TESC administration is busy making the case that last night's concert-goers were "mostly not Evergreen students" (similar to their premature statement in response to the recent rape by a masked intruder on campus: Administration "did not think it was an Evergreen student". How do you decide that a masked intruder is or isn't a student? Greeners don't usually wear that type of thing? I mean, come on, there were no suspects. They had no physical description, but they somehow had a strong suspicion that it was not a student?  And also, who cares?)

So while the school is playing that game, the community is hijacking the story and turning it into justification for their biases and an opportunity for politicking.

• Sperling's Best Places named Olympia the 16th Best Place in the country. For families, Olympia makes Sperling's top three!

• Forbes magazine ranks Olympia among the Best Small Places for Business in America.

• Inc.com's list of Boomtowns 2006 placed Olympia in both the Overall and Hottest Small Cities categories.
• Yahoo Real Estate said Olympia is one of the six Best Places in the U.S. to Buy a Home What are some of the factors that make real estate great? A strong economy, and high opportunity due to a lack of strip malls and corporate chain stores are some of the reasons noted. (Take that, Lacey.)

At 5:30, me and my kids joined a group of homeless people and advocates at Bread and Roses on 4th Ave for dinner before the council meeting. The B& R staff and interns were staying late, keeping the center open so that the homeless who wanted to speak at the council meeting would have a dry place to wait until 7pm. Someone who opposed the ordinances sent Bread and Roses a $60 donation for dinner. The advocates were harried (though cheerful) after an already intense ten hour day, and scrambled to find something that could feed this many people on only $60. Like the loaves and fishes, nine fresh, New York style pizzas arrived.

Every corner of the little office was packed with people. A few homeless people who are leaders in the community practised their speeches, and everyone listened attentively. They were captivating. They outlined how the ordinances would affect the poor, talked about the hardships of street life, cited laws already on the books that address problem behaviors, and made a plea for comprehensive solutions to the problems of poverty, such low-income and transitional housing, and the much-needed day center in Olympia. Then the leaders reminded everyone to be respectful of all the speakers at the meeting.

At 6:30, the band left to walk through the downpour to city hall. I took a van to drop off the two older kids, and then transport myself, the baby, and a disabled man who couldn't make the walk. I couldn't help but feel that we were a part of something great.

There is no activity on God's green earth that I enjoy more than loitering in downtown Olympia.

Tomorrow is the primary.

Jade

We have choices about how to approach problems in our community. We can look at a thing like crime or homelessness (problems not as synonymous as people think)and decide to place responsibility for it on those responsible. No one can tell you not to blame the guilty, if you want to take that upon yourself. But how do you determine, for instance, who is responsible with regard to homelessness? Many believe that the individual is responsible for their own circumstances, however difficult. I guess I believe that too, on some level. I've seen people be unreasonably decent as often as I've seen the opposite, and I can only chalk it up to free will. But if you spend much time working with homeless people trying to get off the streets, you find that many of them are stuck in catch-22s. For instance: the state has determined that they are unable to work due to a serious disability, but their monthly disbility income is less than $400 per month, and there is no subsidized housing available.

Or they have been clean from drugs for a year and a half, are attempting to regain custody of their children and right those they have wronged, and a felony drug charge keeps them from getting a job, getting into any apartment in town, or going to school.

Or they are so traumatized from war or abuse, and have been repeatedly retraumatized on the streets, that they have lost all sense of common reality and cannot recognize a single ally in their life. Maybe it seems like they need to just get over it. I have found it very hard to say that to someone who was raped by their parent as a child, or who has seen other humans blown apart in war. I just don't know what it is to live in the aftermath of something like that.

I can no longer approach human beings as either responsible or not. I have had the privilege to know many bad people. Bad people have changed me. I have known and cared about people who were meth dealers, sex offenders, child abusers, schizophrenics, junkies, and "homeless-by-choice".

Read more...

[Promoted to front page by Rick]

I have also done a lot of thinking about this issue, and this is what I have come to: It is no service to soldiers to lump them together and write them off as "puppets".

True, they are not the orchestrators of this war. But they are the machinery that makes it happen. As we all know, this comes with heavy consequences to themselves, their loved ones, and people in Iraq. Our government happens to be extremely skilled at convincing people in the military that they have no choices anymore, they are nothing more than government property, and that their duty to obey orders is somehow a higher calling than their own inherent human moral sensibility.

Then our government convinces us civilians that our duty to be polite to soldiers is more important than our duty to tell the truth and hold one another accountable.

Bullshit.

Read more:

"Experts have shown that using pesticides does not guarantee increased yields. David Pimentel, professor of insect ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, says: "[Pesticide] use does not always decrease crop losses. For example, even with the 10-fold increase in insecticide use in the United States from 1945 to 1989, total crop losses from insect damage have nearly doubled from 7% to 13%."

This came from my new favorite website journeytoforever.org...