Homelessness in Space

[from 10/7/11]

The Port finally evicted Nickelsville from Terminal 107 a few days ago. As usual I was asleep at home about the time it was all happening, because I needed my beauty sleep as you'd know if you'd seen me. I got up and got on the computer to play a few rounds of Orbit Your Unsuspecting Rabbit, when a friend's chat window popped up asking me if it was true that Anitra "Not Yet Ready To Be Arrested Again So Soon After Last Conviction" Freeman was arrested. I then spent five minutes learning what chat, twitter, and mobile phones are really good for.

The good news: Anitra did NOT get herself arrested, so with the clock on her conviction from last year ticking away she should be good for being arrested again in a month or two, when they'll really want another warm body in the police van. The bad news: 12 other people got arrested. Preliminary reports are that the people arrested were occupying space in such ways that it took more than 4 Port cops per to safely nab and extricate them, and that perhaps 30 more cops of some sort hung about just in case the Jaws of Life were needed. Then, more good news, all the arrestees were released the same day, pending charges.

I'm thrilled that space was involved. As a mathematician who specialized in the field inaccurately called geometry, which should have been called space-ology, I am ecstatic whenever space, or more generally space-time, or space-time related thingies, crop up in the news. I am proud to be a space-time cadet; I have the decoder ring, metaphorically speaking.

The situation is all about space. Nickelsville needs surface area to exist. This is part of a larger issue, that homeless people in general need surface space to exist. There's not enough space where they are allowed to be. For example, there are bed spaces in shelters, but not enough of them. Various estimates assess how much space is needed. In the city I would estimate an absolute minimum of 40,000 square feet is needed, here and there, to enable all the homeless people in Seattle, not just those involved with Nickelsville, to have enough to exist. That would be just less than one acre American, less than 4 decihectares for you foreigners.

The average block in the downtown business core is two acres. On top of that two acres are various office buildings, which serve to multiply, by the number of stories they have, those two acres over and over again. About 18% of it is going vacant these days. When all the calculations are done it turns out there are over 200 acres of unused surface space just downtown in commercial buildings. That's 200 times as much space as is needed to shelter all the homeless people in Seattle. There is, similarly, hundreds of times as much vacant space as is needed in Bellevue to shelter all the Bellevue homeless people, and likewise for Renton, Kirkland, and every other community in the entire country.

I can understand why homeless people aren't going to get one half of one percent of the vacant commercial space downtown. They don't have any money to pay for it. I'm just pointing out that there is no shortage of space in the world for human beings to exist. The prices for it are out of reach of a few thousand people, that's all.

All we're talking about here is bare minimum shelter, not adequate housing. To end homelessness would take more than the equivalent of .5% of the available space downtown. It would take closer to 5% of it. But if Nickelsville can't find even what would amount to .05%, the numbers tell you that the goal of ending homelessness will not be achieved, until the system that says no to human needs is overturned.

Meanwhile, is there anyone at all in this city besides Greg Nickels who just can't live without a 1st Avenue streetcar?

Cindy, Miss Direct

[from 6/17/09]

Last Thursday, a day after the last issue came out, and after a full day in which Seattle could discover that this column was not represented in it, a flood of an inquiry asked what had become of the crossword puzzle. The crossword puzzle thanks whoever that was who asked for their concern. (It took a little vacation.)

I myself spent the week on Facebook with all my wonderful Facebook friends. It's hard to believe that I lived for over half a century without belonging to an internet social network. What did I ever do with my free time? I must have stared at screens, but why?

Fortunately almost everyone I've ever known is now on Facebook, too. Anitra "I Am The Web" Freeman was naturally there first, and dragged me to it. Everyone at Real Change is there, although several are hiding from me. Speaking of hiding, even my muse, Cindy Holly, Muse of Other & Muse of Few Words, is on Facebook, where she's using an alias. She's afraid that otherwise she'd be inundated with unsolicited job offers. She's also lying about her age. Putting down "ageless, of surpassing beauty" in the application wasn't an option.

So now when I need help from Cindy, I don't have to conjure her up. We can pass Facebook messages back and forth. I just asked her on Chat how I should kick this column back up, and she answered right back, "you should find out what's going on and write about that" followed by a winky-smiley. She knows I can't stand smileys, hence the wink. After thinking a minute I asked "What's going on where?" By then Cindy was off-line.

So I'm going to guess she was talking about Nickelsville, as opposed to, say, the Iranian presidential elections, or the switch to digital TV. For the humorous potential. Nickelsville, you will recall, wants to be a permanent shanty-town/encampment for Seattle homeless people that have been let down by an inadequate shelter system, a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness that's a joke, and a mayor who treats human beings who won't further his career in any obvious way as waste. It began on alleged city land in West Seattle last year, was booted off by Mayor Nickels, then stopped in Discovery Park, the U District, and south of the city. Now it's back 100 yards from its original site on state land, just out of the Morlocks' reach.

The reason I think Cindy meant for me to talk about Nickelsville, as I've said, is that there's a potential for humor in its unfolding, whereas everything else happening is just bad news.

