I'm So Privileged

Greg Nickels [our mayor] has me so royally peeved, I'm tempted to just write "Greg Nickels is an arrogant, narcissistic, fool" 75 times and turn that in. I've been told by the editor I could get away with that sort of thing. He's said no one would notice any difference in the quality of my writing, so "what the hell."

I won't though, because I wouldn't want to abuse my free speech privilege. Sarah Palin, who aspires to be Vice President of the United States, a job that requires upholding our Constitution, has reminded us lately that freedom of speech is a privilege that the press should not abuse. Indeed, I clearly recall how in 8th grade history we learned the first ten amendments to the Constitution (they formed what was called the Bill of Privileges), and that the first privilege listed after the Privilege of Religion was the Privilege of Freedom of Speech.

Another privilege we learned about was the Privilege of the People to Peaceably Assemble. I'm sure that if Sarah Palin ever gets to be president she'll keep us on the straight and narrow there, too.

[Right: Some women peaceably assembled to ask politely to be granted privilege to vote. "Please, sirs, with sugar on top!"]

Our activist Supreme Court, abusing its privilege to interpret the Constitution, declared decades ago that people retain privileges of association, asserting they could not otherwise exercise their speech and assembly privileges. Palin has clearly understood how wrong this is.

When Palin accused Barack Obama of associating "with terrorists who targeted our own country" she referred to the fact that Bill Ayers, who helped found the Weather Underground when Obama was 8, and Barack Obama have both worked on the same two non-profit boards. Palin would regard that as an abuse of the privilege of association.

She's absolutely right. Suppose I'm helping put out a fire, at, say, a kindergarten, and I know that the guy passing me buckets of water is none other than Bill Ayers, who blew up a critical Pentagon file-cabinet once. I should walk away from that fire because associating with known terrorists is always wrong, wrong, wrong. The kindergarteners would understand, when they got older, if they weren't burned to a crisp. If they were burned to a crisp, they'd have to ask themselves in the afterlife what the heck were they doing going to a kindergarten in the same neighborhood with a known terrorist?

[Above: President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the landmark Civil Privileges Act of 1964.]

As if just to show you don't have to be republican to have the same kind of grasp of law on privilege as Sarah Palin, this past weekend the administration of our Democratic Mayor Greg Nickels put out a Notice of Land Use Violation threatening to fine a long list of individuals and associations for their support of Nickelsville, at least one of whom was listed for the sole crime of having emailed his support to another of them.

The Notice of Violation notably lists SHARE/WHEEL, the homeless grassroots organization that was NOT responsible for Nickelsville, as a supporter, and includes mention of its Vancouver, Washington, office. But the Vancouver WA office is that of an entirely different organization that just happens to have the name Share.

Therefore Nickels carries Sarah Palin's thinking a step further. Not only should people not do good things if the wrong people join in, they should also pay for having the wrong name. Again, this is as it should be. Share House, Vancouver, started in 1977. SHARE/WHEEL started in 1990. Share House has had 18 of its 31 years in existence to change its name. They have totally abused their privilege of name-having.

But Nickels went too far listing John and Jane Doe as "Persons Responsible For The Violations".

We know what he's doing. He's getting ready to fine everybody who so much as wrote a letter to the editor in support of Nickelsville, $150 a day, every day it exists.

Now we need everyone who cares about Nickelsville and the RIGHT of homeless people to survive to declare themselves to be John or Jane Doe -- I am John Doe.

[Below: I already posted this on my other blog Run Off, but it's worth posting again.]

Spartacus [I now think the subtitles are in Turkish.]

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?]

A Heavy Cross to SHARE

I hate talking about SHARE. There are many good reasons for this. Their name is Anitra “Legion” Freeman, on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept.

If it weren’t for Ms. Freeman I probably wouldn’t know that SHARE was an acronym, or where to look up what the letters stand for. It’s the Seattle Housing And Resource Effort, according to one of Anitra’s 35 or so websites.

If I talk about SHARE I will surely get some detail about it wrong and Anitra will tell me about it, and then she will never stop telling me about it, because once she starts doing anything she can’t stop. She has no brakes.

Unfortunately the city of Seattle has given me no choice. It has denied funding to SHARE because SHARE would not agree to comply with “Safe Harbors,” AKA Tag n’ Trak, AKA Seattle’s version of HMIS (Homeless Management Information Strategies.)

