
Last year, city council member Tim Burgess promised us an anti-panhandling ordinance. It's ready! It has morphed into an anti-aggressive solicitation law. I am NOT going to say ANYTHING about whether the proposed ordinance is wrong or not. That's not my job. I am only going to indicate some of its potential as inspiration for mild and entirely inoffensive humor, which in NO WAY expresses my own opinion.
For example. Let's say it's 4:30 PM and you just parked your BMW at 5th and Wall, and you go to the parking pay station and realize you accidentally left your wallet at home. No problem, you think, because you can find change under the front seat. But when you feed the meter you discover you're 50 cents short of what you need to cover you till 6 PM. So you politely ask a passing pedestrian if they can spare 50 cents. You tell them you're no panhandler, you even offer to return their 50 cents by mail with interest, if they will provide an address. Being less than 15 feet from yourself and at a parking meter, the Tim Burgess ordinance then (this is absolutely true!) DEFINES your behavior as aggressive solicitation, subject to a $50 fine!
We will have a law on the books that contains statements such as these: "The mere act of solicitation is not intimidating conduct," and "The mere act of solicitation without intimidation is not aggressive solicitation." Next year, expect an ordinance that prohibits aggressive miming. It will specifically assert, "The mere act of miming is not intimidating conduct, but, hey, nobody likes mimes except art students and visiting French Canadians, so... " Ha, ha, that's funny because it's SO true! AND it entirely doesn't offend anyone! By the way, the Burgess law WILL outlaw miming with a hat out for change. That's covered under the clause that prohibits alarming gestures while making a solicitation. (All mime is alarming to reasonable people.) But miming just to be a jack-off will still be legal!
The Burgess ordinance also contains language like this: "intentionally blocking or interfering with a person by any means while making a solicitation, including unreasonably causing the person to take evasive action to avoid physical contact, blah, blah,.. " and "intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation blah, blah, blooie, blah... "
So, in other words, what we have here is an ordinance that gets you a fine for blocking and interfering with a person, forcing them to take evasive action, intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm ONLY while making a solicitation!
You'll still be able to do any of that just so long as you DON'T ask for money! It'll be OK for the purposes of this ordinance, which very reasonably only tries to stop these behaviors under limited circumstances, so as not to drain the resources of our over-worked police.
I'm looking forward to more laws like this. For example, we could have a law against driving drunk, while having a vanity license. Why stretch our resources too thin, going after humble drunk drivers, too?
Obligatory irrelevant digression. In 1981, I was at 45th and U Way, late for a very important Go class, when a man with a clip-board stepped up to me and begged me to answer a survey question. The question was, "Is it better to stop or continue?" I said "Stop or continue what?" He said it didn't matter. Then, when I told him he was a moron, he called me an asshole. Can we have a law against people like that? It was very frustrating to me that my only recourse was to walk away from the moron without giving him the answer he wanted. I so needed retribution. A $50 fine would have been nice, or perhaps a policeman could have subjected him to unwanted mime.
Last year, city council member Tim Burgess promised us an anti-panhandling ordinance. It's ready! It has morphed into an anti-aggressive solicitation law. I am NOT going to say ANYTHING about whether the proposed ordinance is wrong or not. That's not my job. I am only going to indicate some of its potential as inspiration for mild and entirely inoffensive humor, which in NO WAY expresses my own opinion.
For example. Let's say it's 4:30 PM and you just parked your BMW at 5th and Wall, and you go to the parking pay station and realize you accidentally left your wallet at home. No problem, you think, because you can find change under the front seat. But when you feed the meter you discover you're 50 cents short of what you need to cover you till 6 PM. So you politely ask a passing pedestrian if they can spare 50 cents. You tell them you're no panhandler, you even offer to return their 50 cents by mail with interest, if they will provide an address. Being less than 15 feet from yourself and at a parking meter, the Tim Burgess ordinance then (this is absolutely true!) DEFINES your behavior as aggressive solicitation, subject to a $50 fine!
