Unwalkable

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and came across a small homeless encampment that's now been there several years. I know that at some point, it wasn't there, but I now can't recall the last time I saw the area devoid of tents.

Normally, the tents are lined up in the parkway between the sidewalk and the street, so that  the sidewalk itself is mostly clear. From time to time, there would be a bicycle or some crates or something taking up some of the sidewalk, but it was generally possible to walk past the tents without needing to walk in the street.

Not this time. The sidewalk is now completely blocked off.

Pedestrians, go elsewhere.

This is the sort of thing that drives resentment of the homeless population of the area, but doesn't actually spark any efforts towards fixing the problem. I will be unsurprised to find that the next time I'm in the area, the sidewalk, if not the entire encampment, has been cleared; this isn't the sort of thing that I expect the local, even in a stereotypically liberal place like Seattle, will suffer gladly. (I'm actually somewhat impressed that the situation was allowed to get to this point, really.)

As housing prices in the greater Puget Sound area continue to rise due to constrained supply (regardless of what some politicians might say), more and more people are going to find themselves living in tents. Last week's brief cold snap and freezing rain notwithstanding, the climate here is generally mild enough that such a lifestyle, if it can be called that, is more workable than in some other places I can think of. (I certainly wouldn't want to be homeless in upstate New York about now.) Which is good, because it's going to be some time before the problem is solved. Allowing for substantial new construction now would likely require at least a decade, if not two, to allow home prices to subside enough that lower-income people could reliably afford them. Failing that, it will take the loss of some of the area's major employers, triggering another "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE - Turn out the lights," moment. Although, unless something happens that makes the area substantially less desirable to live in long-term, this could simply be the opening that housing rental companies and developers need to swoop in.

In any event, homelessness is becoming more and more visible in the city proper. (Not that the suburbs are immune from this; it's common to find tents in out-of-the-way, and therefore not very visible, places.) And that visibility is going to create pressure to do something to move the people elsewhere. It won't be a solution, but as long at it sort of looks like one, that may be enough.

Musty

Okay, sure. But who is going to make them? The United Nations? The people of Afghanistan? A divinity? After all, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan (which people should have seen coming, despite Taliban assurances) can be boiled down to the Taliban structuring their society in the way that they believe that their conceptualization of God wishes it to be structured. And, okay, that's at odds with "Western" understandings of universal human rights and relative gender equality. But it's what works for the Taliban, and they're the ones running the place, because it's not worth it to enough of the populace there to put skin in the game for anyone else to run the place. A state of affairs that the Taliban understand as tacit public approval of their governance.

The various governments that the United States worked to support in Afghanistan all had the basic problem that the Afghan public didn't value them highly enough to stand behind them. And so this is what they have now. The world community can change that, again, but there's little appetite for it. Finger-wagging is unlikely to change that.
 

And That's Terrible

The phenomenon known as "swatting" is a simple one. Someone calls a police department, and says that a serious violent crime and/or hostage situation is occurring at some or another address. The department's SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) team swings into action, only to find out that a hoax has been perpetrated. If everyone involved is fortunate, no-one is killed prior to the deception being uncovered. Otherwise, as has been case on a few occasions, tragedy ensues.

The practice first entered the public's consciousness (and the lexicon) due to the swatting of individuals. But it also happens to organizations. In the case of the National Public Radio story that aired this morning, parties unknown called police departments to falsely report active shooters in schools.

The practice creates problems for a lot of people, not the least of which being the students, faculty and staff of a swatted school. And so this is something that seems newsworthy. Which made it surprising that the story that National Public Radio ran on the phenomenon this morning seemed completely devoid of information. The story purports to be about the lasting consequences of swatting schools, but other than the one mother saying her daughter was basically freaked out by what happened, it doesn't even live up to that.

