C.R. Douglas Gets It

C.R. Douglas at Seattle Inside/Out has been following the sweeps issue for a long time, and he's getting a little pissed off. Early last summer he made me giddy by pressing then Human Services Director Patricia McInturff on where homeless people are supposed to go until she started to twitch. More recently, During Douglas' monthly Ask the Mayor show, Nickels claimed that the people staying at Nickelsville were all political activists who had homes to which they could return. Douglas was obviously taken aback by the Mayor's claim. One expects politicians to distort and lie, but this was way beyond the pale and seems to have put Douglas over the edge. This week's edition of Seattle Inside/Out is his answer.

Douglas goes out on the street to show how bad things are, and then brings Human Services Director Alan Painter, Committee to End Homelessness in King County ED Bill Block, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness ED Alison Eisinger, and Operation NightWatch Director Rick Reynolds into the studio to get some answers. On a scale of 1-10 this show is an 11.

As Painter recites the city talking points in response to Douglas' questions, he looks as though he might be seated on a tack. It's a painful display. Douglas wanted SKCCH Director Alison Eisinger to just flat out say she supports Nickelsville as a solution, but for whatever reason, she couldn't go there. This left it up to Rick Reynolds, who admirably rises to the occasion by humanizing the problem and calling for something better. "Why do we continue to have persistent tenting situations if the need is being met? … It's a band-aid, but how many of us have never needed a band-aid?" He is riveting. Even Bill Block goes a little off the plantation, but not dangerously so. He mostly sticks to his talking points.

The Mayor's script is seriously lacking in credibility. Maybe it's time to try something else.

Smart, Brave, and True

Just when I was beginning to despair that no Seattle reporter would ever really get the sweeps story right, along comes Angela Galloway in today's PI with Seattle Homeless Camp Policy Under Fire: critics see loopholes in rights protections. Galloway deserves major props for taking a second shot at a story the City buried in last Saturday's paper and hitting all the right points.

Broad exceptions to the application of the protocols mean that campers will be evicted without the benefit of rights or process.

This plan has little or nothing to do with ending homelessness, and is punitive and arbitrary.

And then, my favorite quote. Alison Eisinger, on the unfortunate sartorial habits of the Emperor: "It is facile in the extreme to pretend that the 10-year plan is a solution to a problem that affects thousands of people tonight."

Thank God someone finally said it. Anyone who's really paying attention knows that the plan holds few immediate solutions, and that its long-term prospects are dicey at best. To hide behind the Ten Year Plan while criminalizing survival activity is the height of lying hypocrisy.

Eisinger goes on in her reasonable way.

All homeless people have the rights to shelter and services. Further, some people might unwittingly set up camp in recently swept locations, she said.

"When the city puts forward a protocol that is supposed to be designed to help people get off the streets, what we expect to see is a protocol that doesn't punish people for going places where they believe they will be safe," Eisinger said.

Whenever a Nickels administration person gets called on the inconvenient math of very limited space for a large number of unsheltered homeless, the answer runs something like this: "Well, we have a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, because we believe that housing connected to services and not shelter is the answer. It's a Ten Year Plan, not a Two Year Plan. Seattle spends more than $40 million annually on housing and homelessness. 1811 Eastlake ... Plymouth ... blah blah blah. We're committed to ending homelessness and believe we're on track."

This is the rhetorical equivalent of fairy dust. Just a small sprinkle magically makes homeless people disappear.

The key issues of when the protocol applies are now out in the open, and the city is defending their right to take people's stuff without offering warning or services.

Patricia McInturff, director of the city's Human Services Department, said the rules were intended to apply to encampments that hit a "critical mass" of people, not small groups or single individuals illegally camping.

"Certainly, these people are welcome to go to a shelter," said McInturff, who is leaving the department this week. "But it doesn't trigger me calling an outreach team to go out to a neighborhood and post advanced notice for one person."

"How we deal with individuals is something that can be discussed in another setting -- and may or may not be," McInturff said. "But this policy is about encampments."

This is all quite clarifying.

Tim Burgess appears to have closed ranks with the Mayor on this one, despite the fact that none of the issues that once concerned him have been resolved. At least we now know where people stand.

