Socialist Mac and Cheese
Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant has now won four elections! It’s cause for celebration when the senior member of the City Council wins a recall vote financed by right wing dark money, so I made some bacon mac and delivered it to the Tiny House Village. Sawant and supporters of the village overlap, and I loved seeing all the Sawant signs around the neighborhood.
Total cost for four trays of bacon mac came in at around 15 dollars - I didn’t pay for the bacon because it was a donation from my sister. I toasted some rosemary in the bacon drippings - one of those extra touches that the chef at your average homeless shelter probably doesn’t do. I kept one of the trays for our family.
Also made a care package consisting of apples, oranges, propane, ramen noodles, canned creamed corn, apple sauce, pancake mix and a bad of loose change with probably 6 or 8 dollars in it. That’s still in the car. I’ll give it to the next person I see in a tent situation so they can use it or barter with it as they see fit.
While driving through downtown Seattle to drop the teen off at school we see so many wretched, broken people in need of help who are being ignored by our society. Particularly disturbing was the sight of a woman slumped in a doorway who must have been in her 80s, wearing rags on a cold and rainy day. As we drove by – there’s nowhere to stop at this part of 4th Avenue – a guy appeared to be handing her a cigarette while another guy filmed on his phone from a distance. Sickening on so many levels.
Well wait, you might say - don’t you donate to people in need and then blog about it and then ask for donations? Isn’t that the same thing? No. I might take pictures of the food but I don’t film people, and I think those that do so on social media are despicable. Even more clueless are the folks that don’t actually give people anything, but film them in their darkest hours, coming down off of meth or passed out in a pool of filth - just so they can get “likes” on TikTok. And the worst of the worst - local politicians, busybody pro-cop neighborhood groups and media outlets that treat homelessness as a problem of aesthetics rather than as a reflection of the totally broken system we live in called capitalism. Access to food, water, health care and shelter are basic human rights but in America those things have been privatized so that a small group can make immense profits at the expense of everybody else. Many Seattleites want tents out of their neighborhood because they look bad, not because they have any genuine interest in helping anybody but themselves. For shame!
–Alex
UPDATE: We plan to start taking donations next year through direct donation, Patreon, Donorbox, Venmo and, of course, our Coinbase crypto wallet (username: @nirvanawok). Donations are not tax deductible but if you have enough spare money to donate to good causes why do you need to save money on your taxes? Taxes pay for the services that keep our society running (barely, at this point), and the very wealthy among us need to pay more of them if they want to avoid the torches and the pitchforks that are coming.