Horror in Seattle
March 1, 2016
The ferry approaching Seattle on a dark clear night gave a spectacular view of lights from the Space needle to the Giant ferris wheel against a backdrop of a lit skyline. The night was my leap year birthday of February 29, 2016. Since I left my career early on Wall St. 26 years ago partly because getting rich was inevitable, but didn’t like it becoming a religion that gobbled up my spiritual side, I have lived very alternatively or ‘green’ teaching meditation and living frugally, but well. Now Seattle bills itself as a ‘green, alternative, liberal’ mecca of consciousness. Not really though – just a lot of media wannabe hype and hoopla!
I was almost in a situation like the famous movie title, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ only in a New World Order where non compassionate corporations and their minions rule. From the ferry ride, I went to take a Greyhound bus down into Oregon. I missed the last 6:30 PM bus, and the next one didn’t leave until 7:30am the next day, and at 9:00PM the bus station locked it’s doors! However, 2 hours from my home base, I was with cash and could, somewhat reluctantly get a room for the night … or so I thought. It was a warm winter night, however Seattle’s famous rain drops were joining in my dilemma. Seattle is not a walk around city. There is little logic to how the streets go and the hills rival San Francisco.
Homelessness in Seattle is all over on every downtown block. Even though I’m a sizable, fit guy, carrying a tote bag in my new, barely broken in Nike red shoes on mystery streets at 10PM up and down hills, I felt what I had heard of about Seattle. Seattle is becoming a tent city for the homeless (bless them), but these homeless people trolling the street were indicators that I was going to have to spend a ‘sleepless night’ somewhere in downtown Seattle with a pocketful of vulnerable money! Reason being was that after going to 6 hotels that had no compassion for ‘money’, in other words unless it’s a credit card (which until now I’ve avoided), enjoy the ‘street life’, and see what the new ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ is like – even though I mentioned this every four years leap day was my birthday! It was like having to go to an Emergency Room at a hospital and being told you don’t have the credentials to be saved!!!
With no solutions at hand, and no one to call at that hour who were within a couple hours, I started flagging down cabs. After asking four cabbies to take me back home rather than a night on the rainy streets, I found one driver from the small country of Eritrea, Africa who made me a deal, although he had no idea where Port Townsend above the Olympics was. But aha, his cab was new with GPS that would direct him there. After going an hour in the wrong direction, he ‘rebooted’ onto the correct one to get me back home just hours before daylight.
The world is getting technologically more advanced every moment but the collective people are becoming ‘sheeple robots’, rich or poor, and god forbid if you’re one of those hundreds of millions who are 6 months from being on the streets! In the blink of an eye we have become richer for the few (and not the super rich either but mainly combined income couples), and screw that majority who are censored in infinite ways so the wealthier can enjoy the money, money, money that ‘enabled’ them from the higher education factories to have a Disneyland religion of vacuous, non caring entitlement.
Love and compassion go together like a ‘horse and carriage’. Money and denied greed go together like the new heartless Scrooge. Love deeper, and know that everyone is on ‘borrowed time’. Giving makes a godly human being, or the ‘new man and woman’ of a ‘spiritual new world order’!