McInturff''s retirement begins today, and her quotes are those of someone who is a) tired of lying, b) a good soldier to the end, and c) already ceasing to really give a crap. Most people I've talked to think there's a straight line between her taking the heat for Greg on this policy and her precipitously announced retirement plans. Many think that the good stuff that exists in this plan is her work, and that she stood up to the face of true evil, as represented by Tim Ceis and Marilyn Littlejohn.

As Patricia heads off into the sunset toward her Hawaii lanai, it scares me to know that, at some deep, carefully submerged level, she was what passes for an ally in this administration.

Serendipitously, the story appears online next to the Dalai Lama photo gallery.

Galloway got it right. She is my new hero. Journalism with integrity lives at the PI.

Googling "Seattle Homeless"

I found out why the four-month-old Typical Seattle Homeless Encampment Scene is still, with 250 hits since late January, my single most visited page. The majority of readers here don't go to a specific link. They just land on Apesma's Lament and scroll down through the posts. But some do, and the Top Ten Posts list at right ranks the busiest pages. I only pay for StatCounter to log the last 10,000 visits, so after a few months, most posts sort of drop off into oblivion. But this one from December 9 has weirdly stayed right up top. The mystery is now solved.

When you Google "Seattle Homeless" it's number three, and looks like this:

Apesma's Lament: Typical Seattle Homeless Encampment Scene
The image at right, if you've been reading local press accounts of Seattle homeless encampments, is the sort of scene that takes place hundreds of times a ...
apesmaslament.blogspot.com/2007/12/typical-seattle-homeless-encampment.html - 265k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

I think that's pretty cool.

The next post down is something on the WRAP blog, which turns out to be SKCCH ED Alison Eisinger giving a kick-ass speech at our first sweeps protest on December 19.

And the fifth hit was this remarkable thread from City-Data.com, where an overly contrived question about homelessness in Seattle — Should it keep this brave New Yorker away? — blossoms into a frank and often touching exchange of perspectives.

Number one was a Mariners fundraiser on the Good News In Sports blog, about good people who play in sports, doing good things, and number two was some weird thing that I'll have to figure out later.

Some Kind of Hearing

Tonight was the "public hearing" on the Mayor's draft anti-homeless encampment. It was unlike any other that I've attended. For one, there wasn't a single elected official in attendance. You'd think that since it's his policy that he's so proud of, Greg might want to hear what people have to say in person. But you'd be wrong about that. Sitting up front was the head of each affected department, plus a smattering of other top level Mayoral staff. Outside of the brief and highly selective presentation of the policy "outlines" that began the hearing, they were silent throughout.

The room, which was calculated by its largeness to make the audience feel small and insignificant, felt full, even though about a third of the 180 or so seats remained empty on this night of icy roads and impending snow. Last I saw, 64 people had signed up to testify. When I left at 8 pm, they were up to around the 45th speaker, and the hearing had been extended beyond it's 7:30 pm scheduled end.

Only one person had spoken in favor of the Mayor's policy, and it was nutbar guerrilla columnist Craig Thompson, spinning his tales of criminality, murder, and the infiltration of the heroin trade into Seattle's homeless encampments, and how we need to destroy people's camps in order to save them from this certain menace.

Other testimony was much more moving. Widely respected poor people's lobbyist and social work professor Nancy Amidei spoke of an east coast conference she'd just attended where everyone she told of the Mayor's policy was appalled, with many offering resources and advice. Nancy said there was nothing to do with this plan but to toss it out and start over. Stan Burris, with the most riveting (and coherent) speech I've seen him deliver in thirteen years. Real Change vendor John Bailey with his moving assertion that homeless campers bleed red, just as do those on the other side of the table. Wes Browning, with his straightforward list of obvious questions and his equally obvious disgust. SKCCH ED Alison Eisinger, who stated the coalition's starting point for negotiation: a real plan to meet the survival needs of the unserved. Doug McKeehan, the very first speaker, whose speech was barely audible over the malfunctioning PA, but whose choking outrage came across loud and clear.

There were too many remarkable moments to list.

Speaker after speaker after speaker spoke of the moral bankruptcy of the city's criminalization of survival, and derided the cynical ease with which this plan was put forth. Never have I seen such a one-sided response to any public policy.

My own speech seemed to be a big hit, although if looks could kill, Patricia McInturff's piercing death ray would have left me in ashes. Here's what I said.

When I got to work this morning there was a letter on this issue from the Mayor waiting for me. It didn't really have anything to say, and didn't address any of our concerns, but it was striking in that it began and ended by speaking of his commitment to ending homelessness.

