Proposed Statement on Neighborhood Youth Violence for Consideration by the SEDC

Here is what I will ask the Southeast District Council tonight:

Last week at a rally held in response to Tyrone Love's murder Mayor Nickels said that "we need to commit that it is the last time we see that happen in this neighborhood, in this community." But we know it probably will happen again in the Central District and in the Southeast District too, because nothing fundamental has changed.

We have to do more. It's going to take the best efforts of government, community groups, parents, and citizens together, offering mutual support and holding each other accountable to solve our youth violence problem

In order to start to come together as leaders around a problem we recognize as severe and escalating, to be watchful over the resources committed to our community, and to hold government accountable for the role it needs to play, I would like the SEDC to consider endorsing the following points:

• The youth violence problem in the South Precinct is severe and is getting worse
• The South Precinct is understaffed and should be staffed up to the level promised
• Mayor Nickels and the City Council should give the youth violence the attention it deserves

While these points, which the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council endorses, are not particularly specific or ambitious, they can serve as the basis for some consensus among community groups in the Southeast District.

The cycle of violence and retaliation is picking up pace, sucking more people into its logic, and inevitably touching citizens who have nothing to do with gangs. Something has to give.

At this moment, confronting gang violence and saving our children from harm should be the priority of southeast Seattle's community leadership, including the Southeast District Council.

I'm asking the SEDC to endorse these points as an organization, and for membership organizations to write letters to the Mayor and the City Council expressing their concern about youth violence in our community.

Some Teens are Not Smart

On Tuesdays, I tutor Somali refugee kids in Seatac. I do it for selfish reasons - I get to learn a little about the Somali community by osmosis and the students benefit from my help (unless there's high school math in the mix, in which case they're on their own). It's often fun and always interesting.

I've been intending to write about civic participation by the Somali community in South Seattle. After spending a few months interviewing leaders of Seattle's East African community I started to feel like I was getting press-release generalities. I was asking them to tell me, a stranger, about how their lives work. I'm sure my questions weren't particularly insightful. In short, I got the insights I deserved.

I came to recognize that I couldn't expect to know the Somali community unless I was willing to meet them on their own terms. As a tutor, I have the advantage of not needing or expecting to learn anything in particular. The likelihood of gaining the trust necessary for real sharing between people is increased by my willingness to give up a couple of hours a week to help out.

I snatched up my first gem a couple of weeks ago at the orientation class for new tutors. The instructor offered the following example, from an essay on street gangs written by a high school senior, of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication:

Some teens are smart. Some teens are not smart. That is why they need help not to join gang.

"What did this mean?" she asked. Somebody speculated that the student was making a connection between lack of education and crime. Others danced around this idea that it's stupid people who join gangs. Of course, this was all wrong.

What the student meant was that it's perfectly fine for people to join gangs as long as they know how to handle themselves. Imprudent teens who don't know how to keep themselves out of serious trouble are the ones who need to be saved from the gangs. They'll be the ones going to jail and killing each other. In this way of thinking, gangsterism is kind of like skydiving: it looks dangerous to the uninitiated, but with the proper expertise and preparation, it's perfectly safe.

This explanation met with general disapproval. A fellow trainee raised his hand, "As tutors, if we hear something like this, should we tell them that what they're saying is wrong?" I didn't catch the reply, I was off somewhere daydreaming about smart skydivers.

The high school essayist, who no doubt would fit neatly into the "at risk youth" category, was conveying some real, insider wisdom about the calculus of gang membership. But upstanding adults, always ready with our wisdom and righteousness, aren't prepared to hear it. We'd like to edit the faulty reasoning out of a term paper, as if that will make it disappear from the world.

Instead of answering gang violence with repression and violence, Seattle has settled on watching certain kids as much as possible to make sure they're not doing wrong, dissuading them from joining gangs, co-opting them with better alternatives. The idea of hanging out with teens more and reasoning with them informs every part of the the Mayor's $9M "Youth Violence Prevention Initiative". What's missing, I think, is a real understanding of the course of action we're trying to lure them away from.

