Front Porch Forum -- Step Onto The Porch; Folks Have Lots To Say
Yes, crime and traffic, and growth, and education. Many of the things that worry you could have been predicted - and have been - by politicians and the news media, the accustomed arbiters of what you think.
But since last week, when The Times and two local National Public Radio stations asked you to join us in a "Front Porch Forum," you've been saying what you think for yourselves. And the breadth of your interests and concerns goes far beyond the overhyped or oversimplified versions you say you normally read in the paper or hear in political candidates' sound bites.
Crime is a worry, true. But Dorothy Hughes of Seattle suggests - in one of the letters we're printing today - a subtler underlying problem: the loss of honesty as a virtue.
Joy Gray of Seattle had a dramatic experience with crime in the city. After being attacked in Pioneer Square, she was even more shaken by the police officers' handling of the crime. Her experience made her question whether she, a black woman, is welcome here. She may leave.
Homer Nevermann, of West Seattle, is among a large number who feel ignored by politicians or the media. His specific gripe: Society undervalues the experience and wisdom of its older citizens.
"Front Porch Forum" has produced far more than complaints, however. As the following excerpts from your calls and letters show, most people visiting the "Forum" are upbeat about living here and about the future, and many are doing something, even on a small scale, to make their world a little better.
Matt Bertles, of Bainbridge Island, has done what many others suggest but few bring themselves to do: He is working less so he can spend more time with his young family and avoid the necessity of day care.
Joanne Shea left the suburbs and moved with her young daughter to Ballard. To her surprise, she feels a sense of community with her new neighbors that she's never felt before.
Let us know what you think of the ideas discussed here. We'll explore the problems you believe are most important and, if we can, do something about them.
LEFT OUT IN MY OWN CITY
I have many concerns and work with many issues, but I will mention a broad problem. I feel like I have almost no say as to what happens in this city.
If Metro or City Council meetings are public, they are held during workdays when most people cannot attend. When I try to contact council people to share my views, I get an answering machine or an assistant, thereby never knowing if the council person hears my voice. Likewise, I don't know if anyone reads my letters.
I would like to see all council meetings opened to the public and held in the evenings or on weekends. The dates, times, places and issues should be announced on television, on the radio, and in the newspapers.
I am tired of feeling left out in my own city. Arianna Vander Houwen Seattle
LOST: HONESTY IN SOCIETY
My concern is "crime" and our lack of priority on what makes a real crime. Currently the emphasis is on physical violence. True, we don't want violent people among us if they are killing others. We can't lock up everyone, however. I didn't vote for "1-2-3 and out" because I think we are letting seriously deviant people escape detection and putting emphasis on petty offenses.
I read where the brother of the $337 thief says no one got hurt. So he can't understand why his brother might go to prison for the rest of his life. Hurt? Does he mean that no blood was spilled? Is that what "crime" is all about? Spilled blood or broken bones? Obviously it's wrong to take what belongs to others, was earned by others, and deprive them of it.
Why isn't the emphasis on all wrongs? I don't ever hear discussions of what is really wrong in today's society. The willingness to take whatever we want. People blame the breakup of the family. The spread of welfare, poor education, on and on. But isn't it simply the loss of honesty?
No honest person steals, lies, kills, etc., etc. We all know the world used to be more honest. Have we stopped admiring honesty? Requiring people to show it? Is it the way lawyers get their clients off, honest or not? Is it the loss of a respect for self? For God? Dorothy Hughes Richmond Beach
FOUND: A REAL COMMUNITY
This article was especially interesting to me because of the situation my daughter and I have been in since we moved to Ballard.
We had been living in the suburbs for my daughter's whole life and the majority of mine. Up until six months ago, when I decided to make a change. In the suburbs it has been my experience that you don't get involved with your neighbors to avoid any unwanted responsibilities or complications. Especially when our lives were so complicated and hurried as it was. Although I lived this lifestyle for as long as I can remember, I always felt something really big was missing.