Well, so far, so good. We all want to end homelessness.

But the words and the reality are at odds. The Mayor’s commitment to the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is used as cover, as a fig leaf, for a policy that can only be described as deeply immoral.

We are not ending homelessness. And the number of homeless people in Seattle does not “appear to be diminishing,” as the Mayor’s letter also states. This year’s one night count found a 15% increase in those who are trying to survive outside of our overcrowded and inadequate shelter system. That goes up to 18% if you limit the comparison to areas counted both this year and last.

We are not ending homelessness. The best efforts of our Ten Year plan have fallen well short of stated goals. The Mayor’s letter says 1,000 units have been produced since 2005. The goal for production and upgrade with services is 950 units annually. We’re not even halfway to being on track.

We are not ending homelessness because the city has drawn a line in the sand on adding emergency shelter capacity. The glib formula that Housing, Not Shelter is the answer to homelessness ignores the enormity of the growing desperation on our streets.

We are not ending Homelessness when City housing policy, as generous and progressive as it is, is trumped by pro-development policies that turn our City into a playground for the affluent at the expense of the average and low-income people who can no longer afford to live here.

And we are definitely not ending homelessness when we define those who struggle to survive outside as criminals. When we routinely speak of their encampments as places of filth, and depositories of human waste. When we speak of homeless encampments as somehow linked to the drug trade. When we engage the media with alarmist rhetoric about weapons, murder, and rape.

This is nothing less than the lowest form of stigmatizing hate speech, and has no place in a City Committed to Ending Homelessness.

To eliminate the possibility for survival without offering real alternatives is immoral. To define the blankets, tents, and bedrolls upon which these campers depend as garbage, as a variety of hazardous waste, is immoral. To systematically harass those who have nothing, and to engage the broader community as allies in this campaign of harassment, and then pretend that all of this comes from a place of compassion? That's immoral.

The rather inelegant wrap-up can be attributed to my going on a few sentences past the point when the chair loudly thanked me for my testimony. It's amazing sometimes how fast three minutes can go.

In Case You Stayed Home ...

OK. We all know that Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness ED Alison Eisinger is a smart, committed, workhorse. But who knew that she's an amazing soapbox speaker as well? Here's her speech from the Dec. 19 Real Change Organizing Project Rally. The City's encampment removals are "immoral, illegal, and stupid." Go Alison!

BTW, every time she says, "but there's a big fat but," my four-year old giggles away and says "a big fat butt!" Alison has cross-generational appeal.

Ceis and Desist

Last night, I overnighted with around forty other folks, about half of whom were homeless, at the City Hall encampment held by the Real Change Organizing project. Somewhere between 11 and 4 am I got some sleep. I don't know how people do it. Even with the benefit of a sleeping bag, air pad, and dome tent, my night in the cold and rain was physically miserable.

For the 1,600 or so people in Seattle whose needs are unmet by the shelter and housing options that are available this isn't a one night lark. It's their reality. The fact that people are dying on our streets is unsurprising.

At the rally against campsite clearances we held to kick off the camp, Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless Director Alison Eisinger asked a very good question. Why, when the city is doing so much to end homelessness, would the Mayor's office treat us, their allies in the homeless advocacy community, as the enemy? I think what she actually said was, "Why would they want to piss us off?"

She was of course talking about the Human Service Department's high-handed and duplitious response to being called on their secret policy of campsite clearances, and their ensuing scramble to manage the media attention, legal liability, and political pressure that followed.

My guess is that there's pressure coming from somewhere else. I have some guesses also as to where. The downtown condo boom is attracting a wave of affluence to the downtown, as more and more who can afford the pleasures of urban living opt to do so. In the few blocks around Pike Pace Market, 505 new condos will come on line within the next two years with an average value of $2 million each. Over the next three years, 5,000 or so new condos will open downtown. The premise is that those who opt for the urban lifestyle will not be made uncomfortable by some of the harsher realities that prevail.

This represents an enormous amount of investment, presumably by powerful people who have allies, all of whom know the value of a campaign contribution.

Which gives Mayor Nickels a two-year time-line, both to the next election and the move in date for the new Xanadu. This doesn't align very well with projected progress on "ending homelessness." So other tactics are necessary, and the commitment to these tactics is firm.

So some counter-pressure is called for.

