Seattle is sinking...
The feckless city council has voted against law and order, against tourists and against its innocent citizens
My friends, I write of things in this piece I usually do not touch on at all. But as a Washington resident, a husband and father, I couldn’t help myself. This is particular to folks interested in Seattle, and surrounding environs. I humbly beg your pardons and hope you’ll indulge me. As always, comments are welcome and encouraged.
By a vote of 5 to 4 yesterday, Seattle’s city council rang the death knell of sanity, cohesion and good sense in the city. Unlike its Washington state legislators, the city voted against criminalizing the public use of drugs in the city.
When the state passed this legislation on a bipartisan basis to make public drug use a gross misdemeanor, it was welcomed by the majority of Washingtonians. The very simple legislation stipulates that if one is caught using in public, one has two choices, diversion to a treatment program, or go to jail. Four council representatives voted for sanity, and for the state’s largest city to align with the state’s law. Alex Pederson, Sara Nelson, Dan Strauss and Debra Juarez all agreed that Seattle needs to avoid becoming like Portland, which looks nothing like its former self. Businesses are leaving in droves from downtown Portland, and residents too are fleeing what they refer to as a ‘hellscape.’
The five council representatives, Kshama Sawant, Lisa Herbold, Teresa Mosqueda, Andrew Lewis and Tammy Morales, voted against the bill. It’s hard to understand why. Even their excuses don’t hold up. They said that jail should not be an option for public drug use, and claim that since it is a public health crisis, it needs to be treated as such. That’s surely just fine on some level, except when it meets all of those individuals who are not publicly using drugs and are therefore not part of the public health problem, and who are abiding by the laws and ordinances. Now, though-they are simply continued victims of those who will continue to take advantage of Seattle’s city council buffoonery.
Portland has suffered because their council voted the same way, and according to an Oregon based research firm, 51% of respondents regret the passage of what was called Measure 110, which decriminalized “personal amounts” of drug possession.
I don’t know too many people who would deny that drugs are indeed a health problem—though I think we could debate the term “public health problem.” I also don’t know too many people who would deny that addiction is a major problem in the U.S. and it got worse during and after the lockdowns. But there is simply no common sense in legalizing the public consumption of drugs. Forcing the population of a city to watch the public degradation of other human beings, while claiming that it is not degrading-is a recipe for, well…Portland. If you spent time in downtown Portland or San Francisco recently, you know what I’m referencing. Sure, there are parts of the city that run on a relatively normal basis, but mostly, boarded up windows, empty buildings, empty lots all festooned with tents, garbage, human waste and the ripe smell of marijuana, or the remnants of the aforementioned waste and garbage, hang thick in the air, while crime rates skyrocket—and random assault, theft, even murder are on the rise. Seattle has largely become that way as well and with its vote yesterday, it has guaranteed it will continue.
I spoke to a wine tasting room owner in the city whose tasting room is one of several not far from T-Mobile Park where the Seattle Mariners play. I’ll keep them anonymous because I didn’t ask for permission to share their story, which is like so many other stories from Portland, or San Francisco, or Seattle, now. They built their business there because Seattle was home, and it had visitors and tourists arriving from all over. But as the drug use, and the subsequent homeless population soared, business has begun to diminish. People aren’t coming in to the storefront as much anymore, and while Mariners fans continue to go to the park, the scramble to get a parking space as close to the stadium as possible has become more intense as fewer people opt to walk through places like Pioneer Square, once a Seattle tourist landmark, now a denizen of fentanyl abuse and assorted horrors.
Seattle’s property crime rate is 149% above the U.S. national average, and its violent crime rate is 62% above the national average. Last year, just as homicides ticked slightly lower in most major cities across the country, Seattle’s murder rate went up. Just click on those links, and follow the embedded links to the number of random shootings, assaults and beatings. It’s a depressing cacophony of a city in its death throes. At very least, one would think that the city council members might want to address the heart of the problem, which is absolutely the in-flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs, their public use in the city, and the decriminalization of the same. And any politician who argues that homelessness is largely a problem of not having enough homes is simply lying. The homeless population in Seattle did not begin to grow during the lockdowns because of lack of housing, affordable or otherwise. It began to grow because more people were using drugs than pre-lockdown, and coincided with riots in Seattle that left the police outnumbered, and increasingly undervalued, underfunded and harassed. Whether out of desperation, depression or continued addiction, the number of drug users increased, and many of them fell into homelessness—not the other way round.
People in the grip of drug addiction need help. Without it, most will not be able to function and unless they are one of the very few who can self-motivate enough to stop taking drugs, they will most assuredly become a danger to themselves, and others. It’s that last part that actually makes this a public health problem, though not in the way the five members of the Seattle city council think. The residents, workers, visitors, and tourists of Seattle are now reduced to random victim status—and they are victims of elected officials who, as usual, think they know better than everyone else, regardless of experienced reality.
How very sad! I guess I won’t be able to show my boys the Seattle that their dad lived in. Actually, it sounds like that Seattle is long gone. 😢
Pandering politics at its worst. Most major cities are falling . America is falling, and we have to watch it.