Short of following the rabid advice of the readers of our local newspapers - encouraging young men to kill each other, shipping them all to Venezuela - solving our gang violence problem is going to require of us adults the humility to sit down with surly, hormonal teens and learn the math that puts them in a gang.

What I've Been Up To

My most recent piece of writing, published at the Rainier Valley Post blog, is I think, the best writing I've done to date. It's called "The Wrong Side of MLK: A Dispatch from the Nation's Most Diverse Zip Code" and is basically my attempt to answer the question, "What is it like to live in southeast Seatte?"

Like my last writing project, it's also an attempt to shine a light on how grassroots civic participation in southeast Seattle works - who participates, what are the terms of participation, who doesn't participate and why, and what social groups are aligned around particular issues.

I plan to make this the focus of my research and writing for the next couple of years. I'll write about my impressions as I go along here.

A Blight of Dullness at Dearborn Park

Neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.

-- Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

In all our visits, my three-year-old son and I have never seen more than a couple of other people at Dearborn park. Just four blocks from my house, it's convenient but feels shunned by the neighborhood for no obvious reason. Over time, I've come to discount it as a "bad park," and on sunny days tend to venture further afield to ones we enjoy like Powell Barnett or Mt. Baker.

When I heard that a week ago a man abducted a women in Renton, and drove her there to sexually assault her, I began to wonder why a rapist might consider Dearborn park a destination worth a half hour drive when so few local residents choose to walk there.

The prominence of the play equipment and soccer field suggest that children accompanied by adults are the primary intended users. When I ask my boy if he wants to go to the park, the answer is always a resounding yes, but Dearborn doesn't really count in his book. The park means open-ended play -- running from one interesting diversion to another, mixing it up with other kids, navigating varied terrain, excitement!

A funny thing I've found about standard children's park equipment -- the swing and Jungle Gym-style play set -- they have little interest in themselves. Kids know that they are for sliding and swinging and monkeying around, but they will use them only as enthusiastically as the surroundings merit. For lack of excitement, our play sessions at Dearborn are halting, and quick to end. If I don't guide each bit of the action, my son might actually request to go home -- something that has happened at no other park.

But enough of my kid, already -- what about me? The park has little to offer adult tag-alongs in the way of views or other areas where a person might pleasurably linger (unless you're the lurking sort, but more on that below). The walking path around the lower soccer field is only good for a five minute circuit and, as visually uninteresting as it is, only bears a single go round. There are no restrooms on site, which can also make lingering unattractive for families.

Thinking through the overall plan of Dearborn park, I came to the strange conclusion that privacy was the over-arching design consideration for this public facility. It's impossible to get a sense of who is there or what there is to do from the street entrance because the interior is blocked by a large mound. Walking through the park, the view into each successive area is partially or completely obscured by trees.

The path that runs down from the playground is completely secluded in the trees until it pops out into the lower field after some twenty-five yards. It continues on, encircling the play field (which I've only seen used in the fall for soccer) and leads back out to the entrance for a stretch, shaded by more trees. I was bemused when I saw "hiking trails" among the park's features on the city's web listing for Dearborn. I remember seeing what looked like a couple of overgrown deer paths and confirmed by a satellite view that there is a goodly splotch of woods. I never thought of the wooded area as even being part of the park!

Lonely, shaded, and secluded, Dearborn park is ideal for the kind of public activity that is best shielded from the general public view. Come at the right time and you'll see the evidence -- the condoms, the beer bottles, the gang graffiti. It's hard to imagine a better setting for lurking, hooking up, hiding, or indulging in your favorite controlled substance.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this "hiking trails" business, I dug a little deeper and found this enthusiastic review of the park, which declares it a "pleasant pocket of nature in the city." It further explains that the park "was developed by schoolchildren and staff from adjacent Dearborn Elementary School, and Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, EarthCorps and other groups."

