If you read the Spokesman or The Inlander or if you watched the video featured in my last post, you are aware that the number of beds available in homeless shelters is a contested issue. The City of Spokane mayor’s office might insist that if there are, for example, unoccupied beds at a given homeless shelter that it (the City) is within its rights to send its police and workers to clear a homeless encampment and throw the scant belonging of these people into an awaiting garbage truck. (Mind you, of course, the words used by the mayor’s office spokespeople to describe this action would not be so explicit.) You might also have heard arguments over what constitutes a “low barrier” bed.
You would hardly know it based on news coverage, but this is a U.S. Constitutional issue, specifically, an issue grounded in the Bill of Rights. In 2018 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (covering eight western states) ruled in Martin v. Boise that:
…cities cannot prosecute people for sleeping on the streets if there is nowhere else for them to go, saying that violates the 8th Amendment and amounts to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
Moreover,
The city [Boise] later asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its appeal, but the court declined to hear it.
In view of the Martin v. Boise decision, cities, particularly those in the western United States, are adjusting their camping ordinances (and their enforcement of older ordinances) to comply with the ruling.
Absorb that. The Ninth Circuit ruled that, as a matter of personal right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution, that a government cannot prosecute a person for camping on government property if there is no other appropriate shelter available—and the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear and weigh in appeal from the City of Boise. If I understand how the courts work, the only way the Ninth Circuit could come to be overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court is if one of the other federal circuit courts were to be presented a similar case and that court were to issue a ruling contrary to Martin v. Boise. Then the U.S. Supreme Court would be called upon to break the tie.
When the City of Spokane mayor’s office (that is, the executive branch of city government, the branch of government that oversees law enforcement) claims that enough low barrier shelter beds are available to homeless people, the mayor is setting the stage to work around the U.S. Constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment of people simply trying to shelter themselves from the elements.
When, as happened during our recent cold snap, four hundred people show up seeking relief from the cold at the hastily offered space at the convention center while the mayor’s office claims there are 80-100 unoccupied, available beds at local shelters there is an important reality disconnect. Once again Shawn Vestal hits the nail on the head with “A jumble of numbers obscures the need on the street”. Please take the time to watch “The Night of the Unsheltered Homeless” on YouTube and share the link with others for more on the numbers and the City’s inhumanity.
Martin v. Boise’s application of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment of the unsheltered homeless should, in a just world, carry at least the same weight as those civil rights guaranteed by other amendments, like the 2nd, that are more often paraded around and defiantly waved. We would all do well to remember Martin v. Boise each time Mayor Woodward directs law enforcement to threaten homeless people who have no place to go with confiscation of their belongings.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Of course, nothing is inarguable, as this article title in the highly biased and right wing “Epoch Times” (owned and and run by the Falun Gong) demonstrates:
What’s interesting when I talk to everybody is that we all agree what the answer is. We all agree that the answer is not people living in destitution, in poverty, and in filth on our streets in the cold, leaving needles and human waste. We all don’t want that. We think what we want is people living in safe, clean, managed shelters and decent homes getting their life back together and becoming a contributing member of society and not staying an addict. I don’t care whether you’re left or right. I don’t care if you’re businessman or you’re a social worker. We all agree that that’s the goal. What we can’t seem to do is sit down with each other and talk about how to achieve that goal. Because we climb the mountain from different sides.
“We climb the mountain from different sides.”
A great deal of controversy over the problem laid out by Pastor Bryceson stems from the polarized views of the homeless that the media feeds us. Famously, Nadine Woodward narrowly won election as Mayor of the City of Spokane in 2019 in part by stoking fear and loathing of the homeless by posting “Seattle is Dying,” the hourlong polemic by KOMO TV in Seattle that, based on anecdotes and endless video of homeless encampments, characterizes all homeless people as drug addicted or mentally ill. For Woodward, apparently, the problem of homelessness was to be addressed solely by law enforcement and incarceration. That was her side of the mountain.