A funny thing happened this morning. Last night, a well-decorated officer told one of our leaders that the Deputy Mayor would be by to talk with us at 9:00 AM. Mayor's staff called again after sunrise to confirm. We had a message of our own, formulated in the giddy morning hours shortly after the first Starbucks opened at 5:30 AM.

We alerted the media that Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis was coming to talk to us, and that we had an announcement for him.

I need to backtrack here to say I've only had two other interactions with Ceis. Once last summer, I interrupted an interview that Sharon Chan of the PI was doing to show her a finger puppet I'd been playing with. The time before was just after Nickels came into office. He'd requested a meeting after Real Change ran a critical piece on his boss. Amazingly, he told me that unless we allowed prior to publication opportunity to comment on articles, our access would be very limited.

We'd never had access, so I wasn't all that impressed by the threat.

So anyway, Tim arrived, and an awkward conversation ensued.

Ceis: So you guys have some petitions to deliver or something.

Us: No. That's at noon.

Ceis: But you said you had petitions. That's why I'm here.

Us: We said we would deliver petitions at noon. You called us. No one said anything about petitions.

Ceis: Well, I won't be there. Neither will the Mayor.

Us: Well, the petitions aren't ready yet, so we'll just give them to who ever's there.

Ceis: You can give them to the secretary.

Us: Fine.

Ceis: Is there anything else you wanted to say (by now, about three television cameras have homed in on our utterly mundane conversation).

Us: Yes. We're going to be back every three months, until the City has ended homelessness.

Ceis: You can go through Fleets and Facilities to apply for a City Hall Plaza public event permit.

Us: We'll be here, either way.

At this point, the cameras had tightened in. We backed out of the circle, leaving Ceis to be captured by a phalanx of TV reporters who wanted to know how the City was responding to advocates concerns.

We didn't plan an ambush. We really thought Ceis would have something to say. We figured he'd be expecting media and didn't want to disappoint. When the reporters were done, David Bloom and Bill Kirlin-Hackett of the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness respectfully continued the grilling. Then, as a homeless woman asked what they were going to do about people dying on the streets (those numbers keep going up) Ceis smirked and fled, and we offered our side of the story.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," said Frederick Douglas. "Never has, and never will." We're building a demand-side response to the supply-side economy. Ceis is a guy who knows a little about hardball. Think of us as the opposing team.

— photo by Revel Smith

The Nickels Full Court Press Continues

Well, Wednesday is the rally and overnight encampment at City Hall, and the Mayor's office is pushing their own media offensive to go along with it. We have the Raging Grannies opening the thing and the Seattle Labor Chorus closing. I've been to rallies where that would be half the crowd, but it doesn't feel like this is going to be like that. We had 25 people last night at Real Change's civil disobedience training.

The whole CD thing turns out to be a card we don't need to play right now. We've gone respectable, and the whole thing is permitted. Even the overnight encampment. Rally speakers include Council President Nick Licata, City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness Director Alison Eisinger, Real Change Organizing Project participant Revel Smith, Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness co-Chair David Bloom, and Real Change vendor Deb White.

So we turned last night's meeting into a peace keeper's training. We're ready if the folks that the Mayor's office sends out show up to machete our tents and steal our IDs.

Wednesday morning, the City has invited the media to a lower Queen Anne greenbelt on a city guided tour of "the health and safety hazards at these sites."

Since they've been "cleaning" them so regularly, I wouldn't think there'd be much of a problem. I look forward to seeing the photos.

Couldn't be much worse than the goose shit at Green Lake.

Oddly, Real Change didn't get the press release. We apparently aren't on the Human Services Department PR list. That's what they told us anyway.

The first protest I went to when I arrived in Seattle in the Spring of 1994 was about greenbelt clearances near the Kingdome. This isn't new stuff. These things would occur from time to time when neighborhood complaints started to mount. There would be a few of them a year, at most.

What's changed is that now the Mayor's office mobilizes the media and the neighborhoods. It's their proactive approach. Meanwhile, they continue to hold the line against new shelter options, and to tell lies about there being room for more people.

One of the things that happens in the media is that issues turn into cartoons. It's the besieged neighborhoods — over-run by Asian heroin cartels living in concrete bunkers, discarded syringes, and a rising tide of human waste — against the clueless bleeding hearts who are fighting for the right to shit in the woods.