We will have a law on the books that contains statements such as these: "The mere act of solicitation is not intimidating conduct," and "The mere act of solicitation without intimidation is not aggressive solicitation." Next year, expect an ordinance that prohibits aggressive miming. It will specifically assert, "The mere act of miming is not intimidating conduct, but, hey, nobody likes mimes except art students and visiting French Canadians, so... " Ha, ha, that's funny because it's SO true! AND it entirely doesn't offend anyone! By the way, the Burgess law WILL outlaw miming with a hat out for change. That's covered under the clause that prohibits alarming gestures while making a solicitation. (All mime is alarming to reasonable people.) But miming just to be a jack-off will still be legal!
The Burgess ordinance also contains language like this: "intentionally blocking or interfering with a person by any means while making a solicitation, including unreasonably causing the person to take evasive action to avoid physical contact, blah, blah,.. " and "intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation blah, blah, blooie, blah... "
So, in other words, what we have here is an ordinance that gets you a fine for blocking and interfering with a person, forcing them to take evasive action, intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm ONLY while making a solicitation!
You'll still be able to do any of that just so long as you DON'T ask for money! It'll be OK for the purposes of this ordinance, which very reasonably only tries to stop these behaviors under limited circumstances, so as not to drain the resources of our over-worked police.
I'm looking forward to more laws like this. For example, we could have a law against driving drunk, while having a vanity license. Why stretch our resources too thin, going after humble drunk drivers, too?
Obligatory irrelevant digression. In 1981, I was at 45th and U Way, late for a very important Go class, when a man with a clip-board stepped up to me and begged me to answer a survey question. The question was, "Is it better to stop or continue?" I said "Stop or continue what?" He said it didn't matter. Then, when I told him he was a moron, he called me an asshole. Can we have a law against people like that? It was very frustrating to me that my only recourse was to walk away from the moron without giving him the answer he wanted. I so needed retribution. A $50 fine would have been nice, or perhaps a policeman could have subjected him to unwanted mime.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The DSA Is High
The Downtown Seattle Association, or the DSA, as we like to call it, has its “Have a [heart-symbol], Give Smart” campaign, with brochures and a devoted website at givesmart.org. Let’s figure it out!
The DSA says it’s about panhandling, which is about mostly non-homeless people wanting, “in many cases,” drugs and alcohol, and therefore you shouldn’t give them money.
I say it’s about begging. Panhandling is handling a pan. Begging is asking for money. Words have meanings, DSA!
Once we understand that they’re really talking about beggars, rather than pans, we can go to the next fundamental question. Namely, who the freakin’ hell is the DSA and why are they begging me not to give to beggars?
The DSA is an association of, at last count, 439 businesses located in or interested in Seattle. For example the New York City based Merrill Lynch is a member. They have offices here. US Bank is a member. They’re part of US Bancorp, which is headquartered in Minneapolis. Macy’s, which owns the former Bon, is a member. Nowadays they’re based in San Francisco. Tillicum Village and Tours is a member, reaching out to Seattle from Blake Island.
Almost exactly 25% of the DSA’s members are real estate firms. Nearly 25% more deal heavily with real estate firms. There are architecture & planning firms, law firms, banks, insurers, finance companies, and title companies. So about half are companies that profit not just out of a dedicated business site in Seattle, but from the money that flows from pocket to pocket when those sites are created, leased, and sold, and leased again and sold again, and again, and again.
So they’re begging, “Please, please, don’t give the beggars money. Help us send them away! They might scare off new businesses and we won’t make as much money as we want to. PLEASE let us make as much money as we want! We PROMISE neither we nor our children will use our profits to buy cocaine. We PROMISE we won’t use any of our profits buying other things we don’t need, like Italian shoes, Pinot Noir, jogging shorts, or canopied beds.”
Here’s what I think about the real estate business: It’s all stolen property, people! Remember who Seattle was? This land doesn’t really belong to these jackasses!
The Seahawks and Mariners are members. And, here’s your irony, so are the Oklahoma-group-owned Sonics and Storm.
I suppose the Sonics had no representative on the Give Smart Committee. Still, isn’t it odd that one of the most talked-about members of this organization that’s telling us beggars shouldn’t get money just begged for a sackload of money from tax-payer funds?