What I discovered since we have moved to our small apartment complex in Ballard is exactly what was missing. It was our sense of community. Although I must say when we first moved I was very suspicious of how friendly everyone was. And I admit I still have a cautious manner which I don't believe will disappear in light of our basic safety needs. But I know we are very lucky to be experiencing, however small, a new way of living.
I have been trying to determine what the ingredients are here that have allowed this to happen. I believe it is all of the individuals at our complex combined to make one effort. We certainly are a very mixed group of people and I don't think it is particularly important that we agree all the time. As long as we continue to communicate there is a safe and secure feeling that comes from that.
We have recently held our first apartment meeting. Everyone attended including the owner, who lives in Kent. We discussed one woman's recent car theft out of our parking lot. We came up with some practical safety solutions, such as keeping our porch lights on, using "The Club" in our cars and keeping an eye out for people who are new to the area.
We plan to continue our meetings and would like to branch out to our neighborhood block. I believe that the "Citizens Agenda" in Charlotte, N.C., was created by individual neighborhoods, like ours, becoming involved and connected with each other. I also don't believe I would have thought this possible if I had not taken part in something like this before I read your article. Joanne Shea, Ballard
A CHOICE FOR COMMITMENT
I would like to let you know how my wife and I have tried to become more of a part of our community. We have only recently moved to Bainbridge Island, so this is how we are currently forming our "new" sense of community.
We go to the parks with our two young children, talk with other parents about topics that parents tend to think are important, such as schools, parks, building and crime. Fortunately, there does not seem to be the "crime" problem out here as there was for us in Seattle. The reaching-out process of meeting others, sharing information and just chatting has helped us develop what I sense will be a good basis of friendships in the future.
We also try to get to public meetings, such as planning and city council meetings. I used to work as a reporter in Alaska and part of my responsibility was to cover local government. Oftentime I saw how an elected official would respond fairly quickly and decisively when confronted by someone who was knowledgeable and passionate about what they thought needed care. It was quite an education to see that government really does work, it just oftentimes needs prodding.
On a personal level, many people seem to think they need to have a two-income-producing family to live or even survive in today's society. I would like to share what we do. I still work in news, but now I am able to work at night, out of an office in my home. My wife commutes to Seattle and works in research at Immunex. What this has allowed us to do is always have a parent raising our very young children. We did this knowing that we would have to give up some income, but as we watched other children being raised in a day-care atmosphere, it became clear that parents are voluntarily giving up their right to raise children the "right" way, allowing someone at some unknown day-care facility to really have the hands-on ability to teach the children wrong from right.
In short, I think the bottom line is that many of the facets of modern society - the gangs, the violence, the uncaring attitudes - could almost all be related to this parentless, childless, cold, removed lifestyle. It has become easier to not care than to commit and live a full and valuable life, money notwithstanding. Matt Bertles Bainbridge Island
RACISM, INHOSPITABILITY HERE
I recently decided that I may not remain in Seattle. The operative event in my decision-making was an assault by an insane woman in Pioneer Square. I was preparing to leave a local business when the woman entered, knocked me to the floor and began to kick me in my head and abdomen, while ranting about hating black people. After being pulled off of me by several onlookers, she broke free and attacked again. At present, the woman is committed to Harborview's psychiatric ward.
The attack was disturbing, but almost as disturbing has been people's reaction to it. When the Seattle police arrived, one of the officers seemed more interested in questioning my veracity than in attending to the assailant. Other Seattleites have responded by suggesting that I must have known the woman and somehow provoked the attack. Neither is accurate. The subtext of these conversations has been race. As a non-white person attacked by a white person, my credibility is apparently doubtful. It doesn't seem to matter that the attacker was an insane street person on a rampage and that I am both civilized and sane.