Being homeless is really the ultimate inconvenience, after all. You don't have a decent place to sleep, no way to get one, and everyone blames you for it and gets in the way of every single effort you make to try to improve the situation. That's why Nickelsville won't ever be downtown, for example.

When Nickels went to the press to justify tearing down camps of homeless people he cited the filth of the camps. So the campers asked that they be allowed toilets and dumpsters, and were turned down.

A lot of people have said that they should never have called it Nickelsville, because to do so "politicized it." But if one man is the political power that threatens to destroy your chances of survival, that's your politicization right there. Nickels is the politician, Nickels is the agent who started the sweeps, Nickels deserves all the credit for making Nickelsville a necessity.

There's humor, anyway, in misdirection. While we're all waiting to see what will come of Nickelsville, SHARE/WHEEL is looking for transportation for homeless people to and from their scattered shelters unrelated to Nickelsville, and if they fail to find it, they will bring that inconvenience to Nickels himself, camping on his lawn as soon as next Monday.

It's Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake. It's wrong to laugh, but you can't help it.

Mmm, Fried Chicken

Every week I check the news to see if it will write this column for me. Usually it does. So far, the best example of that came with a report from New Zealand that a chicken there was suspected of being a suicide bomber. You can't NOT write a column when you're handed news like that!

Generally if the news fails me it's because it just isn't that interesting. Let's say it's a week where the only thing that happened was Jeff Renner said "Doppler" a record number of times. That would be a good week to write abstractly about the environmental cost of puppies, or efforts to legalize medicinal insane laughter, or the role of education, or the lack of it, in the employment of ceiling fans during winter.

This week, however, there is no shortage of interesting news. The problem is it's all too interesting. Six months ago I didn't think the Dow Jones could fascinate. Now it fascinates to the bone. It fascinates like a wild Bengal Tiger pawing through my innards, looking for the tasty bits.

Six months ago I thought the biggest danger we faced, economically, was that a lot more people would become homeless in America who have never been homeless before. Now I'm afraid the biggest danger we face is that plus riots, plus mass starvation, plus the people who have been homeless will get to be homeless again, plus our babies will all be two-headed, and the only thing on TV will be Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, on all channels, in high def.

An indication of how bad things are: no one you know wants to take Mayor Nickels' job away from him. His current approval rating (33%) is lower than the approval rating of Single Parenthood (37%), but everyone who has a passing reputation as a leader wants to stick Nickels with the mayorship just one more term.

In 1997, I even offered my own self up as a write-in candidate for mayor of Seattle on the Pizza Party ticket. This time around, forget it. The salary would be great, and I'm sure the office has a fantastic view, but I don't want to be there when the villagers surround City Hall with the pitchforks and the torches, blaming me for their 20-cent grocery bags, their increasing pestilence and poverty, their consolation trolleys to nowhere they want to go, their two-headed babies.

So, anyway, what I'm trying to get at is, all I want to talk about this week is how much I like to cook my own food, and what I want people to understand about that.

When I tell folks I like to cook my own food, they invariably say, "Oh, so you're a good cook, huh?" That proves that their values are shot to hell. As long as human beings have crappy values like that, it will be necessary for people like me to set them straight. NO, I am not a particularly good cook, and that is NOT a proper reason to want to cook one's own food.

A proper reason to cook my own food (my reason) is that I get to be in control. My biscuits may end up tasting like burned sawdust and have the texture of modeling clay, but they will be MY biscuits.

It was precisely being homeless, too often and too long, which led to my need to be in control in matters of food. When you're homeless in the city you're eating other people's cooking day after day, meal after meal, because you don't have a kitchen and you can't set up a hibachi on the sidewalk. It's all part of the general powerlessness of the condition, going hand in hand with not being able to sleep under a roof or shower when you need to.

When I was homeless the burgers were always too salty, and you could never scrape off enough. Now, I want to enjoy my country, but it's been over-Bushed.

Mayor Fails Sherbert Test

Let's talk about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)!

A 1963 Supreme Court case decided that a Ms. Sherbert who was fired for not working on her Sabbath day was entitled to unemployment benefits, establishing the 4 part "Sherbert Test" to help courts determine when religious freedom trumps a law: If 1) a belief is sincere and if 2) the law places a significant burden on the practice of the belief, then the government must prove 3) it's acting in furtherance of a "compelling state interest," and 4) it has pursued that interest in the manner least restrictive, or least burdensome, to religion. If 1) and 2) hold and 3) and 4) can't be proved by the government, then the government needs to step off.

Well, that decision, made by a liberal 1963 court, was whittled away by later liberal courts appointed by different presidents. So finally Congress had no choice but to pass the RFRA in 1993 to get their Sherbert back.

Why do I, Wes Browning, care? I'm getting to that.

First, in 2007, the Justice Department ruled, without notifying me personally, that the RFRA meant that the government can go ahead and give my tax money to faith-based organizations that only hire people of their own religious persuasions, even though the same Congress that passed the RFRA specifically said no to the practice. The Justice Department said, basically, a general vague yes from Congress that they like overturns a specific clear no that they don't like. If the Justice Department's Mommy said "you don't always have to do what Billy wants," and also said "don't hit Billy," the Justice department would decide it could do what Billy didn't want, namely punch Billy silly.