“How much of a sackload, Wes?” I’ll tell you how much. If you took all the money they’ve just asked the governor to help them pry from tax-payers and you gave it to Seattle’s street beggars instead, each one would get a minimum of $300,000 (assuming a high estimate of 1000 street beggars. There may be only 439, one for each business in the DSA.) That would allow them to all retire.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should do the opposite of what the DSA says and go out and give the street beggars every dime and dollar they ask for.
I’m just saying, the various highly rich and some not so rich hotshots who run and own the businesses that identify themselves with downtown Seattle, who act like they ARE downtown Seattle, buy drugs and alcohol with the money they make off of this corner of the world. IN MANY CASES. That’s a fact.
You should consider that before you let them earn any more money than they really need for necessities like food, water, housing, and toilet facilities.
They’ll tell you it’s different for them precisely because they earn all their money (the Sonics, Seattle Opera, SAM, a hundred others, aside.)
But it’s not all earned! It’s made by dealing in stolen property. Never forget that.
The DSA says it’s about panhandling, which is about mostly non-homeless people wanting, “in many cases,” drugs and alcohol, and therefore you shouldn’t give them money.
I say it’s about begging. Panhandling is handling a pan. Begging is asking for money. Words have meanings, DSA!
Once we understand that they’re really talking about beggars, rather than pans, we can go to the next fundamental question. Namely, who the freakin’ hell is the DSA and why are they begging me not to give to beggars?
The DSA is an association of, at last count, 439 businesses located in or interested in Seattle. For example the New York City based Merrill Lynch is a member. They have offices here. US Bank is a member. They’re part of US Bancorp, which is headquartered in Minneapolis. Macy’s, which owns the former Bon, is a member. Nowadays they’re based in San Francisco. Tillicum Village and Tours is a member, reaching out to Seattle from Blake Island.
Almost exactly 25% of the DSA’s members are real estate firms. Nearly 25% more deal heavily with real estate firms. There are architecture & planning firms, law firms, banks, insurers, finance companies, and title companies. So about half are companies that profit not just out of a dedicated business site in Seattle, but from the money that flows from pocket to pocket when those sites are created, leased, and sold, and leased again and sold again, and again, and again.
So they’re begging, “Please, please, don’t give the beggars money. Help us send them away! They might scare off new businesses and we won’t make as much money as we want to. PLEASE let us make as much money as we want! We PROMISE neither we nor our children will use our profits to buy cocaine. We PROMISE we won’t use any of our profits buying other things we don’t need, like Italian shoes, Pinot Noir, jogging shorts, or canopied beds.”
Here’s what I think about the real estate business: It’s all stolen property, people! Remember who Seattle was? This land doesn’t really belong to these jackasses!
The Seahawks and Mariners are members. And, here’s your irony, so are the Oklahoma-group-owned Sonics and Storm.
I suppose the Sonics had no representative on the Give Smart Committee. Still, isn’t it odd that one of the most talked-about members of this organization that’s telling us beggars shouldn’t get money just begged for a sackload of money from tax-payer funds?
“How much of a sackload, Wes?” I’ll tell you how much. If you took all the money they’ve just asked the governor to help them pry from tax-payers and you gave it to Seattle’s street beggars instead, each one would get a minimum of $300,000 (assuming a high estimate of 1000 street beggars. There may be only 439, one for each business in the DSA.) That would allow them to all retire.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should do the opposite of what the DSA says and go out and give the street beggars every dime and dollar they ask for.
I’m just saying, the various highly rich and some not so rich hotshots who run and own the businesses that identify themselves with downtown Seattle, who act like they ARE downtown Seattle, buy drugs and alcohol with the money they make off of this corner of the world. IN MANY CASES. That’s a fact.
You should consider that before you let them earn any more money than they really need for necessities like food, water, housing, and toilet facilities.
They’ll tell you it’s different for them precisely because they earn all their money (the Sonics, Seattle Opera, SAM, a hundred others, aside.)
But it’s not all earned! It’s made by dealing in stolen property. Never forget that.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Pimp and Circumstance
My goal this week is to wade into a pool of homeless activists and see what bites me. I want to discuss certain deep questions, such as “What is a poverty pimp?” “Who’s calling whom a poverty pimp?” “I’m not a poverty pimp, you are,” and “Whatever I am, you’re double that,” inspired by a couple of minor controversies which have swirled recently.