This response echoes the suspicion and contempt I have often been subjected to in Seattle. I have also had difficulty obtaining part-time work once I appear for an interview. Despite Seattle's reputation as a laid-back, nice place to live, I have found it to be just the opposite. Its inhabitants have a very narrow notion of what a minority person can be: You're either Norm Rice or a criminal. Being neither, I have accepted that I had best move on to a more hospitable place. Joy Gray, Seattle
NO TIME FOR ANYTHING BUT WORK
I hope you don't mind hearing from someone who has been around for 74 years. I can remember quite clearly when people worked to live, when the expected and anticipated social goal was to work less hours and have more time for family, friends, learning and recreation. There doesn't seem to be any recollection of this rational goal on the part of either your writers, or the people about whom they wrote.
Instead of the progression to less time on the job and more leisure which we confidently anticipated in the 1940s - an anticipation grounded in the historical reduction of the workday from "dawn to dusk" to the eight hours mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act - the trend has been to more and harder hours at work, and no time for anything else. We have reached the stage where people live to work.
In my opinion, most of the problems expressed by the people interviewed could be alleviated, if not eliminated, by reducing the workday. This is not some revolutionary or untried idea. The 40-hour work week was established by legislative action; the 30-hour week (or the four-day week) could be established in the same way. Arthur Mink, Seattle
`SINGLE MOM' ISN'T AN EPITHET
I am a number of things - a single mom, a lawyer (public sector), a sometimes political activist, a feminist. As the sum of these parts - and several others - I have many concerns about the media and how they relate to our community. However, in this letter I want to talk about one thing that has long bothered me.
Why is it that every time the phrase "single mother" is used in a sentence by the media, it is conjoined with words like "poverty," "crime," "at risk," "low achievers" and various other phrases, none of them flattering?
I can only speak from personal experience. My son, who is 7, is bright, happy, capable and loving. He has been nominated to the academically gifted program in the Olympia School District. He is extremely interested in the world around him, social, independent, makes friends easily. He's not perfect - to say the least - but I certainly wouldn't call him disadvantaged in any way. He has male role models, but his father has never been around and he doesn't seem to miss him in any significant way, though he does express curiosity from time to time.
Other single moms I know are fiercely dedicated to their children, many of whom seem to mirror my son's accomplishments. These women struggle, as we all do sometimes, but their children do not seem damaged to me. Of course, I look at some of the two-parent families I know, particularly at my son's school, and I see alcoholism, drug use, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect, and - overwhelmingly - sheer apathy and stupidity. Hours and hours on end in front of the television. No interest in the world around them, in history or politics or nature. I wonder: Who is really "disadvantaged" here?
Each single mom, like me, has her own story, and they are as varied as any other family's story. I really wonder why the media has this fixation on blaming women - who, after all, at least stick by their children, unlike the fathers who make up the vast majority of absentee parents - for the mess children these days seem to be in. I detect an alarming trend toward intolerance and narrow-minded thinking about the family and who/what constitutes one in the media lately, and I don't like it.
I would hope that the media someday present a more unbiased picture of all kinds of families, particularly single moms (meaning those of us who have 100 percent responsibility for our children, not those who simply co-parent, a far different situation). There are many of us who don't feel we are doing the best with a bad situation. On the contrary, we are happy, unselfish, and raising good children who will contribute a lot to this world.
I'd certainly love to read something from my perspective, just once. Sara Feldman, Olympia
A WARM, `KID-FRIENDLY' AREA
As a fairly new resident of Washington (yes, from California, but the Northern End!! Redding, to be exact), the things I find that are nice about the general area is that it is so "kid friendly." There seems to be a feeling of the area that accepts children and families, and since I have three little girls it is nice to know there is plenty to find to do on any given weekend! Since we live east of Redmond a few miles, I feel lucky that out here there is a real blend of country and city.
As a native Californian I was a bit concerned about the "anti-California" sentiment, but after a year and half here, I haven't experienced it yet. I have found everyone up here friendly, nice and willing to share, even the natives I have met! I might also add that I have never lived in a neighborhood where the people were so friendly and welcoming.