The private setting that makes the park seem forlorn at best and menacing at worst during off hours, makes perfect sense if you consider it as an adjunct to Dearborn Park Elementary's grounds. Indeed, according to Dearborn Park Elementary's website, their teachers are "specially trained in Project Wild environmental curriculum to use the woods and wetlands as a classroom."

It's designed for school use, with all the built-in supervision and regimentation that implies. Of course there's no restroom -- there are plenty of them inside the school! Private grounds disconnected from the surrounding streets make city schools feel secure. But when the kids and staff go home, so does all the structure and supporting facilities and liveliness that make it a good place to be.

Without the school, the park is an empty shell and the neighborhood treats it accordingly, abandoning it to "users" like the one who made his way there from Renton last Sunday night.

Saul Alinsky and the Low Road to Morality

Much has been made in this election cycle of the company the presidential candidates have kept. The connection of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to great American rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky has been touted in the media as a potential liability that may yet taint the candidates. Ever the maneuverer, Hillary Clinton, who some forty years ago wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky's work, used her husband's presidential authority to block access to the document. In the mid Eighties, Obama cut his teeth in street-level politics as a community organizer trained in Alinsky's methods.


Alinsky is a bogeyman in some quarters because he had the audacity to encourage the poor to dirty their hands in the process of accumulating power in the same way everybody expects politicians and business to. His sin was viewing the poor as capable of solving their own problems and challenging them to actually confront those in power who have influence over the issues they face (read a fine interview with the man here).

Alinsky's maxim "No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation" wouldn't sound strange coming from some hard hitting executive like say, Jack Welch. But when Alinsky actually expected the poor residents of Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood to "compel negotiation" -- well, that's a different story.

His stated aim of "rubbing raw the sores of discontent" sounds like that great American taboo, "class warfare." We vote, we pray, we humbly accept charity, we may even complain, but we do not confront and we do not demand, especially in groups. It's unreasonable. It upsets our sense of order. It sounds like some commie shit.

In American politics these days, change is on the agenda. The question is who is capable of delivering the change Americans desire. The Hoole Intelligence Report contends that it ain't a new president and, with a little help from Hillary, Barack, and Saul, will explain why.

The Work of Other (Better) People

The other day, I was talking to a friend about philanthropy. His friends tell him that they admire the volunteer work that he does and the contributions he makes but that they themselves aren't the type of people who have the time or disposable income to do likewise. What they are saying is that he has reached that privileged station in life that affords him the wisdom and leisure to give back to the community, but they themselves, lacking his success, are excused from virtue.

They don't realize that he considers himself to be by far the greatest beneficiary of his "charity." He doesn't give because he's a Warren Buffet, he gets to be a little bit the Warren Buffet because he gives. Many people stand up this prerequisite of angelic purity to excuse themselves from stepping outside their immediate circle and contributing to the greater good in their community or the world.

In his book, "Rules for Radicals," Alinsky offers this striking observation about peoples' motivations -- "it is not man's 'better nature' but his self interest that demands that he be his brother's keeper." He continues:

To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if seemingly for the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother's keeper... This is the low road to morality. There is no other.

Self Interest and Self Help -- Self, Self, Selfity, Self

Obama has made his hay so far as an agent of change and doubtless his experience as a community organizer will help him deliver on his promises. Naturally, as a man looking to be the big cheese, he's come to see Alinsky's ideas as too narrow a vessel for broad change. He said in an interview "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

Alinsky would have pointed out that this is a false distinction arising from the shame associated with selfishness. In "Rules for Radicals," he writes in a chapter on the politics of language that "it appears shameful to admit that we operate on the basis of naked self-interest, so we desperately try to reconcile every shift of circumstances that is to our self-interest in terms of a broad moral justification or rationalization."