One has to do with charges out there that Real Change exploits the poor and homeless to keep our director and a few privileged others in the lower middle-class lifestyle that they were born into. I don’t have the space here to get into the details, but I’d like to offer some thoughts of mine regarding those charges.
Our director Tim “Perfess’r” Harris, stands accused of being a greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, Classics-loving, kitsch-collecting, testosterone-driven, quiche-eating, carbs-forsaking, couscous-hating, male. OK, I can live with that. He even has a car, and kids. How dare he afford kids! But when someone says the remaining ten or eleven of us are greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, males, they are wrong in every single case. That’s not the kind of sweatshop we operate around here.
I for one have been homeless four times, and am dirt poor now. Yet even though I am on the board and a white male I’ve never been paid one single potato for the writing I do here. Some greed.
There’s also been a charge that we DO pay some of our writers. These people can’t make up their minds: so is paying good or bad? In the case of our two staff writers, paying is supposedly bad because they are *privileged*, more than, say, the whiner who came up with these charges. I guess so; they can write, if that’s a privilege. I thought it was a talent. But other than that, the charge is a crock.
Truth is, we pay staff when they have to do more than what a volunteer can bear. For the long workweeks we get out of our director we should pay him $52,000 per year. We don’t actually pay him quite that much. Please don’t anyone tell him.
The other controversy concerns “bumvertising” and one of my favorite activists, Michael Stoops of the National Coalition of the Homeless.
Mr. Stoops, like Tim Harris, has his share of detractors. It doesn’t help that at street paper conferences the two of them invariably leave us peons to go party all night at some catered penthouse somewhere, or whatever they do. They could be playing mumbly-peg for all the rest of us know. But I’m kidding; Michael isn’t a poverty pimp.
On the other hand, Ben Rogovy is proof that poverty pimping is alive and well. Mr. Rogovy has recently started an on-line poker service and begun using what he calls “bumvertising” to call attention to it. He pays panhandlers cash, food, and other goods, to advertise Rogovy’s business while they panhandle.
So homeless activists everywhere are outraged, charging Mr. Rogovy with exploiting the homeless. Michael Stoops mainly objects to the term “bumvertising” which perpetuates stereotypes, and I can agree with that, but he goes too far when he also says, "Homeless people are desperate, but they're not so desperate that they are going to be exploited by some avant-garde company that wants to sell their product."
If that were true that would mean homeless people were less desperate than all the other people who work for avant-garde companies that want to sell their products.
No, I would rather Rogovy stopped calling people bums and derelicts, especially now that he has them working, and I’d like to see him stick to paying cash, in order to empower his contractors to choose the goods they want, rather than have their goods chosen for them by the Man. But he’s not exploiting panhandlers any more than Starbucks exploits baristas.
Capitalism exploits, period. Don’t select homeless people out for this special stigma of victimhood.
One has to do with charges out there that Real Change exploits the poor and homeless to keep our director and a few privileged others in the lower middle-class lifestyle that they were born into. I don’t have the space here to get into the details, but I’d like to offer some thoughts of mine regarding those charges.
Our director Tim “Perfess’r” Harris, stands accused of being a greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, Classics-loving, kitsch-collecting, testosterone-driven, quiche-eating, carbs-forsaking, couscous-hating, male. OK, I can live with that. He even has a car, and kids. How dare he afford kids! But when someone says the remaining ten or eleven of us are greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, males, they are wrong in every single case. That’s not the kind of sweatshop we operate around here.
I for one have been homeless four times, and am dirt poor now. Yet even though I am on the board and a white male I’ve never been paid one single potato for the writing I do here. Some greed.
There’s also been a charge that we DO pay some of our writers. These people can’t make up their minds: so is paying good or bad? In the case of our two staff writers, paying is supposedly bad because they are *privileged*, more than, say, the whiner who came up with these charges. I guess so; they can write, if that’s a privilege. I thought it was a talent. But other than that, the charge is a crock.
Truth is, we pay staff when they have to do more than what a volunteer can bear. For the long workweeks we get out of our director we should pay him $52,000 per year. We don’t actually pay him quite that much. Please don’t anyone tell him.