It so happens it's against MY religion to give one dime of my taxes to any organization that only hires Christians to do charity work that Animists could do just as well. But the Justice Department decided that my religious claim on how MY money is spent in MY name doesn't mean SQUAT, because these religious charities that can collect all the money they want from public donations TAX-FREE would be SERIOUSLY burdened by not having my money, too.

[Left: This animist can label and stuff envelopes for a donation drive as well as any Baptist or Presbyterian. All he needs is a chance to prove himself.]

Well, OK, I'm not going to be a sore loser. So long as that same low bar applies everywhere.

Last week, Nickelsville, the world's pinkest tent city that wants to be a shantytown, was forced onto the parking lot of University Christian Church, northwest of the University of Washington, by the persecution of Mayor Nickels and his administration. You'd think they'd be safe on church land. But Nickels has told the church and everyone else concerned that putting Nickelsville up in the parking lot violates Seattle's land use laws.

What does Sherbert say? Let's see.

1) Does host sincerely believe that their religion requires they give sanctuary to the poor? Yes. It's in their Bible.

2) Would making the church clear the parking lot of tents, or produce a replacement parking lot within days, significantly hinder the practice of said belief? Duh! (It might be different if they were granted a reasonable amount of time to provide alternative off-street parking, but Nickels is in a big hurry. He's got to screw'm while he's got the itch.)

3) Does the state, i.e. the city, have a compelling interest? They have an interest in ensuring that people can park on the streets. But compelling? Parking? Compared to survival? Give me a break.

4) Is evicting Nickelsville and/or fining everyone involved $150 the least restriction of the church's freedom to exercise its beliefs in this case?

Hardly. If a mission that only hires Christians can have my taxes, and never pay them back, there's no reason the city can't let a church limit my parking for a lousy month or two, for the sake of homeless people, when every developer in town can do the same for the sake of building bigger and better homes for the rich.

Nickels needs to step off.

Jails Are Seattle's Future

There's been a lot of talk recently about Seattle's need for a municipal jail. But not everything has been said on the subject that could be said. For example, no one has suggested that the new jail could be designed with futuristic sweeping curved lines, stand 600 feet up, be painted orange, and revolve, and so be a lovely tourist attraction and Seattle icon. Even though a new jail would create many new jobs and require new housing and supporting retail, no one has said there should be a street car going there. No one has come up with a good slogan, like "Invest In Your Future -- Invest In Prisons."

[Above: Without one of these, how are people supposed to get there?]

I'm going to say those things and more. I'm going to tell you what no one else at Real Change wants you to hear: We need this new jail!

Real Change doesn't want you to know that jailing people is Seattle's last hope to have a surviving economy and clean empty streets. Real Change doesn't want you to know that scapegoating the poor for the problems of the middle-class pays.

Now, right away, I'm sure that some of you liberal losers are thinking, "Wouldn't it be cheaper to build more traditional shelters, rather than spend all that money on constructing and maintaining a jail complex?" On the surface, that sounds sensible. The city is paying, right now, just about $10 per person per day for shelter and transitional housing, while just the maintenance cost of a new jail is expected to be more than $110 per person per day. But when you scratch deeper it sounds like mairzy doats and dozy doats. Scratch deeper than that, and it takes your arm off.

What did I just tell you in the first paragraph? This is Seattle's chance to create a whole new thriving industry! We've been Jet City. We've been Amazon Central. We've been Latteville. Now we can be Jail Town, USA!

[Left: Jail made Elvis famous. Elvis made the Seattle World's Fair famous. The Seattle World's Fair made Seattle famous. Therefore Jails already have made Seattle famous. Let's cut out the middlemen!]

There are only two things we have to do to guarantee our preeminence as the world's greatest jailers, and we are well our way to accomplishing both of them.

First, we need lots more misdemeanants. This is being arranged. Our mayor is finding new ways to enforce bad laws. Using methods that were pioneered in the Deep South during the Reconstruction, Mayor Nickels has been finding innovative ways to make the inescapable conditions of homelessness illegal. Meanwhile, our president and congress have done us the favor of ensuring that we will have an ever-increasing number of homeless people to convict. It has been estimated that by the end of 2012 every formerly housed single man, woman, and child in Seattle who does not have a high-level government job will have been foreclosed upon, or be a barista.

We need to make more drugs and herbs illegal. I recommend aspirin, tylenol, and ibuprofen; that will make it more illegal than ever to hurt. We need to expand the no-smoking ordinance to prohibit smoking anywhere within 25 feet of a hard surface, and we need to enforce it with jail time, and add a three-strikes provision.

Second, we need funding for it. We need funding to build it, funding to keep it going, and extra funding to line the pockets of the lobbyists for it, to make it worth their while.

We can do this, too, Seattle! We just have to think big! We have to become the experts on jailing that the world comes to see and learn from! We have make Seattle synonymous not with gray skies, but with gray bars.

Let's get Rem Koolhaus to design it. Let's build a world-class park around it, and charge for tours. Let's build a new college to train incarceration professionals and to teach politicians how to write laws that can't fail to be broken.

Century 21 has been used. Let's call it Century 22, and dazzle America and the rest of the World with our vision, our innovation, and the experience we will have achieved.

