"The bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle
Like a beautiful child, growin’ up free and wild
Full of hopes and full of fears
Full of laughter, full of tears
Full of dreams that last the years
In Seattle
In Seattle!"
(music: Hugo Montenegro; lyrics: Jack Keller, Ernie Sheldon)
Perry Como recorded the song “Seattle” and had a Top 40 hit with it in 1969, when I’ll bet Seattle was still looking quite beautiful and the people there were full of hopes and dreams. You definitely remember the song if you watched the TV show, “Here Come The Brides.” For the show intro, it was sung by a group called The New Establishment.
“Here Come The Brides” was set in the Seattle of the 19th Century, when Washington State was almost all wilderness. Back then, it really was a breathtaking place, full of pristine nature.
Have you been to Seattle lately? It has a “new establishment,” all right. And the "fears and tears" part is still there. This must-see hour-long documentary shows in graphic detail what Seattle is like now...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds
Radical leftists in Seattle are apparently having embolisms over this powerful news special, “Seattle Is Dying,” which was aired by KOMO-TV. They call that station “Trump TV” (because it’s owned by conservative Sinclair Broadcasting) and put quotation marks around the word “news,” accusing the right-wing media of using this documentary to instill hatred for the poor. According to leftists, this sort of documentary criminalizes poverty. On the contrary, it justifiably implicates leftism itself, for promoting policies that have led to mass homelessness, filth, heartbreaking substance abuse, widespread theft, untreated mental illness, post-apocalyptic stretches of land, and violent crime.
According to this report, Seattle police are afraid of retaliation if they speak up about the things they routinely encounter on the job. So for this documentary, they filled out questionnaires anonymously.
“Yes, I am frustrated,” one wrote, “because I am a law enforcement officer that is told NOT to enforce the law.” Another observed, “People come here because they call it Free-attle and they believe if they come here they will get free food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes, and will be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right.” Well, except for the part where they do NOT get the mental health care they need, and the part where they die on the street of an overdose.
That same officer went on to explain, “In the last five years there has been a culture shift and it started with the legislature decriminalizing felonies and dumping convicts onto the streets.” Another cop said, “Even if quality warrant arrests are made, the judicial system sees fit to let them out of jail within a couple days --- often the next day. Why are we risking our lives to take felony-level fugitives into custody if they are just going to be released?”
One officer who spoke for the record had finally quit, saying, “I couldn’t do it any more. It was just bureaucracy built up to the point where I felt like I was no longer necessary as a police officer, that the system had a different idea of how they wanted to handle it, and I was an appendix. I needed to be gone.”
“Everybody’s trying to do the right thing,” he went on to say. “It’s just coming out wrong. The only thing I can equate it to is we’re running a concentration camp, without barbed wire, up to and including the medical experiment of poisoning these people with drugs.”
Another officer called it “a broken system with no teeth.” These cops were all dedicated to doing what they could to control unfortunate situations and make lives better. But substance abuse is making it impossible. Police say there is no morale among their ranks.
But read Charles Mudede’s commentary on “Seattle Is Dying” (at the next link) and you’ll see that the left just doesn’t get what critics of their policies are saying. I think leftists must hate people on the right so much that they’re not capable of understanding our feelings about this Third World-style human tragedy. Mudede calls the attitude of this documentary “the manufactured hatred of the poor” (it is nothing of the sort) and says, “In this inverted/perverted KOMO world, the shock is not that the business district is right next to a homeless camp, but that a homeless camp is right next to the business district. There is an important difference between the two perspectives.”
Yes, we see the difference, but leftists don’s seem to understand that THEY ARE IN CHARGE in Seattle –- and in other large cities with similar problems –- and have been for some time. If they really were compassionate, they would clean up this horror RIGHT NOW, as Rudy Giuliani worked hard to do as mayor of New York, and try to help people rise above poverty and substance abuse rather than point fingers at conservative media for calling attention to the problems.
“What’s truly fantastic,” Mudele says, “is that no one is throwing cuffs on the hands of the maddest members of the city, the Bezoses or the Schultzes, and locking them up in an insane asylum.” He blames these people of “obscene wealth” for the current situation. What he doesn’t seem to get is that in his part of the country, these wealthy people are the “progressives.” These powerful moguls are the anti-Trumpers. This is their progress.
This is the very part of the country –- the “Left Coast” (along with the Northeast) –- which the Democrat candidates for President want to let call the shots for the entire nation, by getting rid of the Electoral College if it gets THEM elected. Look at those cities –- Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and also moving east to Chicago, New York and others –- and you can see what happens when "progressives" are in charge. Do they lack competence or compassion? –- it’s got to be one or the other, or both. Whatever it is, political power is obviously the most important thing to these people, much more important than actually fixing the problems. Otherwise, they would be fixed.
These candidates all have such big plans for us. I wouldn't put them in charge of planning a children's birthday party.
KOMO’s Eric Johnson, who wrote and reported “Seattle Is Dying,” explains that this is his third in “a kind of trilogy.” The first was an exploration of homelessness, the second was about the hell of heroin addiction, and this one “is about everyone else.” Perhaps that is why some reviewers are taking this third one out of context and saying he doesn’t focus sufficiently on the victims of drugs and mental illness, when he has already done that. Johnson makes it clear: “This program is not about demonizing those who are struggling with addiction and homelessness and mental illness. On the contrary. It asks the question, “Why aren’t we doing more? Why don’t we have the courage to intervene in lives that are, in the face of a grave sickness, reeling out of control?”
Some local commentators do offer a more balanced view of the KOMO report. But the debate goes on, while nothing gets better. Hey, leftists, you can just keep tweeting about Seattle’s wealthy and deny the problem exists; that’ll take care of it.
As for Americans who are stunned by the crowd of 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates calling for open borders, increasingly lax drug laws, almost nonexistent enforcement, a guaranteed minimum income, and FREE EVERYTHING, take a look at what similar policies are doing to once-beautiful cities of the Left Coast. It’s hoped that by some miracle they’ll realize their policies don’t work and will start turning their cities around. In the meantime, please –- please –- don’t let them metastasize across the rest of the country and ruin it, too.
The problem really is leftist politics. As one Seattle police officer said, “Homelessness and drug use have become such politically charged issues. Politically charged in that the city, including S.P.D. administration, have ceased to be interested in policing this population.”
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Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2019/3/seattle-is-dying
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