The other controversy concerns “bumvertising” and one of my favorite activists, Michael Stoops of the National Coalition of the Homeless.
Mr. Stoops, like Tim Harris, has his share of detractors. It doesn’t help that at street paper conferences the two of them invariably leave us peons to go party all night at some catered penthouse somewhere, or whatever they do. They could be playing mumbly-peg for all the rest of us know. But I’m kidding; Michael isn’t a poverty pimp.
On the other hand, Ben Rogovy is proof that poverty pimping is alive and well. Mr. Rogovy has recently started an on-line poker service and begun using what he calls “bumvertising” to call attention to it. He pays panhandlers cash, food, and other goods, to advertise Rogovy’s business while they panhandle.
So homeless activists everywhere are outraged, charging Mr. Rogovy with exploiting the homeless. Michael Stoops mainly objects to the term “bumvertising” which perpetuates stereotypes, and I can agree with that, but he goes too far when he also says, "Homeless people are desperate, but they're not so desperate that they are going to be exploited by some avant-garde company that wants to sell their product."
If that were true that would mean homeless people were less desperate than all the other people who work for avant-garde companies that want to sell their products.
No, I would rather Rogovy stopped calling people bums and derelicts, especially now that he has them working, and I’d like to see him stick to paying cash, in order to empower his contractors to choose the goods they want, rather than have their goods chosen for them by the Man. But he’s not exploiting panhandlers any more than Starbucks exploits baristas.
Capitalism exploits, period. Don’t select homeless people out for this special stigma of victimhood.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Neural Folia Bloom at Movie
Here's something I bet you didn't know! Most people think consciousness is a continuous process. That's wrong! Scientists now know that human consciousness, like yours, results from the sporadic "flipping" of neural folia in the brain. In normal people, this "flipping" occurs roughly as often as movie frames. This is why humans like movies. Deep down we recognize ourselves in them.
So when I saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) movie, my first reaction was to greet it. My second reaction was to look for other things that the H2G2 movie and I shared, aside from discontinuity. Hobbies? Signs?
Before going there I'll review the movie really fast.
Douglas Adams mostly wrote it. Douglas Adams mostly wrote H2G2's other incarnations. So objections that it differs from the book are irrelevant. Leave it. Anyway, it's more faithful to the book than you'd expect, given that Adams would hardly have wanted to merely repeat himself. Some jokes are missing, but new ones replace them. You want the old jokes? Read the book again. My main complaint about the movie is that the costume designers who created Marvin took the "brain the size of a planet" line far too literally. Also a movie should be over when the credits roll. No fair inserting content two minutes after the end, so impatient Americans like me never get to see it. Also, Questular Rontok's relationship to Zaphod Beeblebrox sorely needed fleshing out, as they say.
SPOILER ALERT: I will soon give away portions of plot.
What I really want to talk about is how, gosh, did any of you ever notice how Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is all about issues we constantly harp on here at Real Change? In case you haven't noticed this, I will list just some of the ways.
1) We at Real Change constantly bitch and moan about homelessness. Likewise, Arthur Dent, the central character of H2G2, perpetually bitches and moans about planetlessness.
2) We complain about bureaucrats and their callous disregard for human needs. The H2G2 movie makes the Vogons primary antagonists. The Vogons are an entire alien species with callous disregard for human needs. Or even Vogonic needs, really. Arthur Dent can prevail against the Vogons largely because, being British, he knows how to queue. Likewise, having been homeless, I know how to wait at a DSHS office.
3) Vogons detest hitchhiking, a practice that involves getting an unauthorized ride. Many Earthlings detest panhandling. At Real Change we provide an authorized alternative, work.
4) In one scene Arthur Dent and company are trying to rescue Trillian (another human) and every time any one of them gets any idea he is whacked in the face by presumptuous entities to whom they had not been previously introduced. Likewise whenever homeless people get ideas for solving their own problems, it turns out that presumptuous politicians, NIMBYs, and radicals who are more-radical-than-thou (but not themselves actually helping in any way) whack them. Figuratively.
