There was an important point I got from the movie "Go with the Flow," (buy it here) about why downtown Olympia is the way it is. Unless I'm forgetting something, after Starbucks and Quizno's, if you really think about downtown, there aren't any "chain stores" down there. There used to, on the corner of Capitol and 4th, there was a Sears, which left for the South Sound mall when it opened in Lacey, and everything else left when the Capital Mall opened on the Westside.

The movie points out that what saved downtown Olympia was that it was so damn cheap to open a store down there compared to the new malls (where only national chains could set up). If downtown Olympia was more prosperous than it is today -- as lucky as Lacey to have a Walmart, a Target, a Lowes AND a Fred Meyer -- it wouldn't be Downtown Olympia.

By the way, there isn't a nationally renowned film festival happening in Lacey or Tumwater this week. When the Oly Film Festival moves to Hawks Prairie, I'll get worried.

So TFI, what is the solution?

I'm not trying to sound preachy here, I just want to understand why people blame the homeless for crime, and urban blight, and other social ills. We should blame ourselves for electing politicians that allow it to continue.

Anyway, back to Olympia. There were three major hits Oly took in the 1960s-70s. First, Dan Evans (who was, let us recall, a Republican), expanded state government so much that the capital campus had to jump across Capital Way and destroy blocks and blocks of nice established homes in order to make room for all those new state workers. Homes which housed a major consumer base for downtown Oly. Gone. All those little grocery stores lost their customers, including Adolph who ran the grocery store where a popular pub now sits on 4th and Columbia.

Secondly, Sears got into a pissing match with the other merchants and pulled out of their store (where WA Personnel now resides) and spearheaded South Sound Mall, which in turn resulted into the incorporation of Lacey in 1966. Another death knell for downtown Oly.

And finally, the Westside started waking up as an economic force. Evergreen opened in 1971 and it was like an alien ship had landed. In one of those paradoxes, a college associated with the left helped stimulate the capitalists in Olympia and the west part of Olympia grew almost as fast as Lacey. When Das Kapital Mall was built in the late 1970s, downtown Oly was dead, dead, dead.

And how did downtown Oly revive? A big part of the resurrection is due to members of the TESC community investing in a town where the locals had historically treated them like dirt. It is a great example of changing the system from within. When this first became apparent, it was known as "Evergreen's revenge." But I think the town and gown are too intertwined today, and that situation has been, thankfully and to the credit of both Olympia and Evergreen, outgrown.

But, like I say, I live out here in a county that is really hurting. If you want to see real pain, visit Aberdeen-Hoquiam-Cosmopolis. Olympia won't look so bad after you visit us.

In a chapter of his book Don't Think Of An Elephant, George Lakoff talks about the Bush administration's response to 9/11. He points out that there are three causes of radical Islamic terrorism.

1.) Worldview: the religious rationale.
2.) Social and poltical conditions: cultures of despair.
3.) Means: the enabling conditions

He goes on to point out that the Bush administration has only focused on the third, the enabling conditions. This is as common in the war on poverty as it is in the war on terrorism. Number two is, in my opinion, the part that should be focused on. Let's not attack panhandlers, let's attack the culture that creates panhandlers. Let's figure out why there are panhandlers and eliminate the root cause. Panhandling is a lot of times the only source of income available to people. This is wrong.