You know a plan is a bad idea the minute someone calls it a strategy. “Strategy” is related to the word “stratosphere.” Both come to us from the ancient Greek for “cloud.” In the case of “strategy,” the idea is that the use of one can cloud people’s minds so they can’t see how stupid you’re being, so you can get away with being stupider than usual.

In this instance the city of Seattle is being so stupid, it might as well be shooting itself in the groinal area. This can be demonstrated mathematically, as follows.

Seattle currently funds 1275 shelter beds. About a quarter of those are administered by SHARE. The total funding costs a total of about 5 million dollars annually. SHARE’s share of the city’s funding, which is the money they will be losing as of next March when the funding year ends, is around a quarter of a million dollars.

That means that 75% of the city’s shelter beds (the non-SHARE portion) suck up 95% of the city’s funding, while 25% of the shelter beds (the SHARE portion) only suck up 5% of the funding.

If the city has to replace the 300 beds now provided by self-managed SHARE shelters with conventional shelters the cost will be more than six times what SHARE has needed.

You can be sure that much money is never going to materialize. Last month Mayor Nickels said he’d work with the City Council to increase shelter funding by as much as $500,000 in order to maintain the same number of shelter beds in the city. That’s not counting the $500,000 per year it’s expected to cost us for the extra paper, paper clips, and the super-duper unhackable computer system Safe Harbors is going to require. But the facts show that without SHARE the city will need $1,500,000 to have the same number of shelter beds it has had with SHARE.

Since that money won’t happen, we can expect to lose at least 200 shelter beds after March. SHARE proposes to make those up by setting up new tent cities. Those would violate SHARE’s agreement with the city regarding tent cities. But I don’t care, since by demanding that SHARE accept Safe Harbors I feel that the city has already in effect reneged on its agreements with SHARE on its own side, big time. I want everyone, and especially Anitra Freeman, to note my careful use of “I” statements here.

Oh wait, who says the city can’t provide beds as cheaply as SHARE? Why, they would just have to imitate the SHARE model without the help of SHARE! Why didn’t I think of that before?

Here’s how it will work. They’ll set up 13 or 14 self-managed shelters all around the city. Only, because they’ll be city shelters instead of SHARE shelters, they’ll be able to make sure that the people who run these self-managed shelters comply with Safe Harbors. The city will be able to do that by managing its own self-managed shelters!

There’s a perfect strategy!

Duck Trouble

The latest news on the homeless front, besides the fundamental legalization of Tent City, is Anitra Freeman's turn to crime.

Anitra has been sort of sucked into sort of a life of crime by such repeat offenders as Michele "Give'm Hell with One L" Marchand of SHARE/WHEEL and Scott "the Facilitator" Morrow of SHARE. Actually more like a minute of crime. But she still should be able to look forward to a rewarding career playing parts in John Waters films, if she can bring herself to relocate to Baltimore three months of every year.

For those of you who just boarded this train at the last station, that's Anitra Freeman, alias Anitra of Many Associations Freeman, aka The Duck on the Italian Menu, aka Net Mama, aka Wes's Main Squeeze, on Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept.

It went down like this. King County Executive Ron Sims got a bug up his butt this year about SHARE, nobody can say why, where, how, or when the bug came from or what it was doing there, but an unidentified source has reportedly said that "maybe he doesn't get the way grassroots organizations like SHARE operate."

The upshot of Sims' dissatisfaction with SHARE was that he wouldn't let them run the Winter Response Shelter at the King County Administration Building this year, even though they ran it for something like eight years without anyone complaining about it at the time. Getting new management for the shelter took time, he said, so the shelter wouldn't open until October 15, he said, instead of the 1st of October, when it usually has been.

So SHARE said, OK, but there is (was, this is all history now) still a need for a shelter Oct. 1 through Oct. 14, because the cold weather won't wait for the County to get its act together, and it's not safe out there even in good weather. Therefore SHARE offered to run the shelter those days. But the bug in Ron Sim's butt made him say no to that. "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin," he might have said, but he evidently didn't, forcing me to make it up.