It is also refreshing to find healthy public schools. Our oldest daughter attends Alcott Elementary in the Lake Washington School District. We have been very impressed with how important public schools are to the area and the state. That means a lot to us coming from California, where the schools are in a state of decline.
I try to get my input on community issues through my active involvement in American Association of University Women, Lake Washington Branch. As the outgoing public-policy chair for the branch, I spent a day in Olympia talking to our state representatives about the gender-equity issues in the public schools, crime and the much-needed repair of Highways 520 and 202.
I guess my bottom line is my family, my daughters' school and AAUW are the areas where I feel the most sense of community. I am trying to raise three independent and socially responsible children who will in turn give back to the community in their own ways. Kathleen Mallory Redmond
POLITICIANS, PRESS OUT OF TOUCH
We applaud The Seattle Times for its initiative in taking this Front Porch Forum concept public. Your opening article exactly articulates our concerns that "We the People" have almost completely lost our voice in determining the future of the Puget Sound region (and the nation in general).
My wife and I are registered voters. We have voted in every election large and small for years. I have read The Seattle Times since I had a Times paper route in Mount Vernon in the '50s. She was raised in North Seattle and graduated from Ingraham High School. She currently works downtown in the commercial insurance industry; I am a software design engineer at Boeing. This background enables us to agree with some authority that the politicians and the mainstream press have indeed lost contact with us.
We are also equipped to see beyond the Puget Sound as we spent a year in Memphis, Tenn., four years in San Diego, Calif., and five years in Yokohama, Japan, before fighting our way back here to recapture the life we knew as kids and young adults.
We pay annual dues to the Phinney Ridge Neighborhood Association primarily in the hopes that they will protect us and our neighborhood against the various city agencies wielding power with no apparent knowledge of the structure, values, needs or desires of the neighborhood we live in.
I think the effort you are making is tremendously worthwhile, and I would like to volunteer one or two nights a week to support whatever infrastructure you may need to implement if this effort truly gets off the ground. Dick and Lauralee Smith Seattle
TIMES RIDICULES CRITICAL VOICES
While I commend your intent and your paper's public admission that people have lost faith in such institutions as the media, I am skeptical about the extent to which papers such as The Seattle Times are willing to give space to critical voices and more than that, to treat them seriously.
It is easy to publish stories from the lives of individuals affected by easily identifiable and sensitive but seldom seriously analyzed problems such as crime. What is more difficult is to treat social problems as social and structural rather than as plights affecting scattered individuals. Yet unless you do this, all you will have is a series of touching but fragmented human-interest stories, and this is no different than the way the American mainstream press has handled social problems for decades.
The fact is that The Seattle Times has not only excluded and marginalized, but has ridiculed critical voices. Witness the coverage of the massive protests in Seattle during the APEC conference last November. Here is truly an occasion where thousands of concerned Seattleites came together over a period of several days and through the efforts of scores of community organizers from local labor, environmental, and human-rights groups to voice their opposition to the complacent manner in which the APEC agenda was being orchestrated by business and political elites. Your response? An insulting and derogatory article in the Sunday Times written by a business section reporter who portrayed the protesters as a motley collection of lunatics or millenarian Jesus freaks.
It is clear but not surprising which interests are represented in your paper. There were two brief references in November to our organization, the East Timor Action Network, which is trying to change U.S. policy toward the Indonesian government, whose army is responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 East Timorese - one-third of the population - since it invaded in 1975. Yet after the paper ran a quarter-page photo of Indonesian President Suharto accepting an award from Boeing, the issue of East Timor fell into conspicuous silence. Much later, and after a good deal of insistence, The Times agreed to run an editorial on East Timor written by one of our members, but all references to U.S. government and Boeing corporate complicity were conveniently excised.