The problem with dreams and ideals and values that we feel don't advance our own interests is that we are unlikely to do much about them ourselves -- they tend to be the broad, fantastical things we feel are outside our sphere of influence which leads us to cede responsibility for them to God or to... a president!

Alinsky's Iron Rule of Organizing illustrates the difference between Obama’s presidential hopes and dreams and the necessity for grassroots political participation:

Never do for people what they can do for themselves.

The equation is simple -- if your values, hopes, and dreams, are important enough for you to personally do something about them, you will. If they are not, you won't.

In Alinsky's words, "Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services."

People who take on an issue themselves are likely to act with a vigor proportionate to the issue's effect on their lives. If you yourself identify an issue and define the action that will get the result you want, you have motivation to see it through and, for better or worse, own the results. This is what people mean when they talk about "sustainability."

For her part, Hillary Clinton has alternately hidden her connection to Alinsky, damned his work with faint praise, and dismissed his methods. In her 1993 book "Living History," she writes,"He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't.”

In fact, Alinsky explicitly stated that people who want to affect change must work inside the system* -- the thing they really disagree on is the purpose of working inside the system. The Clintons have worked inside the system for a solid three decades building a sweeping national political juggernaut. Alinsky-style community organizing starts "inside the system" for the simple reason that, in order to bring about "concrete, specific, achievable" improvements in their lives, normal people need to depart from a familiar place.

Ultimately, it's the scale of Clinton's and Obama's ambition that led them away from Alinsky's principles of civic participation. Their hustle, however noble, is to make the case that giving them your vote is the best way to see your political hopes and dreams realized.

Shop N' Vote '08!

Confronted with the attacks of 9/11 and the specter of environmental disaster, there are just two forms of civic participation Americans have come together around -- shopping and voting. Shopping for that hybrid sedan, picking up those compact florescent bulbs, or in GW's less discriminate formulation, "your continued participation and confidence in the the American economy."

We attempt to buy our way out of an impending environmental disaster not because that is the correct response or the one that will succeed, but because it is the response that will cause no disruption in our politics, our economy, or our lifestyle. The fruit of our virtue is trifling.

And so it is with voting for a president. Obama can only represent us in the most indirect, symbolic way. We would be fools to expect him to do what only we can do for ourselves. Until we connect those distant, abstract problems menacing our world like global warming or dollar-a-day poverty to our own experience and our own self interest, we will continue to meet them with our trifling virtue at best, or fob them off on better people at worst. Obama's got my vote, but I'm still taking the low road.


* "There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families -- more than seventy million people -- whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971 dollars]. (Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals,"xix.")

Tent City Why Not?

Driving though "downtown" Mercer Island, I came across this bit of graffiti last week stenciled at the entrance of a new building in neat, black letters. A man stood staring at it in that Rodin's "Thinker" pose people adopt at art galleries. He walked up to it and scratched at it with his fingernail. A week later it hasn't been painted over.

Who did this? The question isn't a simple one. When Tent City 4 moved from Bellevue to Mercer Island last week, it wasn't without controversy. A group of residents who go by the catchy name Mercer Island Citizens for Fair Process tried unsuccessfully to stop the move in court.

Graffiti is pretty scarce in Mercer Island and the classic graffiti kids do tends to go up around construction sites, abandoned property or space otherwise perceived to be unclaimed. The placement of this message at the entrance of a rather swank new building is an explicit thumb in the eye of official Mercer Island.

Perhaps some hardened pro-homeless activist posted this message 95 theses style, for all of affluent Mercer Island to chew on? This is extremely unlikely given how disciplined the activists and residents of Tent City are about abiding by the law and not proving a nuisance to their host communities. They are painfully aware that if crime can be proven to accompany the tent city, the gig is up -- no city would host it.

Could it have been planted there by a NIMBY provocateur, bent on showing just how depraved the homeless and the people who love them are? I picture a be-suited junior executive sliding out of a Range Rover with a can of spay paint and a smirk in the wee hours of the morning.