Adventures at Nickelsville

Back in the 60s I was a rally chaser. Missing a rally or a march would be like missing an episode of Star Trek. An enormous sense of grief would come over me, made worse by the knowledge that there would be no summer reruns in the case of the rallies and marches.


[Above: May 5, 1970. I was there. The Yellow Indicatrix tells you where. I am NOT between the other protesters and the Tac Squad. I am on the northbound on-ramp. No friend of head trauma, I.]

Now, though, I just want to sit in my little corner in my tiny room and watch the world go by on CNN and the internet. When a public gathering presents an opportunity to be arrested it only strengthens my resolve to hide out in my room, owing to desmoteriophobia (fear of dungeons).

Not all of us have such fear. Saturday I opened up the Seattle P-I to find none other than my beloved Anitra "Smiling Buddha" Freeman gazing blissfully up at a policeman about to haul her radical-hippy ass off to jail. The possibility that this time they could just leave her there and forget to tell anyone either did not occur to her, or it goosed her, or she'd gone batspit crazy and thought the policeman was Wilford Brimley come to take her to Antarea, where she'd be young forever, and learn break-dancing from Don Ameche.

Anitra was getting arrested for refusing to leave alleged city land upon which Nickelsville had been set up. You may recall that two weeks ago Nickelsville was a homeless peoples' shantytown only in potentia. On Friday of last week it was very much concrete, and as Mayor Nickels wanted it to return to being an abstract idea, he sent the police to try to make it so.

Before Anitra got arrested there was a scene, broadcast on KING TV, of her telling residents of Nickelsville ("Nickelodeons") three options the police had laid out. I've watched the video over and over, trying to figure out the logic of the three options. It sounds like what she said the police were saying was the Nickelodeons' options were EITHER 1) stay and be arrested OR 2) go away and not be arrested, OR 3) go away with shipoopy, and no kiss.

I was actually there to witness that episode and the subsequent 22 arrests, in spite of my aforementioned phobia, because I'd spent the night before boiling peanuts for my sweetheart not considering that, what with her spending the night in a fuchsia tent at Nickelsville and then surely wanting to stick around to be jailed, and me without a teleportation device, I would have to go there to deliver her the peanuts. So I went, and it was just coincidence that the police vans were arriving from the donut shop just the same time I arrived by bus.

It's the story of my life. I boil some peanuts for someone, then I think, oops, got to deliver the peanuts. I get there just as the cops do. Oh, look, doggies!

It all worked out half well though. I did not get arrested. Anitra got caught and released. Governor Gregoire granted a reprieve to Nickelsville itself, letting the Nickelodeons cram as many tents onto a state owned parking lot as could fit, out of reach of the mayor. I got to talk to the people the mayor sent from Human Services to refer Nickelodeons to "proper" shelter in the system, and I tried to find out how they could do that with a straight face knowing that the shelters are full every night. Answer: they don't think about that. They just pass out referral cards to whoever takes them and call it a job done.

Here's your irony adventure: Some people took the cards and went to be referred to the shelter that the mayor keeps saying is there for them, and the referral agency gave them bus tickets and sent them back to Nickelsville!

Greg Nickels is like the owner of a row boat trying to bail it out with a Dixie cup after it's already sunk in 10 feet of water. Greg Nickels is a fool.

Twist and Shout

On the way to a party this weekend (the third in a week, but I'm not yet a party animal, more of a party vegetable) Anitra "Party Duck" Freeman and I shared a bus stop with a man who turned out to be studying law. He said, "Ask me any question about torts." Naturally, I asked him what the etymology of "torts" was, concerned as I am to avoid bready sweets.

It turns out torts have nothing to do with bready sweets. The word comes from the root word that gives us "torque." The root means to twist. Torts are all about wrungs, and wringings, which sound like wrongs, except for one vowel. If you've ever read a book on tort case law for entertainment, as I have, you would understand immediately how wrungs differ from wrongs. Basically a wrong is a "He done him wrong" situation whereas a wrung is the more general "He and him are in a twist" situation.

For example, say I borrow your pig for the purpose of showing him off at a fair. While I'm walking your pig to Puyallup, the pig falls into a puddle and drowns. Not wanting to waste your pig, I butcher him, and give his rump away to the needy. One of the needy chokes on your pig's rump, dies, and his death deprives future income to several poverty pimps. Is your pig liable?

Some people read tort cases for competitive purposes. They hope they will then be better able to win tort decisions against the rest of us. The reason I like to read tort cases is for the same reason so many people have watched ABC Wide World of Sports, or Shakespearean plays, or America's Funniest Videos, especially for the crotch hits. Torts are a rich source of comedy and tragedy, often at the same time.

Another fun thing about tort law, besides the suffering and the guffaws, is the archaic language and the Latin and Old French that pops up. I guess a lot of tort law came about because of Normans, perhaps owing to their behavior. You have your tortious acts committed by your tortfeasors. You have the res ipsa loquitur, the thing which speaks for itself. You have such things as detinue, replevin, and trover, which I don't know what any of them are. You have your bailors and bailees. My favorite is "chattel." In tort law you are free to go on and on with "They took my chattel! They took my chattel!"