Your paper's general attitude is also extended to issues closer to home. The City of Seattle has recently enacted two draconian ordinances which have met the staunch opposition of citizens' groups: a ban on postering and the no-sitting-on-sidewalks ordinance. The Times has not made the slightest effort to probe the sentiments of organizers from citizen groups. In the front-page coverage of the enactment of the no-sitting ordinance, the sole dissenting voice was of a homeless man on the street, who was described as, I quote, "homeless for two months because of drug and alcohol addiction." Perhaps not coincidentally, the parallel move of criminalizing postering effectively eliminates the only reliable medium of civic communication in our city for those who cannot afford to place quarter-page ads in your paper. To my knowledge, The Times not only did not condemn such moves to abridge First Amendment rights, but did not so much as comment on them.
Will the Seattle Times offer a satisfactory and workable substitute for public postering to the people of Seattle? Your paper's cozy-sounding Front Porch Forum project notwithstanding, many of us would be more than amazed if it did. Loren Ryter, coordinator East Timor Action Network Seattle
WE SENIORS HAVE BEEN THERE
Let me introduce myself. I would undoubtedly be considered a senior, senior citizen. I am of a time and culture that is mostly out of agreement with contemporary viewpoints, values and philosophy. Certainly with those of the majority of politicians and journalists. The voices arising from my age category are not being taken seriously and are being dismissed as the pitiful, senile opinions of those who no longer recognize life in its complexities. The complexities are basically the same as ever, and we have survived them.
We older citizens have witnessed the emergence of the "New Deal" and its shortcomings and faults. The ever-increasing remedies for these ills created "side effects," constantly requiring yet another "fix." Now some 60-plus years later, our politicians continue to try to legislate more "fixes." The news media, in their pseudo elitism, expound the virtues of these measures. All untried, all impractical and so the complexities of today proliferate.
Politicians of our times are basically self-centered, opportunists, insincere, and motivators, not "do-ers." Journalists are, for the most part, also opportunists, taking advantage of occasions to exploit their "stock in trade," expressing their self-proclaimed expert convictions in order to control public opinion.
The doctrines of the '60s, such as "I Did it My Way," "Born Free," "The Impossible Dream," etc., all cast aside the wisdom of the ages and embrace the folly of idealism. Take stock of what we have come to today because of such philosophies. Can we afford to continue on in this manner? We seniors can offer much in the way of bettering society. We should be listened to. Homer H. Nevermann West Seattle
ANYTHING OF VALUE TAKES WORK
I believe that the sense of no responsibility that most people adopt has a great deal to do with the problems of society. My wife and I are continually disappointed by the lack of responsibility that people have when it comes to:
1. Treating other people with respect and dignity.
2. Making the connection that having children means devoting you and your family fully to them and often means making gigantic sacrifices in careers, financial matters and personal aspirations.
3. Participation in and support of the community. People don't understand that lack of involvement in community means higher taxes for more police and people to pick up litter, etc., and it also degrades education, forcing teachers to teach less but spend more resources handling discipline problems and other parental matters instead.
Although my wife and I have no children, since January I have been working on a committee of the Issaquah School District. I have been very surprised at people's reactions when they find out that I'm taking time away from my professional life to give to the school district, even though I have no children at the school - I'm just a concerned member of the community! In fact, I'm unemployed and looking for a job.
Responsibility and commitment are what make people's lives work. Anything of real value takes work and sometimes pain. So many people today have become gutless about value. They shrivel in the face of real challenges and instead run and hide behind the nearest excuses. Tom Swett Bellevue
--------------------------- IF YOU'D LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE ---------------------------
-- Leave a message on The Times' Forum line, 464-3340. -- Phone the listener call-in lines for KUOW-FM or KPLU-FM. KUOW: 543-9595. KPLU: 536-5008 in Tacoma.
-- Send a fax to Front Page Forum, at 464-8121, in Seattle.
-- Through the Internet, send e-mail to Mark Matassa, 73023.252@compuserve.com.
-- Or mail a letter to Front Porch Forum, Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, 98111.
Include your name, city of residence and phone number for verification.