I'm not making this part up: Each night of Oct. 2 through Oct. 14 the County put up "no trespassing" tape to keep people out from under the overhang at the entrance way to the Administration Building. SHARE then went ahead and ran a sidewalk shelter in front of the Admin. Building every one of those nights, vowing each night to cross the tape if it should happen to be raining at the beginning of the night.

The office of Ron Sims referred to SHARE's sleep-out as a political stunt, without explaining why politics is bad for SHARE but OK for Ron Sims and his office. The unofficial SHARE position is that it was NOT a political stunt, they needed the shelter for survival, etc., but nobody at SHARE has explained to me why SHARE continues to let Ron Sims and others characterize politics as a bad thing when homeless people engage in it, but all part of a civic duty when anyone else does it. Politics are the means by which Americans set about choosing what's right, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Finally it rained on the beginning of the night of Oct. 12.

Six people were arrested -- Anitra, Michele, Scott, Claude "Cowboy" Nalls, Ted "Tex" Shirey, and Richard "No Fancy Nickname That I Know Of" West. The two women of the gang were cuffed and locked together alone for more than an hour in the SPD holding tank. There, Michele was forced to listen as Anitra, now hyper, theorized extemporaneously on the sociological origins of warfare. Eventually bail was set at $190 for everybody, and all but Scott got out by the next day on their personal recognizance.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, risking domestic turmoil and tumult, to say that I think both sides overreacted in this incident. But in the words of my unidentified source, "The county overreacted FIRST, so there."

Also, on a stupidity scale from 1 to 10, what the County did was a big fat 9, and what SHARE did in response was at most a 5, only slightly more than half as stupid.

To put those numbers in perspective, using scales from 1 to 10 (and how many of us haven't, be honest) is itself an 8 already.

Space-time Keeps It's Shape

A Poem Regarding Humor’s Essence,

Or Opus I Lost Count, Can I Get Back to You on That?

by © Dr. Wes Browning

Some say the essence of humor is hostility.

I say it’s clown squeezings.

Extra virgin clown, first cold press.

Some say comedy is always ultimately cruel.

I say, here, have some grated Bozo.

Or, clown-ka-bob, made from tenderized marinated clown.

Or, crushed clown with chives, clown croutons,

or filet of clown, minced mime,

chipped clown on toast,

mime pâté, or clown à la mode

Yes, these are all excellent, I admit,

but I still say the essence of humor is

clown squeezings.

I think it is high time to give credit where credit is due to some of the many wonderful people who help make this paper the constantly changing reality that it is. I don’t know what that has to do with the poem above.

No, wait! Yes I do! I wouldn’t feel so generous if the Real Change weren’t “featuring” me this month. I am feeling heartily squeezed! And look out, I am about to squeeze back! I’m a little garlic, and I’ve got some juices!

I’m being “featured” because I went to Portland. Imagine that. Think what would have happened if I had went all the way to Walla Walla! Or Boise. Or San Jose! Especially since I don’t know where San Jose is. Do you know where San Jose is? Never mind.

As usual I digress. I also exaggerate. I had another reason to think of talking about other people besides me — Stan “two r’s, two s’s, eight lines” Burriss, glorious editor person, remarked in his official editorial capacity last Wednesday, at an official editorial meeting, that he didn’t have a clue where Tent City 3 is anymore, and hadn’t for 4 days.

Let me put this in perspective.

We are talking about Stan Burriss, former president of SHARE (Seattle Housing And I forget what the R and the E stand for. SHARE. You know. Look them up in the phone book. Homeless organization. Runs self-managed shelters, Tent Cities, stuff like that. We’ve written about them three hundred times.)

This is the man who for the last five years, every time there has been a Tent City, of any number, has said to me, “Say, Wes, you know, it wouldn’t hurt you to go up to Tent City and look around. You just might learn something. And you could write about it, and educate people.”

Every time he has said that, I have said, “What? I’m a teacher now? I’m writing a humor column! Knock, knock, is anyone home?”

So do you all see what an amazing turn of events we have witnessed here? If Tent City has had to move so often that Stan Burriss, of all people, can’t keep track of where it is, surely the foundation has moved under our blush and highlight, so to speak, hasn’t it? Or anyway, that’s how I feel about it.