Outside of tort law, whining about the loss of your chattel might be frowned upon, because it ordinarily is taken to mean "slaves." But inside of tort law it means your tangible, movable, property. As opposed to your land, your house, or your idea for a great off-Broadway play.

I would like to hear the word chattel used more often. One way I see that this could happen is if lawsuits were brought against the City of Seattle for the wrongful, or wrungful, detention of the chattel of homeless people.

OK, maybe it's just me that wants to say chattel all the time. But I can almost guarantee that such lawsuits will happen. In fact I can prove it.

In Fresno, California, 225 homeless people claimed in a federal class-action lawsuit, back in 2006, that the City of Fresno confiscated and failed to return their rightful belongings, including medicine, food, identification, tents, sleeping bags, and a wheelchair. The lawsuit ended in a $2.3 million settlement. Subtracting the $850,000 in attorneys' fees, that leaves $1,450,000 to divide up among 225 people, for an average of $6,444.44 each. Nobody doesn't like to get $6,444.44, especially in return for having been done an injustice. QED.

It's only a matter of time before the City of Seattle pays through the nose for letting Greg Nickels violate the law, the constitution, and decency in pursuing a reckless policy of stealing the survival needs of homeless people.

I'll Be Your Despot

Last Friday, our very own Mayor Greg Nickels shared top honors with some Indiana dude in the 2008 Mayors’ US Conference of Mayors/ Wal-Mart Stores Climate Protection Awards Program for his "outstanding and innovative practices to increase energy efficiency... and to help curb global warming." Learning of this, suddenly it all became clear. All his strange behavior lately, his obsession with banning plastic bags, plastic bottles, polystyrene, and beach bonfires, and his pushing compact fluorescent light bulbs, was all an angle to get a Wal-Mart Stores award. What? Does it come with a Weber Grill and a lifetime supply of charcoal?

We still have the gun ban, the trolley, and the crazy drive to keep the greenbelts to the squirrels to explain. A lot of people say that if you dig deep enough you'll find that on every issue Greg Nickels is in the pocket of big business, getting both a personal hand up and a hand out, if you know what they mean, but I think there's a very real possibility that Greggers is just keen on making Seattle the bestest gleaming city in the whole wide world, and he's thinking, "gosh, I'm the mayor of Seattle, so I can get it done."

[Below: Nickel's dream for Seattle.]

So we get an order banning handguns at Seattle Center. This is an improvement to Seattle! Now, when someone shoots someone at Seattle Center, they will be guilty of violating a mayoral order. That's something they don't have in other cities.

Naturally Greg wants the greenbelts cleared of homeless people, because doing so drives them to band together in tent cities for protection, and Greg Nickels knows that tent cities are good for Seattle. He's improving Seattle by making tent cities more necessary than ever. By the end of summer Seattle will even have a shantytown called Nickelsville, actually named after the mayor in honor of all that he has been doing to endanger homeless people. Not every mayor can boast a tent city named after him. OK, some people are calling all of New York City, Bloombergville, but it's not the same.

The point is, he genuinely wants to improve Seattle, and I can't argue with that. I also want Seattle improved. We want the same thing! I'd just prefer different methods, such as transparency, constitutional governing, consultation with the people, democracy, and some other silly things like that, and I would select and prioritize improvements differently.

A few ways that I, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning, would improve Seattle if I, rather than Greg Nickels, were your despot:

There would be a Separation of Sports and State. Instead of giving sports franchises public funds, we would exempt them from taxes, as we would any other cult. Ticket prices would have to be voluntary tithes, but failure to pay could be grounds for "excommunication." We would expect a season's ticket to reasonably go for 10% of one's income during that season. Refreshments ("sacraments") would have to be free.

I have always thought that what this country needs to do is reorganize into city states, like the Ancient Greeks had. I would strive to achieve independence of a Seattle City State from the US, while seeking alliances and federation with other city states for as long as it serves our interests, and otherwise crushing competing city states, looting and burning them, and enslaving their people, especially the Redmondites and the Lynnwoodians.

Gun Control: I would arrange for only my friends to have guns. Unlike Nickels, I tell you that up front.

Environment: There's no point in improving an environment if you don't have environs. "Environs" means room or space in which to move around. Downtown should be an environs for people, not cars. I will allow my friends to shoot cars downtown.

Mass transit: Metro knows where I live (we've corresponded.) I will tell them where I like to be. They will take me there when I say, and bring me back when I say. That is my promise.

No cake! Pizza!

Whereas, Sniggling Happens

I just spent way too much of my life rooting through 7 recently released city documents concerning "Unauthorized Camping on City Property" looking for the pony they promised, and all I found was manure.

Greg J Nickels has done it again. Another fine act of propaganda backing up a policy of cruelty serving greed.

If you've been overseas for fifteen months and just got back, here's a refresher. Sometime a year or more ago (nobody's quite sure when) Greg Nickels decided the old protocols for clearing homeless people off city land weren't good enough. So he instituted new protocols without telling the public that hired him and pays him, and without telling the city council that has a duty to oversee city affairs. When the public found out, it was only because reports of excessive sweeps prompted resort to the Freedom of Information Act, not because Greg Nickels was suddenly struck by a sense of duty. The information had to be forced from his administration, and details are still missing, and we've got no apologies yet for the trouble of squeezing what little we got out of them.