5) To the Vogons, who have no imaginations, Trillian can't establish her identity unless she can legitimately claim a currently existing home planet. To the US Postal Service in Seattle it is unimaginable that Seattle residents who don't have street addresses might require a post office box in the same vicinity as the social services they need. No, none of us has a space ship that can get us to a suburban branch office that provides PO boxes to homeless people and back downtown in time to line up for food and shelter. Yes we all need to get mail. It is no longer a luxury. The 18th century is over.
6) In the movie, the bowl of petunias thinks "Oh no, not again," just before colliding with a medium-sized planet at several hundred kilometers per hour. Here at Real Change, that's our reaction to most every state budget announcement, and every election. "Oh no, not again." Splat.
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Letting Time Go
Let's talk about Edward T. Hall, why White People can't dance, and panhandling!
Why does panhandling seem wrong to so many of us? I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that it feels wrong for the same reason that moving more than the feet to music feels wrong to straight White men over fifty: our parents never taught us to do things like that.
My parents said there's a time and place for everything, and they were very specific. Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist, came up with a pair of words to describe the results of these kinds of teachings. He identifies two broad categories of styles of cultures, the monochronic and polychronic, arising from two ways of relating to time. White American/Northern European cultures express monochronic styles. The rest of the world, pre-MacDonalds, have generally been polychronic.
Monochronic styles require one-thing-at-a-time. Polychronic styles allow and expect lots-of-things-at-once. In monochronic cultures there's only one time. Your watch has your time. In polychronic cultures they may not even have a word for time. Talking about when something will or should happen may be wildly inappropriate.
How can this affect our panhandling behavior? (Note: By panhandling behavior we are talking not just about panhandlers but also panhandlees!) Let's say you're White, your name is Chris, you're walking to work, and as you pass the MacDonalds another White Person holds up a cardboard sign saying "Hungry/homeless, please help" and sticks out a Styrofoam cup. What might you think, Chris?
Well if you're like me, Chris, you think, "Hey, this is my walking time!" You think, "I didn't come out here to give my money away. I do that at the appropriately designated times. I give to United Way at the office. I pay my taxes every April." You think, "This person isn't supposed to get money now. They haven't just completed work. That's the time you're supposed to get money. Don't they know that?"
It's just like when White People first saw Chuck Berry dancing on a stage. "You can't move that body part like that now! You have to wait until you're in bed alone with a woman!" So over the years it has been necessary for African-American musicians to slowly, step by step, introduce White People to more and more movement, a project that began with the Twist and gradually proceeded through the Funky Chicken, Disco, culminating to date in whatever it is that Britney Spears does.
Now let's imagine someone from an unspecified polychronic culture. Still walking to work, let's say his name is Rongo Diego Yoko M!fumi, and another representative of his same culture appears, panhandling. Same sign, same Styrofoam cup. What does Rongo think?
The answer can vary from one polychronic culture to another -- Mr. Hall's categories are very broad -- but here are some possibilities: "Sure why not? My money came from everyone and so it belongs to everyone." Or, "I'm sure that if this fine person had money, and I needed some, he/she would help me. People have always helped me." "Maybe we could go have a coffee and sandwiches somewhere and talk. I can go to work tomorrow." "I feel like dancing." "Whoa, look at all those stiff White People staring at us."
To Chris, we work and THEN we deserve pay. To Rongo, we can always be deserving. "Work? Sure we do that. We give, we take, we work, we rest. What's the problem?"
Do you know for a fact that the panhandler HASN'T worked? What if the panhandler worked years for an exploitative employer who paid him less than what his work was worth? Now you have extra change in your pocket. Could that mean you've been paid too much lately? You could help to even things out. Or you could hurry to work, letting the universe run by itself, like a clock that never has to be wound, even though there are people stuck in it.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Of Pennies and Prejudice
Today I want to talk about panhandling, panhandling related incidents, and panhandler focused factoids.
It really annoys me that I can't actually present reliably true panhandler focused factoids, on account of there being none. So far, the only way genius social scientists have been able to figure out who panhandles and who doesn't is to go around to places where they think potential panhandlers are to be found, like shelters and meal programs, and beg them to tell the truth about whether they panhandle or not. This approach results in statistics that are a little like the ones you get when you ask the neighbor teenagers how often they've done each other.
