Freeing the Buddha.
A Seattle pilgrimage.
21 AUGUST—I had been in Seattle only a week when a friend drove me to my old neighborhood of Ballard. A once proud working class enclave, the North Seattle community had been transmogrified as if by a demon child playing with giant legos.
Much of it had been torn down and replaced with six- and seven-story luxury apartments. Corporate people warehouses—as I’ve since taken to thinking of them. One building I saw that day had a sign designating it: “The Commons at Ballard.” The name had been appropriated—stolen in fact. Corporatized like everything else and pimped for profit. The complex sits across from and looks down upon a once lovely park named the Ballard Commons, where I and my neighbors used to walk and sit and chat and people watch.
It was unrecognizable. All that I recalled from a decade previously—an oasis of green grass, fragrant herbaceous borders, laughing people—was gone. The ground was dusty and barren and a tent city sprawled across it. Broken furniture sat in odd arrangements. Piles of garbage rotted in the sun. A dead rat lay in the street. All of the children were gone too. The fountains they’d played in on warm summer days had been turned off.
More tents lined the sidewalks around the public library. I glanced into one as I walked by and saw a woman sitting on a crate staring despondently into the space before her. Every inch of the small enclosure was crammed to its thin nylon ceiling with piles of clothing and stacks of mostly unidentifiable objects: Papers, books and who knows what. It looked like so much detritus.
We can talk until the planet burns to a cinder about how complicated homelessness is. But that’s a dodge. We don’t have a homeless problem in this country. We have a wealth problem. We have a greed problem. The same dynamics drive global warming.
I almost never pay attention to twitter but a peculiarly pertinent retweet landed in my social box this morning:
I leave Seattle early in the morning sadder than when I arrived. And more determined: to find and set the Buddha free.