So anyway, people found out what the new protocols were and a lots got angry, and demanded answers. So Greg Nickels arranged for them to vent at city department heads. People packed a big room at the Seattle Center and one after another stood up and voiced outrage at the homeless sweeps procedures. Nickels himself didn't have the decency to be there. No apology for that either.

It was part of a belated "comment period." The comment period ended almost as soon as it began, time passed, and now, New and Improved Homeless Harassment!

It's "better" because it takes longer! That's the whole improvement. It's like "Please don't run me over with that truck!" "How about if I take three times as long to run you over with this truck?" "Oh yes!! Thank you, kind sir."

NO THANK YOU!! The whole new protocol starts out with a bunch of Whereas-s that put out the same lie that the old protocols put out. The city is doing enough to end homelessness to justify cracking down on campers. IT IS NOT.

The big propaganda: The city will add 20 new shelter beds right away.

Brilliant. That's a whole 1.7% increase in shelter beds, in Seattle. The King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which the city has bragged endlessly about signing on with, requires King County's shelter bed count frozen at 2006 numbers, so I suppose those 20 beds will have to come from Renton or Burien. Meanwhile, January's One Night Count found over 2600 people sleeping outside. If they all had to use the city's generous new shelter beds, they'd each get to lie down 11 minutes every day.

You'll be hearing about the city's new definition of encampment that comes along with its New and Improved Homeless Harassment. That's because it defines a homeless encampment using such exacting legalistic language as "identifiable area" and camps being within "approximately" 300 feet.

I can't resist sniggling like the nerdy mathematician I am and pointing out that any one pair of nearby campers in Seattle, combined with any other one pair of nearby campers anywhere else in Seattle, would meet the city's idiotic definition of an encampment, because the rule only says each camper has to be close to one other in the group, not close to all in the group, and Seattle itself is an identifiable area. (So's planet Earth.) And, oh yes, two pair makes four, which is more than three.

This says it all: The Human Services Department ("Investing in People") has provided directions to the Westbridge storage facility, where those homeless people will have to go to retrieve their confiscated belongings. The protocol specifically excludes car campers from the procedures it lists. But the directions are solely for drivers.

What a failure to imagine the real lives and hardships of the people they are abusing.

Crossing Allies

Last Thursday some Real Change people and friends camped out at the City Hall Plaza in the second such effort to draw Mayor Greg Nickels' royal attention to our call for an end to his inhumane and illegal sweeps of homeless encampments. I could go on and on about the fact that Greg Nickels gave every appearance of not giving a damn, and how that means we'll be back, and probably back again, and again, but there will be plenty of time for that later. What I want to do now is talk about cross-class sleeping.


[Above: A portion of the tents on the plaza that night. Photo stolen from catherd Doug McKeehan by way of a post on Apesma's Lament.]

My first experience with cross-class sleeping was the rebound whose Father owned a multi-million dollar chain of laundromats back East. Daddy gave her a red Corvette for her graduation present. She owned so many clothes she had to buy her own commercial size clothes rack. Her clothes rack was bigger than my whole apartment. We didn't get along very well. I came to believe that cross-class sleeping would not bring classes together, politically.

I now realize how wrong I have been. There are ways to make cross-class sleeping work. Those ways involve insomnia, coffee, and wet tents.

Get people together to try to sleep in wet tents! They will not be able to sleep! They will then be forced to talk amongst themselves, causing social glues to exude from their pores, sticking them to each other! It worked last Thursday between myself and a bunch of strangers. If I can bond to a bunch of strangers so can almost anyone.

The classes I have bonded with so far include various intern-classes and legal-aide-classes. In the future I hope to bond to other kinds of classes.

One very promising class is the class of clergy. I came literally within inches of bonding with representatives of the clerical class during the camp out. I actually felt their silky vestments! How many of you readers have ever come so close to bonding with clergy that you felt their silky vestments? (Just a raise of hands will do. Details aren't necessary.)

It turns out these clergy were mostly morning people, so my plans to invade their tents and bond more thoroughly did not pan out. But I can plan better for the next camp out. I am looking forward to a night, three months from now, of cross-class alliance-ing with at least three ministers simultaneously. My plan makes room for a very early pillow fight. With proper timing, I should be able to get in, bond, and get out again in time to bond with some night people elsewhere. Lawyers or bartenders, conceivably.

Even the little bit of bonding I was able to do with the clergy at last week's camp out taught me a very important lesson about them. Clergy are human too. They have the same needs that we do. Some of them eat lasagna.

Another class I look forward to bonding to is the class of Seattle City Council Members. I only saw one city council member Thursday, new guy Tim Burgess, and he didn't join in the camp out. Next time I want to see all nine in tents of their own. I'm sure they all love camping, why else live and do politics in the Pacific Northwest? I'll bet Mr. Burgess skis, even.

Further into the future I foresee opportunities to ally cross-class-ly to all sorts of classes I now rarely have occasion to think about. The class consisting mainly of retired television repairmen. Whatever class acupuncturists belong to. The class of jewelers who are also former tugboat workers. The class of Times and/or P-I reporters.

