AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Upon occasion, in human affairs, it becomes necessary to remind functionaries that they are not proprietors. This observation has reference to that Euro-American mélange of colossal dummies who self-identify as the foreign policy establishment (FPE) as well as to their tools, practitioners, who call themselves the intelligence community (IC).
I spent about 5 hours this past week doing recon of Seattle major areas: Seattle CBD (complete 2nd and 4th Avenues), Sodo, South Lake Union, Ballard, Upper Fremont, U District, and Central Area, to include 23rd and Union. I did not traverse Fremont (Freakmont) proper/lower, where stands the monumental Lenin statue.
I saw three tents, all in one place: on the approach from the south to Market Street in the Ballard CBD. Three! That was all. Even the park in front of the county building was clean!
Otherwise, miles of only clean streets, sidewalks, and lots. People going about their business, including normal elderly white women walking the Central District sidewalks alone. In fact, overall the city’s main areas were cleaner and better-kept than they were when I drove public transit there, and on the Eastside of Lake Washington, for 23 years.
Most impressive to my eyes were five things: (1) narrowing of 2nd Ave, for a bike lane, (2) gentrification of the Central District (very extensive make over of what I used to call The Moonscape), (3) the classical exteriors of old public high schools cleaned up to look like new, and Black kids carrying books(!), (4) virtually all the old dives shuttered and awaiting demolition, replaced with housing and/or offices, or radically re-pristine-ated, even in the U District(!), and (5) the words MERRY CHRISTMAS in large, clear, bright red and white lights readable, while one descends 2nd Ave., about three floors up the west exterior wall of the venerable Metropolitan Grill in the Seattle CBD.
That particular felicitation in that particular location evoked in me memory of transit agency bosses telling us we could not utter those words — so of course we spoke them fluently and prolifically, so much so that the bosses too finally spoke them — and admiration for someone’s determination to throw truth and tradition into the orifices of Seattle’s sententious tyrants. In other words, during my recon I saw a lot of American common sense and spirit. I find that gratifying. Truth is the truth, after all, and, like a lion, it finds ways to be, to protect, and to propagate itself. Tennyson (We are not now …) was wrong about that. He did not see the truth for itself. Truth is a Lion.
I posted the foregoing as a comment to a post today at Instapundit and that evoked these exchanges:
Casey to David R. Graham
…And Walter Duranty said he didn’t see any starving people in the USSR.
David R. Graham to Casey
Oh come on, that’s not what I said and you know it, if you are not a machine.
balzacq to David R. Graham
I commute from West Seattle to downtown every day. I see more than three tents along Alaska Way (that’s the waterfront drive under where the Viaduct used to be, for those not from Seattle). Every time I drive past the county courthouse, I don’t see many tents but I definitely see a lot of homeless. They’re the ones that induced the courthouse to close its main entrance to protect people from harassment and assault.
I also see the entrances to homeless camps in every wooded area along the 509; the garbage is unmistakable.
One thing the city has done is to fence off all the underpasses in SODO, so all the RVs and tents I used to see there have packed up and moved. Pretty sure they’re still all in Seattle and still homeless, though.
David R. Graham to balzacq
I doubt not your witness. However: (1) I was careful to specify the areas where I did recon, (2) while the famous one-hour KOMO documentary showed tents in the Seattle CBD, including around Westlake Center, I saw none there, and (3) vagrants/addicts (inebriated mendicants one of our supervisors termed them, getting gigged by management for using the term on radio) were less in view than I remember them being between 1984 when I started and 2007 when I retired from public transit, in some traditionally chronic places far less.
I reported what I saw. I did not claim to see everything in Seattle.
It may be that the KOMO documentary got families who run Seattle to compel city and county councils and their agency heads to clean up the joint. I do not know. Big or small as it may be, every city or town is run by a few families or even one family, Seattle not excepted. It is the case that normal people do not enjoy picking their way through filth and danger to get to work or home, and anyone working in an economy feels the same way, regardless of ideological crotchets.
As our vision, so is the creation. Will not the colour of creation change based on the colour of glasses we wear? There have been and there are great masters now too who demonstrate to man the great heights one can attain, and also reveal the great power that is latent in the human body. Mind of man is often wasted wandering on things outside, criticising others and similar such activities. When one is always engaged in seeing faults in others, how can one attain ekagrata or one-pointedness? Ask yourself this question: When many valorous and great ones, who have physical bodies just like me, have attained such exalted status, why should my position be anything less? What do I gain in finding faults of others? I have to search within myself for my own faults and keep my mind under control – Making this firm resolve is the first step in spiritual practice.
Sathya Sai Baba – Prema Vahini, Ch 3.
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