by Beau Hebert
Dear The Beauster,
Do you think that living through the COVID-19 pandemic will make people more understanding and patient?
Sincerely,
Skyway Suzy
Category Archives: Voices
Sunday Comix: Landlord Lament
Next Gen: Yard Sale
Sunday Comix: Fallback Legacy Centerpiece
OPINION: Random Remembrances of 9/11
by Sharon Maeda
On September 11, 2001, I lived in New York City. Twenty years later, my mind is still full of so many random memories and emotions, just as it was back then.
In the hours following the attacks, millions of people were trying to contact loved ones. Phone services were overtaxed and everyone was frantic. No one could get in or out of Manhattan; the subways were shut down. I was stuck in a suburban New York Marriott hotel with colleagues at a conference. The Marriott had a policy that when one hotel is attacked, all their neighboring hotels go into lockdown. I was panicked out of my mind. I had no idea where my niece was on her first day of work in New York. Hours later, her mother in Seattle was able to reach me and report that Lea was safe and walking home from Midtown to my place in Washington Heights. At some point, she abandoned her heels and walked all the way up to 190th barefooted.
Early on, no one understood the source of the terrorism or could have imagined a 20-year war.
Continue reading OPINION: Random Remembrances of 9/11
OPINION: A September 11 Survivor’s Call for Us All
by Jessica Carso Bhuiyan
I will never forget having been in Manhattan that fateful day twenty years ago. The billowing smoke. The disappearing traffic. Thousands running for their lives. Instinctively, I fell into the crowd and ran, too. Remembering, my heart swells, recalling my own fear and the best of humanity I saw that day.
Upon this 20th Anniversary of September 11, 2001, these memories are triggered again. And they are reminding me to also reflect on my hope for unity and peace.
Continue reading OPINION: A September 11 Survivor’s Call for Us All
Rosh Hashanah Reflection: Measuring and Celebrating Time
by Susan Davis
We live in a pluralistic community here in southeast Seattle. Even how we celebrate time varies.
According to the Gregorian (standard) calendar, the new year started on January 1, 2021. But the Ethiopian New Year starts Sept. 11 and the year will be 2013. Islam just celebrated New Year the second week of August and it’s now 1443. Chinese Lunar New Year was in February and it’s 4719. The Hindi New Year of 2078 happened in April.
Some calendars are solar, or solar-lunar, while others are lunar based. You get the idea: Time is measured, explained, and observed differently around the world and, therefore, here in the South End, too.
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OPINION: ‘Normal’ Isn’t Good Enough for Returning School Kids
by Marcus Harrison Green
(This article is co-published with The Seattle Times.)
Forgive me if I hope returning school children experience their most abnormal year yet.
Having survived a pandemic, a makeshift move to remote learning, and minimal socialization, I say they’re owed good karma by the metric ton.
But returning to normal won’t settle that debt.
Continue reading OPINION: ‘Normal’ Isn’t Good Enough for Returning School Kids
Rosh Hashanah Reflection: Recapturing Hope
by Joy Resmovits
One of the biggest privileges of being Jewish in moments like these, when the world feels like it’s caving in on itself, is that we get to ring in a new year in the middle of the fall. Yes, it marks a time of serious spiritual self-questioning and atonement, with hours-long services and liturgy replete with some stone-cold allusions to who will die and who gets to live another year. New Year’s Eve it is not.
But ultimately, we dress up our tables with fish heads (for a new start), pomegranates (filled with seeds that supposedly equal the number of mitzvoth, or good deeds, but don’t try to count them …), and apples dipped in honey (to bless our year with sweetness) and get to wave a fond farewell to 5,781, the current year of the Jewish lunar calendar.
Since it’s a time of reflection, I’m looking at the past to illuminate the future. And what I’m realizing on the eve of this time-bound holiday — which, quite strangely, falls on Labor Day this year — is that our clocks are broken. No, not our Fitbits, our internal clocks. Since 2019, our lives have been compressed into an unnatural pattern of bursts of change and excruciating stasis. We are, simply put, out of sync with the passage of time. On top of the grief and inequalities that compound on a daily basis, the compressed way in which we are forced to take in life’s IRL splendors — for those of us who are lucky to not be immunocompromised — is grinding us down. Numbing us. This is the season of quitting, haven’t you heard?
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OPINION: It’s Time to Put an End to Racially Disparate Police Stops and Searches
by Angélica Cházaro and Anita Khandelwal
Once again, a report has revealed alarming racial disparities in the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) treatment of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color (BIPOC). The Center for Policing Equity, in a study completed earlier this year, found that Black pedestrians are five times — and Native pedestrians nine times — more likely to be stopped by SPD than white pedestrians. Moreover, BIPOC pedestrians are significantly more likely to be searched than their white counterparts, despite being statistically less likely to carry weapons. While SPD’s data did not allow for analysis of traffic stops, given the pervasiveness of such racial disparities it seems likely that similar ratios would hold for those as well.
Fortunately, the Seattle City Council and King County Council have the power to immediately reduce these harms by adopting two simple pieces of legislation — one that would deprioritize any traffic stops where the driver does not pose an imminent danger of physical harm to others and another that would ban consent searches.
Continue reading OPINION: It’s Time to Put an End to Racially Disparate Police Stops and Searches