Who knew that Times and/or P-I reporters valued their evenings so much that none of them could swing by after rush hour to see it? The lesson: If there isn't a riot or a conflagration going on, Seattle's mainstream reporters are going to stay home to watch Lost.

After socially allying with mainstream reporters, I may be ready for mayors.

[Below: High priority for mainstream reporters everywhere.]

Sloppy Justice

Let's get serious about justice!

Ha, ha! No, seriously, we'll talk.

First of all, why am I interested in justice? Well, I have a big disclaimer to make here: I want some. So I may be seen to have a conflict of interest. Or you might say, "He hasn't had any justice so what would he know about it?" On the other hand, wanting some makes you attentive. It makes you look up "justice" and justice-related words in dictionaries and beg other people to tell you what they've heard about it. Eventually you get to know as much about it as anyone else who hasn't had it. I want to share some of what I have learned.

The first thing I learned was that as justice is about fairness, and as fairness concerns mutuality, therefore justice is actually a verb that describes a social behavior rather than a state of being. In other words , you can't really HAVE justice, you can only do it, with other people. I learned that in a nursery, during a fight over a thingy with different colored wheels that spun around.

The second thing I have learned about it is that the mutuality part has to be consensual for it to be really good justice. The best justice is not enforced fairness but fairness that comes about willingly. You learn that by watching cops from a safe distance, and seeing people go in and out of jails.

The third and most important thing I have learned about justice is that imaginative people do it better. This works in two ways. If you're imaginative you can put yourself in the minds of your partners. You can understand how their situation looks to them and can therefore better know their needs and wants. Also, imaginative people are better at coming up with excellent ways to meet their partners' needs and wants, without neglecting their own. Technique matters!

That last discovery is best illustrated in the negative. Just look at the lousy justice boring, unimaginative, people give, and you'll see what I mean!

For example, Mayor Nickels and his administration have lately been trying to do justice with people in and around homeless people's encampments. How boring and unimaginative are Mayor Nickels et al? Well, they are dealing with homeless people who have no place to go but where they are, and they tell them to go there! Hello? There's no "there" there! Wake up!

An unimaginative person can't see how someone standing around at the scene of an altercation with what is, or even what just looks like, a weapon, might be innocent, and not deserve to be riddled with bullets. So when off duty Mt Vernon, NY, police officer Christopher Ridley [pictured left] wrestled his own gun away from an assault suspect he had been trying to arrest in White Plains, NY, recently, and just then four White Plains officers appeared, someone said "drop the gun or we'll shoot" and when Ridley didn't drop his gun in the customary allotment of one-twentieth of a second (one-half normal reaction time), they shot him dead. They are now saying, "We didn't know he was a fellow police officer," which is believable, since Mt Vernon is a good ten miles from White Plains, so they'd likely never met. And if you don't have any imagination, what is true for you is only what you know is true.

The recent Post-Intelligencer "Victory and Ruins" series exposing how authorities put justice on hold for the benefit of a few of the UW Huskies during that team's 2000 run for the Rose Bowl provides a beautiful example of the need for good technique in justice-making. Timing is essential. It's extremely important to know when to turn on the lights. You have to have respect for all of your partners, not just ones who are doing you supremely enjoyable favors at the moment.

Otherwise you could be regretting your behavior six years later, once the glow has worn off.

Hot Pants

I am totally hacked off.

What really steams my trousers is that I can't tell you why they're steamed, because they're too steamed. If I were to explain why, they'd explode. No one wants to see that.

All I can say is, it has to do with Mayor Nickels, sweeps of homeless encampments, a new draft policy for the city, a definition of what constitutes potentially hazardous articles that could include blankets, bunnies, and daffodils, which definition would be allowed to justify the destruction of such articles at the whim of sweepers without due process, while meanwhile no such outrageous justifications would ever be used to destroy, say, warehouses, without due process, because the city can't get away with that, but denying civil rights to homeless people is a snap.

[Above: Officer Bonehead says, "We have a reasonable suspicion that there are hazardous materials all over this park. Let's destroy the park without due process!"]

After talking over the state of my hacked-offedness with Farmer Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor Compost Worms Have Died" Freeman, we agreed that I should not talk about Mayor Nickels or his administration or their new draft policy that if implemented should be grounds for the federal imprisonment of the whole lot of them. (Not that it'd ever happen -- look who's running the Justice Department now.) I should talk about things that make me less angry.

[Below Left: Sacks of trash from downtown businesses litter our public alleyways. We can't trespass the businessmen responsible from their private buildings, but we can deny them the use of our public streets to get to them. Officer Bonehead says, "Let's see how many of these filthy businessmen spring for personal helicopters! Ha, ha!"]

Something that doesn't quite fry my pantaloons: The other day a Boston psychiatrist wrote a story that appeared in the New York Times about a homeless man who went to an ER for the first time for a sore shoulder and found out that the hospital had records that he had been there before for a drug overdose. But that was impossible, the man said, because he doesn't do drugs. When the doctor looking at the records verified that the ID used in the previous visit matched that of the patient in front of him, the patient said the other guy must have stolen his ID.