I guess it might as well be literally "the writing on the wall," placed there by some divine hand. Over the protests of a few residents, churchgoing Mercer Island made the new camp location happen. Way to go, rich people!

The Ghost Verse

This edition of the Hoole Intelligence Report will bring to your attention the existence of a fake, but immensely popular Bible verse which somebody (nobody knows who) invented to prove a silly point about masturbation (which nobody can agree on). That the holy scriptures offer succor and guidance to untold millions across the globe goes without saying. It is my hope that the tale of the Ghost Verse will make it clear that fake scripture can be a profound source of inspiration in its own right.

It was during a week night session of church some time in the Eighties that I first heard it told. The dude who sat down in the metal folding chair next to mine was a singular fellow, who I'd never met before. A son of one of the church regulars back from somewhere (prison? some low-rent art school?) outfitted in a late-Seventies style typical of a certain kind of twenty-something loaner. His name would have been something like Dan or Jimmy.

His hair, parted in the middle and carefully combed over the ears, framed glasses that made him look more square than studious. He had on a black t-shirt, and in his back pocket was tucked the inevitable comb. I'd seen the costume before and even then, it suggested something definite -- the insistence on an obviously dated style was the outward sign of a simmering refusal to get on with the business of adulthood.
The pastor must have mentioned something that related to masturbation from the podium (itself a strange circumstance), which prompted Jimmy to turn, look me in the eye, and declare with monotone intensity:

The Bible says "It is better to cast thy seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground."

His intention was obvious - to suggest that the Bible was much more complex than the preacherman was letting on, that he was a special authority on the ambiguities of scripture, and that he was personally very much in the belly-of-a-whore camp.
Being a surly misfit myself, I'm sure I nodded my head at the fellow or grunted and returned to the tedious business of sitting through church. I was staggered, nonetheless. It had the ring of authentic scripture, but the theology seemed contradictory to what I'd read myself in the Bible. Paraphrasing it, one hears God as a Marine Corps burn-out father -- "You gotta get yourself laid son, wanking it's for wimps."

The story of Onan, the Bible's famed masturbator, seems to be the inspiration for the verse. It's laid out in Genesis 38 like this -- a guy named Judah sets his son up with a wife, Tamar. God turns on the son and ends up killing him (standard operating procedure in the Old Testament, it turns out). It then falls by tradition to our man Onan to knock up his brother's widow, so that the offspring can carry on their dead father's line. A close reading reveals that though Onan was only too happy to "get down" with Tamar, he wasn't trying to father any kids that weren't his, which led him to withdraw at the vital moment and famously "spill his seed on the ground."

The popular gloss on the story is that Onan settled for "shaking hands with the unemployed" instead of hooking up with Tamar. And thus he was fingered as a wanker by posterity and "Onanism" became a synonym for masturbation. Worse still, poor Onan didn't get a chance to enjoy his new found fame as God killed him shortly afterward.

This misreading of the story is a big semantic leap toward the Ghost Verse, because it presumes that Onan chose masturbation over the chance to sleep with an actual woman (an opportunity sanctioned by God himself, no less). You won't have to ask too many teenage boys to find out why that's absolutely nuts. Nuts enough in fact to rise to the level of Sin. And this is the thrust, if you will, of the Ghost Verse -- male masturbation should be a source of guilt because it is a distraction from the totally awesome business of getting laid.

The beauty of the Ghost Verse is that it has survived and flourished. Search for it on the internet, and you'll find that its status as authentic scripture is refuted time and time again, but such protests only seem to increase its popularity. People continue to quote it because they like it, even if it's not "real."

For some, it confirms Christian hypocrisy and the flawed, anachronistic nature of scripture. For others, like Malachy McCourt (Frank's bro), its presumed Biblical origin is a source of comfort, explaining adolescent sexual anguish as fealty to a strange and cruel god. As for Jimmy, my first and greatest tutor in fake theology, wherever he ended up, I'm sure he continues to do God's work to this day.