There is another man who is deeply involved with Real Change whom I’d like to talk about. I am speaking of a man who I have known for many, many minutes, nay, days, Scott “SXN” Nodland, Real Change Board Member, once and probably future Treasurer of the Board and Real Change Landlord.

Scott once told me (this is an exact quote) “I want all the money!” That helps explain why those of us at the Real Change affectionately refer to Scott as “our Real Change Yuppy-Scum Landlord.”

Don’t misunderstand, we love our landlord. The expression Yuppy-Scum is just our way of acknowledging that Scott makes both Frazier and Niles Crane look like trailer trash. If there’s a Yuppy in Seattle who can kick Crane butt it’s our Scott! You want to talk Brie? You better know your French provinces buddy, ‘cause our guy is fully armed!

Anyway I’ve gotten carried away again, and have failed to explain that the reason I should be calling attention to Mr. Nodland is that he has somehow managed to become some kind of housing director or other at the Low Income Housing Institute, aka LIHI, aka, some other organization we’ve written about a half zillion or hundred times.

The way I see it, I live in the best of all possible worlds. Tent City keeps finding places to move to, not only faster than the city can follow, but also even faster than Stan can follow. The Real Change maintains a presence on LIHI. Meanwhile, space-time retains it’s shape, as I was sure it would.

The Truth Is Way Out There

Well, here we are again. It’s deadline time and I’m stuck, as always. I ask Cindy and she suggests “Write about why you are stuck.” I think, “Do I really want to talk about the X-Files here?” But I have nowhere else to go.

As I write this, Anitra L. “Net Mama” Freeman, fellow editor and proof that I am not the world’s biggest nerd, tells me that she wants me to get the following message printed.

“Mulder is a dweeb. He is a lovable dweeb, but he is a dweeb. And YOU, Scully, are an admirable woman in many ways. But you seriously need to enroll in a co-dependency program: ‘Woman Who Love Dweebs.’”

Apparently, how Scully conducts her life is very important to Anitra, and Anitra is certain that her advice will reach Scully. The theory seems to be that some paranoid schizophrenic will read the above paragraph and pass it on to Mulder (all paranoid schizophrenics have Fox Mulder’s unlisted phone number - it’s a union privilege), in the belief that it contains a coded message. Mulder will then show it to Scully, in the hopes that she will be able to decipher it. She will.

But that isn’t what is making it so hard for me to write this month. After sharing my problem with Anitra, she is very alarmed. She says I mustn’t talk about that in public. There are people, she tells me, sad, unfortunate people, who haven’t seen the movie yet! She pleads with me not to spoil it for those miserable people who might nevertheless still find the seven bucks to see it, someday, in a theater.

I’m sorry. Tell you what though, I’ll give you all a warning - WARNING, INFORMATION ABOUT THE END OF THE X-FILES MOVIE FOLLOWS.

OK, you’ve all been warned. So here’s my problem. There they are, BOTH of them, lying in the ice and snow, IN ANTARCTICA, at the edge of this huge crater made by the unexpected take-off of a previously buried tremendously huge alien YOU-KNOW-WHAT. The snow tractor that delivered Mulder to this site is somewhere nearby, BUT IT IS OUT OF GAS. The evil conspirators who brought Scully to this chunk of ice ARE LONG GONE.

So how did they get off Antarctica? What’d they do, thumb a ride on the back of a passing penguin? Walrus, walri? In the very next scene they’re doing their almost-but-not-quite-kissing act in DC, under blossoming cherry trees! What?! Did Mulder dial up the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise on his cell-phone? “Hey, it’s cherry blossom time! Beam us to the Capitol, Scotty!!?” On a continent that does not yet have cellular phone service???

Oh, but THAT can’t be. I forgot that Mulder’s cell-phone would have been in outer space at this point, since he had carelessly dropped it inside the alien YOU-KNOW-WHAT.

SEQUEL ALERT!!: ALIENS have Mulder’s cell-phone! The fun only starts there!

Speaking of evil conspirators...

Let me get this straight... Paul Schell deeply CARES about the plight of the homeless, so long as they aren’t visible? So long as they don’t put up tents? “I LOVE you homeless guy, cause you sleep outdoors without any shelter and you will surely die at that rate, but thank you anyway good buddy! - for not putting that nasty protective tent up!”

