In Seattle, there are those who pretend to be compassionate by enabling others to suffer terrible addiction, life altering drug abuse, living on mud in leaky tents, sleeping on sodden bedding surrounded by needles and Mountain Dew bottles of urine, all so that they can sit in their suburban homes and virtue flex that allowing them to suffer is virtuous. This is the ultimate in narcissism.
Compassion is defined as sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. Compassion literally means “to suffer together” It is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.
In Seattle, there is no feeling of motivation to relieve the suffering, only to enable it and to then virtue signal about enabling without actually doing any of the work to relieve it.
Typically these people live in areas unaffected, far from the motorhome trains or meth camps, they are completely ignorant of what happens in these camps, or of the condition of the people there or their addictions. They are not having every opening in their homes and businesses probed 24/7 looking for a way in or something left unattended. Mail to steal, a garden hose, bicycle or propane tank. Perhaps an unlocked window and the honey pot of someone else’s life memories and possessions, tools of their trade or stock of their trade to be pilfered. The ultimate NIMBY’s
They sit in their comfortable homes, watching their chosen data-bubble of confirmation bias while pointing fingers at those actually trying to alleviate the enabled suffering and virtue flex on them as though they were marching in a civil rights movement.
All the while enabling these camps and trains only creates a magnet for the most vulnerable among us, a convenient dungeon in which to sweep those who most need help, out of sight enough not to be bothersome, but in sight enough to virtue flex about allowing them to live in garbage.
We can build a camps for thousands in the middle of a war zone when we choose. Mess and latrine tents, communication and medical tents, hot showers and even recreation, and we can do it in a matter of days. I worked in several refugee camps and have been in several military bases that were this exactly.
If we wanted to have compassion and to alleviated this suffering, we could do so in a day or a week at best. If this solution is good enough for our military, good enough for refugees and disaster victims, why is it not good enough for the addicted and mentally ill that we have living in our parks and parking strips in conditions not suitable for rats? Instead we do nothing but comment with crying face emojis when we hear about another death, rape or overdose.
One or more locations where services could be brought to those in need. Hot food, mental health and addiction counseling, medical attention, mail, phone, internet, job help, transitions to permanent housing and security away from the pimps and dealers.
But no, in Seattle we just want to drive by the dark wet tents, to ignore the addicted woman being used and abused on a wet sleeping bag, the mentally ill man beating his head into a tree, the fentanyl addict carrying bags of shoplifted goods and the meth user wearing two backpacks of stolen property while riding a children’s bicycle. In Seattle enabling is compassionate.