To make matters worse: I am not a statistics wonk, so I forget even where I've seen statistics based on the truth-begging approach. So, for example, I am certain that at one time a few years ago I saw a report about such surveys being done in Seattle, Denver and Washington, D.C., independently, among other places. I am almost certain what the results were. And I am absolutely without any shred of doubt certain I don't remember where I saw that report, so I'm just wasting space telling you about it.
Still I can't resist telling you that, in spite of the inadequacies of the research methods, there is one pair of conclusions that genius social scientists always come up with when they study the question. Those conclusions are that (2) most panhandlers aren't homeless (so looking for them in shelters might be a mistake, see above), and (1) most homeless people aren't panhandlers.
The reason they come to the first conclusion is that the reported frequency of panhandling among admittedly homeless people is incredibly low even assuming, as social scientists do, that roughly a quarter of all human beings will lie to social scientists whenever they get the chance. The reason they come to the second conclusion is the same way I have, namely by getting to know various panhandlers and following them home at the end of the day.
The kind of results we're talking about varies considerably from city to city, but, except for Washington, D.C., in every place you go the percentage of homeless people who report even intermittent panhandling is down below 15%. In some areas the figure is much lower. I just saw a recent report out of Charlottesville, Virginia, about a hundred miles from D.C., where they could only get 4 homeless adults in a hundred admit to having panhandled at all in 6 months. Or maybe it was 3 in a hundred. They weren't too clear about their denominator. I don't blame them --denominators are hard.
The result I remember for Seattle was closer to 6%. I'd really appreciate someone tracking that down for me.
Meanwhile, a survey done by the Gallup people found that over 30% of all Americans thought the average homeless person was a panhandler. So a sizable minority of Americans figures that you can't solve homelessness without first dissuading homeless people from relying on panhandling, something hardly any of them do. It's like thinking that in order to solve the continuing problem of poverty in rural West Virginia, we have to get the West Virginians to not speak Etruscan when applying for jobs.
Here's one of those panhandling related incidents I was talking about. One day I was homeless and had 3 pennies. Two days later I still had the same 3 pennies. It occurred to me then that if I asked somebody for a quarter and they gave me one, I would experience an 833% increase in liquid assets, and after buying a roll at Safeway I would still have 3 pennies. Instead, I starved. Ha, ha, pride is funny.
Let that be a lesson to you all. If you are ever homeless, and you only have 3 pennies, and you don't ask anybody for a quarter, well, join the club.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Thanks For All The Beer
Last issue (North American Newsbriefs, July 10) we read about beerforthehomeless.com. Those are the people in Chattanooga, TN, who are collecting donations to pass out beer for the homeless.
We love this idea. We (I mean I myself of course) have been saying for years that homeless people have as much right to decide for themselves whether they should imbibe alcoholic beverages as homeful people do.
What we really delight in is this information from the FAQ page at beerforthehomeless.com: "… the fact is that less than half of the homeless we visit accept our beer." Bearing in mind that they are only talking about Chattanooga, nevertheless someone has finally succeeded in finding a way to substantiate our long stated observation that most homeless people aren't alcoholics, they're just people who don't have a proper place to live at the moment.
And what a straightforward method of proof it is. "Let's pass the stuff out and see who takes it!" To think that researchers have probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars for years trying to figure this one out with pencils and surveys.
The website also gives me hope by reminding me that there are decent generous people out there who really get it. It makes me want to acknowledge all the great generous folks I have encountered and benefited from over the years.
Yours truly (like most homeless people!) has never panhandled. Partly this is because I always found things to sell when I was broke. For example, there was the day I sold the naming rights to parts of my body. I started the day out with nothing. I charged one dollar for the naming rights to each body part. My first customer was this rag's founder Timothy Harris who paid a dollar to name my liver "Intrepid." Altogether I earned twelve dollars doing that.
But I have also found that if you just go about your life and do nothing unusual money can be pushed into your hands even AGAINST YOUR WILL!