Once again, Anitra gets into the act. She wants me to “remember the hamsters”, whatever that means. I remind her that Mayor Schell is on our side. Yeah, really! This is a man who would never beat a dead horse - he LOVES dead horses!

Maybe Paul Schell would like to negotiate with SHARE and WHEEL et al to agree that they may put their unhoused people on the continent of Antarctica. Just so long as they don’t put up any unsightly tents that might offend the eyes of those who may have voted for Mr. Schell, or that might do so in the future, or that might be artichokes.

“Tents are not only ugly, but they are a fire hazard. Snow is much safer.”

And, surely those homeless wimps can’t complain about being isolated, by being put there in Antarctica. For one, they’ll have evil conspirators everywhere around them to keep them company. For two, they will be able to get to DC within minutes (at cherry blossom time).

For three, Mark Sidran himself, renowned humanitarian, is prepared to provide the initial transportation at no cost to the general public (he can write it off as a campaign expense.)

Great, now my spell-checker is telling me to change “unhoused” to “unhorsed”. Some things make no sense, others too much. How’s a guy supposed to concentrate?

We're Outta Here!

Homeless people are literally leaving Seattle by the busloads. In the past two months nearly four thousand have left by Greyhound, bound mainly for East Coast cities. The departures have been coordinated. They leave daily, each bus carrying away up to fifty homeless men, women, and children.

Some pay their own fare, others have their fares paid for them, generally by national organizations dedicated to homeless causes. Chief among these is the American Homeless Union. Recently the Seattle head of the AHU, Phil M. Hand, explained the ongoing exodus this way: "Basically around December or January we all began to realize that we really weren't wanted here in Seattle. And we're not masochists, OK? I mean, we've been working hard for years at making this city a real haven for our folks, but if Seattle isn't into it, we can live with that."

Further details are sketchy. The rumors among street people (what's left of them) are, as always, incomplete and unreliable. What is certain is that the departures began near the end of January and coincided with a number of setbacks for the homeless in this city. There was the recent reclearing of the "Jungle" along I-5, and the so-called sweep of the Municipal Building encampment.

But worst of all was the resistance by local merchants to plans to expand laundry and shower facilities at a few downtown service-centers. As one Belltown alley resident put it, "I always knew no one wanted me around when I was dirty and smelled like a sewer. But when I saw they didn't want me clean and smelling like a rose, either, I really got the message! It is personal, isn't' it? So right then I spent my welfare check on a ticket to Pittsburgh. I'll be gone by tomorrow."

The repercussions of this mass exodus cannot be understated. Most of Seattle's homeless-advocacy groups have already ceased to function, even though the last busload of homeless isn't expected to depart until mid-April. These groups include SHARE, WHEEL, and Operation Homestead. Several hundred social workers formerly employed by service agencies throughout the city have already been laid off.

But in addition to the expected, there have been some perhaps unexpected consequences of the sudden scarcity of homeless. For example, at City Hall, everyone from Norm Rice to Mark Sidran is complaining about the long waits for cab rides.

It seems that as many as one-third of all Seattle taxi drivers have been homeless and are now driving elsewhere. Dishes are piling up unwashed in even the best local restaurants, houses are going unpainted, and overgrown backyards are remaining so. Non-homeless residents are experiencing more muggings and burglaries than ever, now that gangs don't have easier targets to victimize.

Gay-bashing and race-related violence is on the increase again as "bum-bashing" declines. Dumpsters are overflowing with recyclables throughout the city. Seattle is awash in aluminum cans, refundable bottles, reparable TV sets, and stereos.

Corner rose-vendors have vanished and with them half the street musicians. And many service-industry businesses are discovering that they can't afford to pay the higher wages demanded and required by rent-paying and home-owning citizens. To help with these and other problems, the city has established special consulting hotlines. Anyone concerned may request assistance or further information at 684-8200.

Naturally, the Real Change homeless newspaper will not be unaffected. "Sure, we'll keep operating for a couple of months," said Timothy "Make My Day" Harris. I mean, we've got donations coming in, and we've got our subscribers and our advertisers. But let's face it. People are going to catch on."

"With no vendors and nothing to write about, what are we going to do? Well, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do! Get the hell out of here! That's what!"

Perhaps he'll head for Pittsburg.