But homelessness is not one problem. It is several problems that intertwine. Most of us see the issue like a blind man “sees” an elephant. It depends upon which part of the elephant we encounter. For some, like our Mayor, the picture of homelessness is the scantily clad, skinny, tattooed, scary guy walking on the downtown streets gesticulating and talking to people only he can see. For others, it is people urinating, defecating, and shooting up in downtown alleys or on the sidewalk, making a mess that frightens away potential customers. For others the image is one of clustered tents under bridges, outside City Hall or in the parks. The least seen and least iconic face of the Spokane homeless are the men, women, and children who have lost their means of support, cannot pay the rent, cannot figure out how to get help, and wind up desperate and on the streets. Each homeless individual, each homeless family, has a unique story.
Homeless people have one thing in common: once you’re homeless the barriers to getting back on your feet are suddenly very high. Each of the things that make it possible to function in our modern world, things that most of us take almost for granted, are suddenly out of reach. Without secure shelter with an address, a cell phone, and means of transportation, your day is taken up with the very most basic needs—staying warm, guarding the few belongings you still possess, finding food (and how do you prepare it?), and just physically getting to whatever shelter or agency might offer help—or might not. Imagine all that occupying your mind and THEN facing the daunting task of making yourself presentable enough in both appearance and odor to apply for a job. What do you use as an address, phone number, or email address on the application? How do you get to the job on time while holding the rest of your life together? While you’re at work, where do you safely park the shopping cart that might contain enough bedding to stay warm that night? That some might take solace in street drugs—just to forget for a while—should not come as a surprise.
That level of life uncertainly and precariousness is frightening to contemplate. None of us wants to imagine ourselves walking a block in those tattered shoes. It is human nature to mentally distance ourselves from such fears: homeless people must have “made bad choices” or they are drug addicted, or they’re mentally ill, and, after all, I am not any of those things. Like the blind man, we tend to characterize the whole elephant by the part of the animal we happen to encounter—or the part that is easiest to “see”.
It costs money and requires careful administration and oversight for it to work, but the first step in dealing with homelessness is to provide secure shelter and basic support, not just warming centers. That needs follow-up with affordable housing, not the high margin upper middle class and upper class housing we are so fond of building based on market forces. At the same time we have to start dealing with addiction as the disease that it is instead of relying solely on the penal system in the hope of sweeping the problem out of sight.
As housing costs rise into the stratosphere every large city faces the multi-faceted problem of people who have no means to find shelter, a problem reminiscent of the cities of Dickensian England.
There are individuals and groups in Spokane who are working very hard, pulling together, climbing the mountain from different sides, trying to work together to address the problem of homelessness. It behooves us to learn of these efforts, take part, donate, get involved—and support those who are working hard to make things better. A good start can be had by watching the local documentary video below (also referenced above) and checking out others of the documentaries at MyRoadLeadsHome.org.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Another quote from Pastor Rob Bryceson of The Gathering House from this documentary (1:07):
Wow you know it’s interesting to me is because I’m a pastor I sit with groups of other church leaders. I’m in a group right now sponsored by Whitworth that sits with other pastors discussing how could we unite together and use our resources of people, time, and money to help a major social problem in the city. They wonder what to do. In the meantime I’m in another meeting where the mayor is speaking—actually in our church—on a women’s panel event and she is saying, ‘Do you know who’s not showing up to deal with these problems? It’s the faith community. Where is the faith community? I would love to talk to the faith community,’ she said. And meanwhile the business community is having a hard time talking to the front line workers.
Pastor Bryceson, it seems to me, represents the outward-looking, socially responsible Christianity in which I was brought up. I may differ on some points of theology, but I understand these people. For me they stand in stark contrast to the predominantly inward-looking, insular, Second Amendment, anti-abortion, and End Times obsessed congregations like those of Matt Shea and Ken Peters, who, instead of working for the common good, spend their time demonstrating outside Planned Parenthood and demonstrating against vaccinations and masks.