The piece is basically a human-interest story speaking to the day's event. Which is marginally interesting, but it feels like something between a filler piece and a missed opportunity. Granted, I'm not a journalist myself, but surely, there is something more informative about the practice that could have been the basis for a story. Part of what's going on, I suspect, is that I'm not really in NPR's target audience, and their target audience is into this human-interest stories. There's also just a greater focus on human-interest stories in the media landscape in general, as they allow for news outlets to present their viewpoints by selecting the people whose stories they tell.

Sliders

Starting perhaps late Thursday night, freezing rain started falling in the Seattle area. By yesterday morning, most of the area was doing a passable interpretation of an ice rink. One neighborhood couple literally had their crampons on to go for a walk, and the slope of the street made standing in one place impossible for good stretches of it.

But the problem with the weather here in the Puget Sound area is almost never actually the weather itself; but in how people (mal)adapt to the conditions it brings about. My primary concern, which was that icy power lines would come down nearby and leave the neighborhood in the dark and cold, never materialized. So true to form, it was the people themselves that took it on themselves to cause problems.

I'd just happened to look out the front window when I saw a white SUV barrelling past. This doesn't end well, I thought, as the car exited my field of view. A moment later, my impromptu prophecy came true, as there was a loud bang from the street, followed by the startled clamor of a car alarm. Sure enough, the SUV had been unable to follow the gentle curvature of the street, and slammed into a car parked in front of the home next door.

What, I wondered, possessed someone to drive down the street at anything faster than a snail's pace? It wasn't as if the ice was difficult to see; it was an opaque sheet that in some places was half an inch thick. But that's one of the weird things about driving in this area when the weather is bad. Everyone knows that Seattlites fare poorly in bad road conditions. But really, it's the sizable minority who think that they're exempted from this who are the hazard.

I think it's because the local understanding is that people in the Seattle area are just bad at driving on anything other than bare (and maybe wet) pavement. But as a native of Chicago, I don't remember people there doing much better on expanses of ice; it's just that, back in Chicagoland, the local municipalities and highway departments have snow-removal equipment, protocols for keeping the street open enough to use it and, perhaps most importantly, stockpiles of salt and sand for slick conditions. That's what prevents the place from being one massive pile-up in the Winter, rather than some remarkable level of skill at driving.

The weather has warmed, and we're back to our usual diet of light rain. This is doing the work of de-icing the streets and making places passable again. And, unfortunately, perhaps allowing people to forget that when it comes to cars and driving, gravity always wins. It's just a matter of having the sense to not fight with it, when it's not on your side.

The Kids These Days

“The people we consider to be ‘adults’ are married with kids, sharing houses, sharing finances,” says [sex educator and therapist Liz] Powell. “Whereas ‘wayward adults’, like myself, who live alone, unmarried, are examples of everything wrong with society.”
Does ‘solo polyamory’ mean having it all?

As someone who lives alone, and is unmarried, I have never heard the term “wayward adult” before. No-one has ever described me, to me, that way, certainly. “Failed human being” in the context of being “childless by choice,” yes, but never “wayward adult.” But I wonder: Who is the “we” that Ms. Powell refers to? Part of the reason why I decided to stop using the word “we” when referring to large groups of people that I might be a part of is specifically because it fails to actually point the finger at anyone. And while I understand that there are still noticeable numbers of relatively conservative (or Conservative) people out there for whom nothing less than a monogamous marriage to one’s first and only sex partner resulting in multiple Christian children is acceptable, attributing that attitude to society at large is overstating things.

There is, I think, a certain narcissism that goes into some persecution complexes, stemming from the supposition that whatever it is that one is doing is so threatening to others that they’re motivated to pull out all the stops to put an end to it. This is not to say that there aren’t people who understand that putting a stop to all “non-biblical” forms of human relationships wouldn’t magically fix everything that ails humanity, but their chances of that wish coming true anytime soon are pretty much zero.

There are always going to be people for whom their chosen way of living is seen as the one true way that everyone should follow. That’s not going away. Being aggrieved about it isn’t useful. Change takes time, and while that time is often frustrating, it’s simply part of the process. It doesn’t need to be a matter of us versus them.