For example, early one morning I was pacing back and forth in between St. James Cathedral and the Rectory. I was pacing because I was early for an appointment and had nowhere else to go, being too broke to go to a café or anywhere else. I wasn't panhandling, I didn't have my hand out, but along came this tall guy in a suit smoking a cigar and wouldn't you know it? He walks right up to my face, whips out a twenty and stuffs it into my shirt pocket, saying, "A friend told me to put this in the poor box, but I'd rather give it to someone who looks like they know what to do with it."
Another time I was in Belltown and on the street, so I visited the Denny Regrade Park at Third and Bell to relax a while. Right after I sat down in the park, two strangers sat down next to me and struck up a friendly conversation. They were openly passing a beer back and forth and generously offered me some.
I know what you're all thinking. You're thinking that, OK, maybe most homeless people aren't alcoholics, but Dr. Wes has a liver named Intrepid and for sure he's a lush and there's no way he would turn down free malt liquor in the park.
But there IS a way! For one thing, I hate the taste of malt liquor. I prefer lager, thank you. For another, I can't enjoy drinking any alcoholic beverages openly in a park with police looking over my shoulder. I told my new friends that they were at risk of being busted. Sure enough, only a minute later two security officers pedaled up and poured out the bottle. So the guys decided to leave the park and I tagged along so we could continue talking.
We were not twenty feet out of the park when an older guy with a torn T-shirt saw us and said, "You guys look like you could use some beer. Here, take this ten and get yourselves a couple of pitchers."
Yes, there is hope for humanity!
We love this idea. We (I mean I myself of course) have been saying for years that homeless people have as much right to decide for themselves whether they should imbibe alcoholic beverages as homeful people do.
What we really delight in is this information from the FAQ page at beerforthehomeless.com: "… the fact is that less than half of the homeless we visit accept our beer." Bearing in mind that they are only talking about Chattanooga, nevertheless someone has finally succeeded in finding a way to substantiate our long stated observation that most homeless people aren't alcoholics, they're just people who don't have a proper place to live at the moment.
And what a straightforward method of proof it is. "Let's pass the stuff out and see who takes it!" To think that researchers have probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars for years trying to figure this one out with pencils and surveys.
The website also gives me hope by reminding me that there are decent generous people out there who really get it. It makes me want to acknowledge all the great generous folks I have encountered and benefited from over the years.
Yours truly (like most homeless people!) has never panhandled. Partly this is because I always found things to sell when I was broke. For example, there was the day I sold the naming rights to parts of my body. I started the day out with nothing. I charged one dollar for the naming rights to each body part. My first customer was this rag's founder Timothy Harris who paid a dollar to name my liver "Intrepid." Altogether I earned twelve dollars doing that.
But I have also found that if you just go about your life and do nothing unusual money can be pushed into your hands even AGAINST YOUR WILL!
For example, early one morning I was pacing back and forth in between St. James Cathedral and the Rectory. I was pacing because I was early for an appointment and had nowhere else to go, being too broke to go to a café or anywhere else. I wasn't panhandling, I didn't have my hand out, but along came this tall guy in a suit smoking a cigar and wouldn't you know it? He walks right up to my face, whips out a twenty and stuffs it into my shirt pocket, saying, "A friend told me to put this in the poor box, but I'd rather give it to someone who looks like they know what to do with it."
Another time I was in Belltown and on the street, so I visited the Denny Regrade Park at Third and Bell to relax a while. Right after I sat down in the park, two strangers sat down next to me and struck up a friendly conversation. They were openly passing a beer back and forth and generously offered me some.
I know what you're all thinking. You're thinking that, OK, maybe most homeless people aren't alcoholics, but Dr. Wes has a liver named Intrepid and for sure he's a lush and there's no way he would turn down free malt liquor in the park.
But there IS a way! For one thing, I hate the taste of malt liquor. I prefer lager, thank you. For another, I can't enjoy drinking any alcoholic beverages openly in a park with police looking over my shoulder. I told my new friends that they were at risk of being busted. Sure enough, only a minute later two security officers pedaled up and poured out the bottle. So the guys decided to leave the park and I tagged along so we could continue talking.
We were not twenty feet out of the park when an older guy with a torn T-shirt saw us and said, "You guys look like you could use some beer. Here, take this ten and get yourselves a couple of pitchers."
Yes, there is hope for humanity!
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