9/11

It's September 11, one of those days that I can remember exactly what I did all day, even 25 years later. I remember what I read that morning. I remember what I was wearing.  I saw the CEO of a Fortune 50 company cry; we all cried. I remember the two teenaged boys standing on the bridge waving large American flags as I drove home that evening. The anger and despair brought us together.

This morning a different kind of despair has overtaken where I live. People here swing between being dejected and angry. I saw my neighbor sitting on his balcony. His head was bowed low. He's elderly, and not well. But he helps the woman living next door to him get her children down the stairs and into her car every morning. She has infant twins, a toddler and a four year old. His help is vital to her; he is her village.

In Washington, a town would deal with their "homeless problem" by tearing down the tents of the destitute, destroy all their belongings and tell them to move on the next town. Then the next town would do the same and chase them back where they came from. The same thing is being done here, but you don't have to be homeless to be the problem. The town doesn't want all those poor people hanging around. So tear down their homes and make them move on to the next town. What happens when the next town decides that it doesn't like the "eyesore" of poverty?  Do they tear down their homes too?  Washington didn't solve their homeless population by chasing the homeless around the Sound. It just made the homeless more poor, more desperate, less stable. That is what will happen here. 

We swing between despair and anger, but this is making us notice our neighbors. It is bringing us together.