Emerald City EDD

I look down on this sorry sight on from the upper floor of the West Seattle Health Club: a string of derelict RV's and campers parked on the street below. A significant percentage of the homeless in Seattle live in their vehicles, so many in fact that the city has almost given up on the problem. That orange "move this vehicle or else" sticker has been in the car's window for a couple of weeks now. 

Some cities on the west coast have created safe parks for the RV homeless, but the City of Seattle doesn't have any at this point. We are still "studying the problem."  A few generous churches and businesses open their parking lots for camping, but most people just move from place to place.

Being Seattle, everything regarding the homeless problem is muddled and mired in controversy. A judge recently ruled that a homeless man's truck was his home, based on an old Washington frontier era homesteading law that declared house walls could be any material, not just wood. The judge ordered the city to reimburse the man for the cost of impounding his illegally parked vehicle. The city attorney is appealing. And so it goes...

 

Oh well, it gives me something to look at while I'm trudging out my two miles on the treadmill. I'm starting to feel like I know this guy.  The other morning I watched him in the tent tossing and turning at 9 am. It looked like he had just finished eating a Costco sheet cake and he threw the plastic box outside his tent.  Munchies?

And then, we have that other Seattle of $4 lattes and $50 lunches. We took Uber downtown yesterday to get a new rain jacket for John to take on The Big Trip.  At the fancy sportswear store, we found something decent enough to wear in one of the great capitols of the world, although it has the logo "Columbia" plastered right on front.  Just in case there's the slightest doubt we're Americans. 

Since we were downtown, we stopped at the Art Museum on the way home.  They are running a Edward Curtis photograph exhibit of indigenous people in Native America.  It was organized with the New York Public Library, although I recognized some of the photos from MOHAI's vast Curtis collection.

There was also a small exhibit with various spooky masks, sculptures, and a psychedelic light show created by the Institute of Empathy. It's designed to help "improve your understanding of others."  Which includes, I suppose, looking down on others while walking on the treadmill listening to an Ipod.

Empathy—the ability to understand the experiences of others—is a skill that’s said to have eroded in the modern world. The result is Empathy Deficit Disorder (EDD).