“Inflation” is an economic term whose meaning—and explanation of its cause(s)—has evolved over nearly two centuries. For at least the last half century “inflation” has been synonymous with a rise in prices, that is, a rise in the “cost of living,” but the commonly cited reason for price inflation has carried over from the original meaning of the term. When the term “inflation” was coined it referred specifically to the printing of paper money (“currency”) in excess of the value held by the government as “hard” currency, traditionally gold, available to back it. Things you might want or need to buy were considered to have intrinsic value vis-à-vis the value of gold. If the “price” of one of those things rose it was on account of the government using its power to print more paper money, that is, to “inflate” the amount of currency, thereby devaluing a given unit of that currency (e.g. a dollar) with respect to gold reserves.
The meaning of inflation as explained to me as a youth was tied up in terms like the “gold standard”, Fort Knox (actually the United States Bullion Depository established at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1936), and cautionary worry about the Great Depression and “hyperinflation”. Today we hear, and mostly dismiss as crackpots, people talking about a “return to the gold standard”. All of this references a time when the average citizen was aware of and debated issues around the value of money, a time when things you might want to buy were considered to have an intrinsic value beyond the paper dollar price attached to them at a given moment, a price that rises only on account of the government printing, i.e. “inflating”, the money supply.
With that background it should be no surprise that Republicans today immediately place the blame for “inflation” (“price inflation” in the modern meaning of the word) on any social spending—as if there were no other cause for the price of anything to rise. It is as if Republicans considered the law of supply and demand were abruptly suspended. Instead, it is suddenly about “too much spending”. Our eastern Washington Republican Congresswoman, devoted spreader of Republican talking points, adopted this blame game with gusto.
A December 8 email from Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) comes with a simple subject line: “Biden’s inflation … it’s getting worse.” (Here is the whole email.) The missive opens with a dark, brooding photo of President Biden with the line “Americans Are Paying More Because of Joe Biden”. Perhaps McMorris Rodgers’ “Executive MBA” (the abridged version of a Masters of Business Administration) never covered economics—a convenient omission since her primary purpose is to focus blame and derision rather than present and discuss complex issues. It is far easier to blame Joe Biden for the purpose of eventual electoral advantage than it is to address corporate profits growing at the expense of consumers.
If you have another eight minutes watch the following video. The economic basics presented by the British commentator make a mockery of CMR’s simplistic blame game.
P.S. Whether she understands this or not, McMorris Rodgers is preaching the credo of the “monetarists”, a school of economic thought most associated with the leading“Chicago School” economist, Milton Friedman, and with the neoliberal ideas that have driven the Republican (and to a lesser extent the Democratic) Party for the last forty years. Friedman (1912-2006) coined and often repeated “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”, a convenient and appealing (for some) simplification of how the economies work, a simplification that always puts the blame for price inflation on the government “printing” too much money. Friedman, like the Republicans who continue to follow his ideas, reduced complex economic problems to a simple formulation and then hammered the idea into listeners’ minds by repetition, effectively precluding the consideration of alternate points of view, such was his influence. For example, see this presentation on inflation:
The opinion piece copied and pasted below appeared in the Sunday, December 19, Spokesman. Shawn Vestal contrasts U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-Eastern Washington, WA Congressional District 5 for sixteen years) with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). The two have in common that they served successively as the chairperson of the House Republican Conference, “the primary forum for communicating the party’s message to members.” The chair of the House Republican Conference is to communicate, not craft, the party message. It is a position for a follower, not a leader. As a follower (and one of a handful of Republican women serving in the House), McMorris Rodgers served as chair for six years (three Congresses), the longest tenure for anyone, male or female, in three decades. On January 3, 2019, McMorris Rodgers was voted out as chair and returned to the position of a rank and file House Republican, stripped of putative leadership credentials. She was replaced by Rep. Liz Cheney. When Cheney denounced the January 6 insurrection her independence from the Republican message machine was not tolerated. Part way into her second term as chair Cheney was replaced by the more pliable, three term Republican Representative from New York, Elise Stefanik, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump on May 14, 2021. The job of communicating the message of the Trump Party is once again in the hands of a follower and sycophant.
Vestal’s coverage of the contrast between Cheney and McMorris Rodgers is spot on.
Ever since Liz Cheney outmaneuvered Cathy McMorris Rodgers for her spot in House leadership a few years back, the Wyoming Republican has served as a kind of opposite number to the congressional representation we have here.
