May Day in Seattle

The nobility out for a ride in the countryside.

Book of Hours

I remember when May Day used to be fun. The little girls across the street would hang paper flower cones on the door, and Amanda would run to the neighbor's houses. Now that seems so, well, old-fashioned. There are children in this neighborhood of course, but we never see them alone outside.  

Sweet old days...

The local news is full of warnings this morning about avoiding the protests downtown.  A few years ago, the self-named anarchists and anti-capitalists hijacked May Day in Seattle.  The labor and immigration groups hold organized marches which are disruptive, but the anarchists don't seem to have a cause except for tearing things down and making life miserable for folks who have jobs.  Some businesses like Starbucks on Capitol Hill are closed and boarded up for the day.

I never go downtown anymore, unless we have a symphony on Sunday afternoon. We used to go downtown all the time, just to wander around the market, go shopping, have an evening out. There was less fear in those days.  Now traffic is impossible and the streets filled homeless people and panhandlers. If you haven't been here for a while, you would be shocked by the filthy encampments lining the freeways and filling the underpasses.  What do tourists think of our city?

Travel websites like SmarterTravel warn about aggressive beggars and panhandlers in Seattle. Many are addicts or mentally ill.  More people are now homeless in Seattle than anywhere except New York City, Los Angeles or Las Vegas.  The reasons why are too complex for this little blog.  We are a rich city and spend millions of dollars on the problem, but it only seems to get worse.

We've become a city (and society) of extremes.  You can look down from a $500 hotel room or a million dollar condo and see people illegally camped in squalor on the sidewalk.  It is both heartbreaking and disgusting.