Reading the story, I was a little incredulous. It was suggested that his wallet might have been stolen, the ID copied, and the wallet returned intact, so our guy didn't know anything had happened. But never mind, because the doctor bought the premise. And, having done so, she then refused to let the patient see the previous record in his name, for the sake of the confidentiality of the suspected identity thief! Identity thieves have confidentiality rights from the people they steal from? That steams my socks, but my trousers are cool, because I can convince myself that state and federal lawmakers will have no problem coming up with a cheap and easy fix. Even I won't mind if identity thieves are denied rights under the law.

A story from Morecambe in Lancashire County, England tells of a homeless man sleeping outdoors at 6:30 AM Christmas Day, following a righteous Christmas Eve drunk, when a guy delivering presents (I'll call him "Santa's Smartass Helper") in the neighborhood saw him and disturbed him by sarcastically wishing him Merry Christmas. Whereupon the homeless man pulverized Santa's Smartass Helper for five minutes. What makes me angry about this story is that the writer referred to the beating as "unprovoked" and evidently the court that convicted the homeless man of assault agreed with that assessment.

Word to the wise: Anybody -- ANYBODY -- who wakes me up out of sleep at 6:30 AM on Christmas Day, just to wish me a Merry Christmas, better be prepared to hurt. Sarcastic or sincere, it doesn't matter.

There's the judge's decision to grant an injunction allowing pharmacists to deny medication. This whole situation has been cast as a clash of rights -- the right of the pharmacists to practice their private morality versus the right of the people they serve to prescribed medicine.

There's no such things as private moralities. The pharmacists who don't want to fill prescriptions don't have to be pharmacists. There's no clash of rights. I am hopeful this decision will be overturned on appeal so that I won't have to soak my trousers in ice.

[Below: Officer Bonehead says, "I found a dirty needle in the bathroom of this place. Can I burn the whole place down without a court order?"]

Tokens at the Top

The online list of members of the King County Governing Board of the Committee to End Homelessness (CEH) may be out of date. But we can use it as a rough indication of the Governing Board's makeup.

Let's see, the list includes: Ron Sims, Greg Nickels, Tom Rasmussen, Mike Lowry, Dean Robert Taylor, Norm Rice, Blake Nordstrom, and OK now I'm tired of typing these names, but so far I haven't found any dimwits.

Likewise, a similarly scientific half-assed glance at the Interagency Council, which implements CEH policies, didn't turn up more than a couple of hollow headed chair warmers, too few to significantly lower the group IQ of the IAC.

So why, given that, has the CEH outsourced its brains?

"Wes," you say, "there's no way they've done that! You are surely making that up!"

It's a fact! I found it out like I find out everything I know about the CEH. I go to meetings, get the handouts, then find out from someone else. Two weeks ago I learned through people in SHARE/WHEEL that the Consumer Advisory Council (CAC), yet another CEH subcommittee, would be forming a speakers bureau. The CAC consists of "consumers", i.e. consumers of homeless people's services, i.e. homeless and formerly homeless people. So who better to form a speaker's bureau, to go out and tell the people of King County what homelessness in King County is all about?

Leadership Tomorrow, that's who! The very same day I found out about the speakers bureau plan, the same people in SHARE/WHEEL who told me about it also handed me 15 pages of stuff with the CEH logo on it including a Q&A about homelessness and a guide to a slide show about homelessness. The Q&A part of the handout SAID on its own page one it was "a sampling of questions posed to [CEH chairperson] Bill Block and his responses" and that it may "serve as a guide for managing the Q&A portion" of the slide show.

The contents of the Q&A and the commentary for the slide show included real genuine information mixed with misleading statements (about the one night counts, for example) smashed up with opinion masquerading as information (propaganda) such as whether the tent cities are really about shelter, or how panhandlers ought to be dealt with, or whose problem homelessness is, the cities or the suburbs.

Normally you think that when people are solicited to form a speakers bureau in accordance with their experiential expertise on a subject, you do not tell them what to say. So those of us at Real Change who subsequently read the 15 page handout could be heard all the way from our offices in Belltown to the Exchange Building shrieking and hooting about it, like monkeys in the jungle that just saw a big gnarly cat.

Well, Bill Block heard our hoots and he reassured us. No, no, no, he said, that handout wasn't for the CAC homeless speaker's bureau, it was for the rest of the CEH. And it wasn't written by him, he told us, it was put together by Leadership Tomorrow. Why did it have his name on it, I wondered. Would heads roll? Not likely.

So my question now is, who the freak are Leadership Tomorrow and when did they get to be the brains of the CEH? Whatever happened to "Leadership Today", the big geniuses that were appointed to the Governing Board and the IAC because they were such hot and sweaty kick-ass leaders?

Does the fact that Leadership Tomorrow is doing the thinking about homelessness for the CEH mean that not only are all the homeless and formerly homeless members of the CAC and the other CEH subcommittees just tokens, like we all knew, but so are Norm Rice, Lowry, Sims, Nordstrom and all the other big names on the top committees?

Is Greg Nickels just on the Governing Board for show?

I sure hope so. That's funny.

[Right: Just another pretty face?]