Where Cheney zigs, Rodgers zags. Cheney shows courage; Rodgers displays cowardice. Cheney puts principle over party; Rodgers puts party over everything. Cheney tells obvious truths; Rodgers lavishes praise on the emperor’s new duds.
Cheney is spending every bit of her political capital to root out the facts about Jan. 6; Rodgers is voting in lockstep with Team Amnesia.
They are the yin and yang of GOP politics. And because of the sorry state of those politics, the brave one is in exile, and the coward is perfectly secure.
Last week brought another example.
As the House select committee circled the coup-plotting former president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, it was Cheney’s straightforward, unvarnished voice bringing forth the evidence that Trump was begged repeatedly to call off the dogs while the Capitol was being stormed – begged by people who have since publicly minimized and lied about Jan. 6.
Cheney, facing another barrage of criticism and insults from her own team, delivered the plain truth on the House floor.
“All of my colleagues, all of them, knew that what happened on Jan. 6 was an assault on our Constitution,” she said. “They knew it at the time. Yet now they are defending the indefensible. Whether we tell the truth, get to the truth, and defend ourselves against it ever happening again is the moral test of our time. How we address Jan. 6 is the moral test of our time.”
Rodgers was busily meeting this moral challenge by tweeting about “#Bidenflation” and voting in lockstep against charging Meadows with contempt of Congress.
This was only to be expected. Rodgers, though she is a minor figure in the revisionist army, has loyally propped up the lies that brought us here, both directly and indirectly – lies that fueled Jan. 6 and lies that have been deployed ever since to minimize what happened and obstruct accountability.
The Trump era has put most GOP lawmakers – the ones who are not out-and-out nuts – into a tight corner: go along or sacrifice yourself on principle. A year ago, as Trump was cooking up plans to undermine the election and the corner was getting very tight indeed, these two representatives set out on very different paths.
The Supreme Court had just batted away an effort by Team Trump to have legitimate votes thrown out and to allow state legislatures to replace the will of the voters with a victory for Trump. Rodgers and 125 other members of Congress signed on to this reprehensible effort.
She also peddled clear, knowably false nonsense about the Pennsylvania elections. She planned to vote against the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, a vote based on these lies. She did not waver in this stance even after the release of Trump’s phone call to Georgia elections officials made clear what kind of slimy mafioso tactics she was supporting.
Only after insurrectionists broke into the Capitol did she seem to wake up to what she and her fellow travelers had wrought. Being scared for your life will do that. She was described later as sitting outside the Capitol, tearfully texting that she was afraid for her country.
She showed a brief moment of clarity after that, when she reversed course and voted to certify the election after all. This has been described by more than one of her sycophants as “courageous.”
Courage ain’t what it used to be in the GOP, I guess. Fortunately, there is an actual instance of courage in the House, one that has stood higher and higher as Rodgers dried her tears and got over her concern for the country. Along the way, she’s done a lot of predictable shovel work for the party, carrying out the attack of the day against Biden with all the originality and verve that she’s come to be known for.
Meanwhile, Cheney was calling on her fellow representatives to stop lying about the election and give up on their unconstitutional plans to overturn the vote. As the Jan. 6 riot was unfolding, she angrily – and correctly – told Rep. Jim Jordan: “You … did this.”
She voted to impeach, and she has been among the very, very few in her party whose concern over Jan. 6 didn’t evaporate by Jan. 8.
Last week, she again vaulted in moral stature – while plummeting in party stature – as she read the damning texts that showed lawmakers and Fox News barkers literally pleading with the president to act while the rioters raged. The president, as everyone knows, did nothing for hours then told the rioters he loved them.
In ordinary times, what Cheney is doing would not be extraordinary. It might simply show that she’s a sentient being – able to identify and discern facts, unwilling to tell blatant falsehoods, and serious about her oath to the Constitution.
In these times, however, that makes her all but heroic. But you can’t tell the truth in today’s GOP, which is why Cheney is doomed and Rodgers is just fine.
