Seattle is Still Dying
Oh Seattle… How the mighty has fallen.
For my friends outside of the Pacific Northwest, everything you hear about the decline of Seattle is unfortunately true. You know it’s bad when you drive past that which was once flourishing and see it covered with litter and debris and boarded up windows. So help me, this is the truth: I just witnessed, as I drove by, business dumpsters in one area with razor wire on the top of their enclosures, and I can’t believe that it is to keep the garbage in, because the garbage is everywhere.
When are the people going to elect officials who fix the problem instead of contribute to it? We got out at just the right time…
I’m so frustrated! I generally like to keep my social media post positive and politics free. I haven’t come anywhere close in this post to sharing the fullness of the decay and brokenness I’ve seen today. Heartbreaking! And the razor wire was basically the exclamations point In my day.
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After writing the above, I drive a little farther north into what used to be the nice part of town to stop in and pick up a few groceries before getting on the ferry. The parking lot is strewn the same kind of debris I saw earlier , in the sidewalk and has people, I assume, laying on the ground covered with filthy rags with drug paraphernalia next to them.
As I began pulling into my parking space, the young mother dressed in a bright and beautiful saree and her three children were getting out of the car next to where I was about to park. I waited as her daughter—probably about seven or eight years old—helped her little brother get out of the car and get up onto the sidewalk and step over one of the people laying on the ground. The little girl turned around and looked at me and smiled… And then she waved. I waved back and smiled at her as well.
When I went into the store — a large and nationally recognized grocery chain— the police were escorting a man out who still had some of the cans of beer he was attempting to shoplift falling out of his sweat pants as he was complaining about the cashier not observing his pronouns, the store not taking his EBT card, and that the cops were racists (one was white, two were Asian, one was African American). The gentleman being escorted out was white.
When I passed the entrance and stepped fully into the store, it looked clean, so I took a chance on using the bathroom since I was going to be getting on the ferry later and anticipated waiting in the traffic line for perhaps an hour or more. When I entered the bathroom, there was a guy passed out on the floor in the stall. The bathroom wall with covered with different taggings. Another custom stepped in behind me and said, "Holy shit… another one" referring to the person passed out. I did my business and got out. The police were walking toward the bathroom as I walked away; situation under their control.
I did some quick shopping and headed to the cashier.
At the cashier station, the woman in front of me was telling the cashier that she had moved here from Greece 45 years ago. Her accent was still thick and strong. As she talked to the cashier, whose accent I couldn’t make out, they both lamented about how far down the city had run itself in the last 15 years. No such thing as coincidence… This was precisely what I have been thinking, as I had stated earlier above. The old woman asked me if I was Greek. I replied. "No, Yaya, but I would love to go there some day." She smiled at me and replied, "Yaya? You are Greek!" and finished her transaction, paying the 8-odd dollars worth of items with pennies, nickels and dimes—and a couple quarters—which she dumped out of her purse. "I cannot shop here unless it is daytime," she told us both. "I am no longer safe."
There are beautiful people here. There are people from every nation on the earth living in the Seattle area… It is not difficult to encounter a myriad of cultures all in one day. That is part of why I loved this city. And the multitude of times I have talked with people in recent years who have settled in Seattle as their home after coming from other cultures and other nations because they were drawn by its beauty and it’s safety have unanimously been outspoken about how horrible it is now, and how much it resembles the places they left.
I am saddened by what I saw… Saddened to see the tremendous uptick in the number of homeless, the increase of filth, the brazen increase in the numbers of and territory of sex workers and the desolation of storefronts and the need for razor wire.
When Candace and I moved our family here in 2004, our research told us that Seattle was a city with low violent crime and a high rating for safety. That city is gone.
If you are with me still in this rant and are still reading, I hope you will continue on and watch the video below that was aired four years ago on one of our local Seattle stations. And then imagine this: It is worse—FAR worse—than what was reported when this first aired.
I ask again, When are the people going to elect officials who fix the problem instead of contribute to it? Perhaps that is not the right question to be asking. Perhaps it should be, When are the people going to change the way they think and stop listening to the politicians who continue to repeat the same ideologically-proven failures and vote differently?