For the record, people shouldn't have to sleep in the woods in the winter unless they have the appropriate REI gear. And shelters shouldn't be an overcrowded poor excuse for a mental health system for the poor. And poor people should be able to afford housing AND food. And the minimum wage should be a livable wage. And there should be universal health care in America. And anyone who wants to get into drug treatment should be able to without jumping through twenty hoops designed to weed out all but the most determined.

And the Mayor shouldn't be able to say he's ending homelessness when he's only hiding the evidence.

But that's not the world we live in, is it? So, maybe we'll see you Wednesday. Click here for info.

Seattle Rejects HUD Propaganda Offensive

If ever there was a government agency that deserved absolutely no credit for ending homelessness, it would be HUD. This is the agency that hasn't spend a dime on new public housing since 2001, and has actually lost 100,000 units since 1996. This week, they cooked some stats and shuffled around some dough to serve up big bowls of media pap about winning the war on homelessness.

Some ate less heartily than others. The Washington Post, which has apparently been reduced to simply editing government press releases for length before dropping them into the paper, was one of the worst. Their idea of balance was to use a quote from USICH lapdog National Alliance to End Homelessness:

"In the past few years, there has been a significant investment in ending chronic homelessness, both in time and resources," said Mary Cunningham, director of the Homelessness Research Institute at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

"Communities across the country are really working hard on this issue," she said. "It would be a major disappointment if the numbers were not going down."

Yeah. Totally major. Thanks for the critical perspective Mary.

The New York Times passed on it altogether and instead ran this utterly depressing but excellent piece of reporting on the escalating numbers of homeless veterans.

Special traits of the current wars may contribute to homelessness, including high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, which can cause unstable behavior and substance abuse, and the long and repeated tours of duty, which can make the reintegration into families and work all the harder.

Frederick Johnson, 37, an Army reservist, slept in abandoned houses shortly after returning to Chester, Pa., from a year in Iraq, where he experienced daily mortar attacks and saw mangled bodies of soldiers and children. He started using crack cocaine and drinking, burning through $6,000 in savings.

“I cut myself off from my family and went from being a pleasant guy to wanting to rip your head off if you looked at me wrong,” Mr. Johnson said.

God I hate this fucking war. The LA Times also passed on the HUD propaganda-fest and picked up on an AP version of the homeless vets story as well, and the Boston Globe took a similar route.

The NAEH just released a new report, Vital Mission: Ending Homelessness Among Veterans, which says that one in four homeless people are vets and contains this factoid: "approximately 89,553 to 467,877 veterans are at risk of homelessness. At risk is defined as being below the poverty level and paying more than 50 percent of household income on rent. It also includes households with a member who has a disability, a person living alone, and those who are not in the labor force.

The DC poverty pimps published an important report and managed to eclipse a HUD non-event in the process. Kills me to say it, but ... nice work. In the face of all this, the USICH website, which carries the HUD press release and links to their favorite story (USA Today), says they have homelessness among vets on the run as well. Here's my favorite quote by USICH poo-bah Phil fucking Mangano.

"When McKinney-Vento was first passed, this technology developed in the mental health system of response was not in common use. Today communities across the country are targeting this technology to those experiencing chronic homelessness and achieving 80-85% retention rates on average."

He's talking about housing there. Where does he get this stuff?

Here in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer story was admirably critical, and SKCCH Executive Director Alison Eisinger was Kennedy-esque on KUOW.

Jeremy Rosen over at the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness did a really nice job of banging out a quick fact-check of the HUD press release, and here's what he had to say:

In July of 2001, then HUD Secretary Mel Martinez declared a goal of ending “chronic” homelessness by 2011 – a modest goal considering that the “chronic” homeless population is at most 10% of the overall homeless population over the course of a year. HUD and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness declared that this goal could be met by providing 150,000 new units of permanent supportive housing. Beginning in 2002, HUD began working to achieve this goal, primarily by shifting existing resources from programs serving other homeless populations, but also through targeting of the new homeless assistance grant funding provided each year.

Between 2002 and early 2007, HUD frequently asserted that “chronic” homelessness was being reduced, but no data was released to support this claim. In February, HUD released its first “Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.” Citing January, 2005 data collected as part of Continuum of Care applications, the number of chronically homeless persons was listed as 169,879 persons. This is a different number than the 175, 914 people who HUD’s press release cited as being “chronically” homeless in 2005. Since HUD did not release any data to support the numbers listed in their press release, it is hard to account for this variance. But whichever number you take, it would certainly appear that “chronic” homelessness did not decline between 2001 and 2005.