The opinion piece copied and pasted below appeared in the Sunday, December 19, Spokesman. Shawn Vestal contrasts U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-Eastern Washington, WA Congressional District 5 for sixteen years) with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). The two have in common that they served successively as the chairperson of the House Republican Conference, “the primary forum for communicating the party’s message to members.” The chair of the House Republican Conference is to communicate, not craft, the party message. It is a position for a follower, not a leader. As a follower (and one of a handful of Republican women serving in the House), McMorris Rodgers served as chair for six years (three Congresses), the longest tenure for anyone, male or female, in three decades. On January 3, 2019, McMorris Rodgers was voted out as chair and returned to the position of a rank and file House Republican, stripped of putative leadership credentials. She was replaced by Rep. Liz Cheney. When Cheney denounced the January 6 insurrection her independence from the Republican message machine was not tolerated. Part way into her second term as chair Cheney was replaced by the more pliable, three term Republican Representative from New York, Elise Stefanik, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump on May 14, 2021. The job of communicating the message of the Trump Party is once again in the hands of a follower and sycophant.
Vestal’s coverage of the contrast between Cheney and McMorris Rodgers is spot on.
Ever since Liz Cheney outmaneuvered Cathy McMorris Rodgers for her spot in House leadership a few years back, the Wyoming Republican has served as a kind of opposite number to the congressional representation we have here.
Where Cheney zigs, Rodgers zags. Cheney shows courage; Rodgers displays cowardice. Cheney puts principle over party; Rodgers puts party over everything. Cheney tells obvious truths; Rodgers lavishes praise on the emperor’s new duds.
Cheney is spending every bit of her political capital to root out the facts about Jan. 6; Rodgers is voting in lockstep with Team Amnesia.
They are the yin and yang of GOP politics. And because of the sorry state of those politics, the brave one is in exile, and the coward is perfectly secure.
Last week brought another example.
As the House select committee circled the coup-plotting former president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, it was Cheney’s straightforward, unvarnished voice bringing forth the evidence that Trump was begged repeatedly to call off the dogs while the Capitol was being stormed – begged by people who have since publicly minimized and lied about Jan. 6.
Cheney, facing another barrage of criticism and insults from her own team, delivered the plain truth on the House floor.
“All of my colleagues, all of them, knew that what happened on Jan. 6 was an assault on our Constitution,” she said. “They knew it at the time. Yet now they are defending the indefensible. Whether we tell the truth, get to the truth, and defend ourselves against it ever happening again is the moral test of our time. How we address Jan. 6 is the moral test of our time.”
Rodgers was busily meeting this moral challenge by tweeting about “#Bidenflation” and voting in lockstep against charging Meadows with contempt of Congress.
This was only to be expected. Rodgers, though she is a minor figure in the revisionist army, has loyally propped up the lies that brought us here, both directly and indirectly – lies that fueled Jan. 6 and lies that have been deployed ever since to minimize what happened and obstruct accountability.
The Trump era has put most GOP lawmakers – the ones who are not out-and-out nuts – into a tight corner: go along or sacrifice yourself on principle. A year ago, as Trump was cooking up plans to undermine the election and the corner was getting very tight indeed, these two representatives set out on very different paths.
The Supreme Court had just batted away an effort by Team Trump to have legitimate votes thrown out and to allow state legislatures to replace the will of the voters with a victory for Trump. Rodgers and 125 other members of Congress signed on to this reprehensible effort.
She also peddled clear, knowably false nonsense about the Pennsylvania elections. She planned to vote against the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, a vote based on these lies. She did not waver in this stance even after the release of Trump’s phone call to Georgia elections officials made clear what kind of slimy mafioso tactics she was supporting.
Only after insurrectionists broke into the Capitol did she seem to wake up to what she and her fellow travelers had wrought. Being scared for your life will do that. She was described later as sitting outside the Capitol, tearfully texting that she was afraid for her country.
She showed a brief moment of clarity after that, when she reversed course and voted to certify the election after all. This has been described by more than one of her sycophants as “courageous.”
