I’d like for everyone to read this article. It was forwarded to me by our treasurer, Todd Soderberg, and is about the dire situation in Seattle. The “Queen City of the Northwest” has descended into lawlessness and squalor, courtesy of the idiot “progressives” who for decades have run it—into the ground.
I thought Oakland was bad (and it is), but from this account, and others, Seattle is even worse. The article describes a broken, dystopian and possibly terminal nightmare that has crippled American cities like Seattle run by progressives. When it talks about “a pockmarked ghost town,” about boarded-up storefronts, about tents “crowding sidewalks,” about open-air drug use and dealing, about “minimal to nonexistent traffic enforcement” and companies fleeing town, about police transferring to cities where they are respected, about rampant shoplifting that cops are not even allowed to interfere with (by order of the Chief), about out-of-control murder—well, it all sounds like what Oakland is enduring.
Sometimes I just have to shake my head and wonder what the hell is going on. The population of Seattle is educated, wealthy and caring. How could they have allowed their city to descend into this Dantean circle of hell? I happen to have a close relative there. She’s the mother of three young kids; her husband is very wealthy. They own a mansion with their own private beach and boat on the shores of Puget Sound, in an enclave of rich, mainly white people. But of all the people I know, including the most far-left progressives in Oakland, my relative is the most woke of them all. She literally says that all cops are criminals and must be locked up! I’ve stopped reminding her that the nearest homeless person to her is many miles away, that the streets in her neighborhood are clean and edged with gardens, or that she and her family have absolutely nothing to worry about from criminals. Their worst fear is that a neighbor should build an addition that would block their view, God forbid. Sad to say, I’ve more or less stopped communicating with her.
But I think about her. She’s the typical woke, white, wealthy progressive who lives in her own bubble and boosts her self-esteem by virtue-signaling with Black Lives Matter signs in her floor-to-ceiling windows. She volunteered for the census in 2020, and her husband, a physician, travels to third-world countries to treat the poor. All very commendable. And yet she subscribes to this rubbish of progressivism. My relative obviously is a hypocrite—she would never allow her own children to live in a place like downtown Seattle (or Oakland, for that matter)—but she doesn’t understand why people who live in areas of crime and encampments are so upset. To her, anyone who complains about crime, filth and tents is a racist.
Sometimes when I write this blog it feels like spitting into the wind. I look around me and see how blasé and uninterested so many people, especially young people, are when it comes to what’s happening in Oakland. They don’t know and they don’t care—at least, not until they’re carjacked or mugged or their catalytic converter is stolen. They’ll go out and vote for any incompetent who calls cops “thugs” and promises to end homelessness. That’s how Carroll Fife got elected, by ignoramuses who prove the old P.T. Barnum truth that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” They’re the kind of people who, on the right, voted for Trump.
Oakland’s young people seem to think that cities have to be this way, with the dirt and dumps of garbage, the zombies wandering the streets, the camps and crime. I’d like to tell them the truth: This is not normal. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can fix Oakland, but first we have to marginalize the people who brought these horrors upon us: the woke social justice warriors, who don’t give a damn about the rest of us.
Steve Heimoff