With respect to the ”new” 2005 to 2006 data, both national and local advocates have noted methodological concerns. In a USA Today article, staff for the National Alliance to End Homelessness commented that it can be difficult to determine whether or not an individual living on the street is disabled and that some cities have seen increases in “chronic” homelessness even as other cities have seen declines. HUD’s release acknowledges this, stating that over 1,500 of 3,900 communities reported decreases in “chronic” homelessness, meaning that 2,400 communities showed increases.

And in a Daytona Beach News-Journal article, Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Lindsay Roberts dismissed the HUD announcement, attributing any decreases in “chronic” homelessness to HUD’s changing standards for how communities have been instructed to count homeless persons. According to Roberts and local officials, their area’s point in time count of all homeless people, which includes the category of “chronic” homeless persons, dropped from 2,660 to 1,478 – not because of new housing opportunities but instead because HUD required them to use new methods for estimating the extent of homelessness in their community. Among these changes, HUD no longer allowed them to “count homeless people who were in jail or hospitals more than 30 days, or people sharing places with another person in a hotel.” As Roberts concluded, “If you torture the numbers enough, you can make them tell you anything. I think they would really like the picture to be rosier. I think it's justification of not providing adequate funding to address the genuine need. Skewing the numbers doesn't make these people go away." Without more information from HUD on how rules for counting homeless persons have changed, any reported decrease in “chronic” homelessness remains suspect.

In addition, HUD efforts to focus federal homeless assistance resources on the “chronic” homeless population have had a profound impact on homelessness among children, youth, and families. At the same time that New York City cited a decrease in “chronic” homelessness, the city also reported a record number of homeless families. Similar issues have occurred in Philadelphia, where funding for successful housing and services programs for homeless families was reduced in order to focus on “chronically” homeless individuals – an effort that even organizations serving the homeless street population have criticized. Increases in family homelessness help to explain why HUD is unable to report any overall decrease in homelessness.

So, what does this reported 11.5 percent drop in homelessness mean? Not all that much. Mostly, it means that some people are desperate enough to show success that they don't care how much damage they have to do to truth to get there. Alison nailed it:

"While we would applaud a genuine decrease in either chronic homelessness or homelessness, because after all that is what we are all working night and day to accomplish, we would really appreciate fewer press conferences and more investment in additional Section 8 vouchers and in substantial changes to how we house the people of this country."

Pearl Moskowitz' Last Stand

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifIt's the end of August and we're off to our annual family pilgrimage to Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula. This year we're going to mix things up and spend a few days at Kalaloch as well.

Nearly everyone else in the world has checked out through Memorial Day weekend as well. I'm way too obsessive about this blog to abandon it altogether, but I have a plan, which occurred to me about ten minutes ago. For the next week, you may look forward to a series of postings of no consequence.

So, if you're looking for another diatribe regarding the Satanic essence of Phil Mangano, or my latest take on the dark slimy underbelly of ten year plans to end homelessness, you'll have to wait. While I might surprise myself and have a thoughtful moment, the odds, frankly, are against it.

So, for my first posting of no consequence, I thought I'd publish this beautiful watercolor from Pearl Moskowitz's Last Stand, which our friend Alison brought as a gift for Kay and Mica when she came visiting last night. Below is a gratuitously adorable photo of the girls, as Alison reads to them from Babar. Alison didn't bring Babar, which tends to reinforce colonialist attitudes and almost always ends with someone getting a medal. No. Alison brought them an out of print children's story about an activist Jewish mom who saves a tree from developers by engaging the enemy with kugel. She picks this book up used whenever she sees it to eventually give away.

It's an awesome kids book.

I do that too. Here's my list of books I buy used whenever I see them to give away to the next person I deem to be both worthy and in need: Lawrence Boadt's Reading the Old Testament study guide, Carolyn Forche's Against Forgetting anthology of war poetry; and Elliot Liebow's brilliant and moving ethnography of homeless women Tell Them Who I Am. I have also been known to do this with John Hersey's The Wall and Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine, two very different fictionalizations of underground resistance to fascism during World War II that everyone on the planet should really read sometime. More embarrassingly, I also give away copies of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.