Courage ain’t what it used to be in the GOP, I guess. Fortunately, there is an actual instance of courage in the House, one that has stood higher and higher as Rodgers dried her tears and got over her concern for the country. Along the way, she’s done a lot of predictable shovel work for the party, carrying out the attack of the day against Biden with all the originality and verve that she’s come to be known for.
Meanwhile, Cheney was calling on her fellow representatives to stop lying about the election and give up on their unconstitutional plans to overturn the vote. As the Jan. 6 riot was unfolding, she angrily – and correctly – told Rep. Jim Jordan: “You … did this.”
She voted to impeach, and she has been among the very, very few in her party whose concern over Jan. 6 didn’t evaporate by Jan. 8.
Last week, she again vaulted in moral stature – while plummeting in party stature – as she read the damning texts that showed lawmakers and Fox News barkers literally pleading with the president to act while the rioters raged. The president, as everyone knows, did nothing for hours then told the rioters he loved them.
In ordinary times, what Cheney is doing would not be extraordinary. It might simply show that she’s a sentient being – able to identify and discern facts, unwilling to tell blatant falsehoods, and serious about her oath to the Constitution.
In these times, however, that makes her all but heroic. But you can’t tell the truth in today’s GOP, which is why Cheney is doomed and Rodgers is just fine.
The article I’ve copied and pasted below appeared in The Inlander. It is dated December 16. A friend texted me the link on Christmas Day. I feel the article is worth sharing, especially as I read of comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (DINO, WV), a man living on his yacht, suggesting that the recipients of some of the benefits contained in the Build Back Better Act would “just spend the money on drugs”. Yesterday, I heard from someone driving on I-90 who noted the homeless encampment on the cleared land on the north side of freeway, people with no place to go—just as temperatures are predicted below zero. What is wrong with us?
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Like the good book says, this Christmas let’s resolve to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things
Helping the young, poor and pregnant has some precedent.
The Christmas Eve I was 25 years old, I knelt by the couch, prying Matchbox cars out of their packaging and stuffing them into my almost-2-year-old son’s stocking. On the ratty carpet of our tiny rental house, my husband set up a figure-eight of wooden train tracks, right where H would see them when he woke up.
Earlier that night, after tucking H into his crib, I’d driven across town to the lone open grocery store to buy a test. It was just a precaution. Just a little heartburn, a little stomach ache. I was definitely overreacting.
But, sitting at a stoplight halfway to the store, I realized I had no doubt what the test would say.
We were young, a grad student and a security guard, still reeling from the Great Recession, sitting on a pile of student loans, raising a toddler with the help of family and friends. No formal child care. No sick leave. Bare-bones medical insurance.
H was a planned baby, in the way two idealistic 20-somethings make life-rewriting plans without really knowing what they’re getting into. I was a newspaper reporter when he was born, and I wrote a piece about how grateful I was that Medicaid saved us when I had complications early in my pregnancy that wiped out our savings. People — not strangers, but people I’d interviewed, people I knew — wrote to declare I did not deserve to have a child if I couldn’t pay for it.
And now I was poor and pregnant again.
We’d fretted over the cost of that train set. Bought H the $15 Buzz Lightyear action figure instead of the big one he’d admired in the store, with its working buttons and lights. Topped his stocking off with socks and a toothbrush, because he needed them anyway.
I remember thinking about a certain filthy rich reality TV star. I’d read in a magazine about a gift he’d bought his wife, some piece of extravagant jewelry that cost several times more than my family lived on in a year.
And I was angry, furious, knowing how some people would look at the rich man’s gift compared to the beautiful, terrifying, unexpected one I got that Christmas Eve. I knew who they’d think was worthy, and who wasn’t.
Every Christmas season, all those feelings come back. During Advent at my church, we sing “The Magnificat” — the verses from the book of Luke where Mary sings in celebration of the impending birth of Jesus.
Mary was young, poor, socially compromised, facing the mother of all unplanned pregnancies. She wasn’t feeling too warm about rich people in her time, either.
(God) has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
For Mary, my 25-year-old self and everyone for whom the holiday has ever been as much about fear as joy, I’d like to suggest we honor this ancient Christmas message.
Let’s tax the hell out of the rich. Redistribute some unholy wealth. Do God’s work of bringing down the powerful from their superyachts and obscenely shaped spaceships and golden thrones (of various types) and making them fund a few good things for the rest of us.
We wouldn’t even have to send them away completely empty. Just skim enough off the top of American billionaires’ $1.2 trillion of shiny new net worth added in just the past year to help pay for a few extravagant gifts like funding parental leave, or ensuring fair wages for teachers and nurses and grocery store workers, or making sure every person has a safe place to live and enough to eat, or making sure no one goes broke trying to pay for cancer treatment or insulin or a new baby.
I know it’s a lot to ask when there are private islands and enormous diamonds to be had, but I feel like we could make it work.
Of course I don’t know how to make it work. My mighty columnist powers have yet to give me nuanced insight into capital gains taxes and IRS loopholes — but they do give me a platform to call on the plenty of qualified people out there who can figure it out. I want to hear their plans, I want to vote for the people who support them, and I want the people I vote for to be brave enough to try it out.
Is all this radical, idealistic, blindly optimistic, and disregarding of arguments about capitalism and liberty and bootstraps? Sure is.
Indulge me in my wild ideas. Indulge yourself, if you want the same. Make it a prayer and a song; dig in to that feeling of ludicrous hope. Believe in the seemingly impossible. It’s Christmas. ♦
Tara Roberts is a writer and college journalism adviser who lives in Moscow with her husband, sons and poodle. Her work has appeared in Moss, Hippocampus and a variety of regional publications. Follow her on Twitter @tarabethidaho.
I’m taking a break from writing this Christmas Eve, but I just heard this read on Spokane Public Radio and I thought it would be fun to share. It is entitled “Ode to Christmas” and written by Chuck Kramer. The poem has been around for a couple of decades at least. It is periodically updated:
Lord …and Taylor. Anne Taylor. Anne Klein, Calvin Klein, Cuisinart, Wal-Mart, cotton-polyester, budget stretcher, store-wide, half-off, all sales final, simulated wood-grain vinyl. 12 months interest-free, HD, 3D, 4G, Blue-Ray, Bluetooth, LCD, LED, WiFi, hot-spot, buy a Kindle, or a Nook. Nintendo, Guitar Hero, waterproof, oven-proof, shockproof, 90-proof, down the hatch, dollar-a-batch, doesn’t match, helter-skelter, Alka-Seltzer. Amazon, BestBuy, eBay, Abercrombie, shopping zombie, UPS, CVS, JVC, DVD, GE, GI Joe, Axe, Fax, TJ Maxx, Timex, FedEx, AmEx, Gortex, X-Box, Reeboks, Ink-Jet, Polartec, J Crew, Jean Nate, Cachet, Faberge, Gourmet, Old Spice, LL Bean, I-Pad, I-Pod, I-Zod, Egad! Polo, Play-Doh, Lego, Tickle Me Elmo, Casio, Hasbro, Tyco, Tonka, Barbie, Dolby, Duracell, Eveready, rechargeable, returnable, recordable, portable, digital, trivial pursuit. London Fog, Canadian Club, Scotch Tape, Irish Mist, English Leather, Russian Vodka, Stolichnaya, Sterling Silver, Lady Schick, sure-stick, non-stick, Water-Pik, Shreve, Crump, Low watt, crock, pot. Cotton Dockers? Guess. One Day Sale, Buy Two, Three-speed, Four-slice, Saks Fifth Ave, Windows 7, Nine-volt, Ten-speed, 12-cup, Building 19, 1-800, kilo, mega, giga, tera, byte, white sale, infra-red, Walgreens, Black Friday. Black and Decker, Spelling checker, What the heck, Deck the halls with Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sansui, Fuji, Sony, Seiko, Samsung, Panasonic, instant classic, automatic, anti-static, alkaline, online, nine to nine, Calvin Klein, Anne Klein, Anne & Hope, Anne Taylor, Lord & Taylor. Good Lord. What have we done to Christmas?
I’ve even heard the rumor that all the celebrations have once again convinced the Sun to return to the Northern Hemisphere.
