There’ve been quibbles about what to call the act of destroying homeless encampments. Homeless people have been calling such things “sweeps.” Seattle city officials are calling then “cleanups.” I want to add to the quibbles. I’ll suggest “cleansings.”
I’ve had a concern about the city’s embrace of tent cities all along, that it came with a horrible downside. We get more tent encampments that are recognized and permitted by the city in return for fewer isolated encampments. Since Ed Murray became mayor, cleansings are up four-fold. Seattle should be getting squeaky clean.
The only difference between what we have now and a potential state-authorized rounding-up of citizens is that people aren’t forcibly put in vans and hauled directly to the authorized camps. Instead, they’re simply chased from one end of the city to the other, stripped of their tents and sleeping bags and other belongings, until the only way they can survive is join an authorized camp, “willingly.”
The unauthorized camps, ostensibly remaining independent of the city since they’ve been created by homeless people for their own self-defense, become an unintended final destination in the city’s oppression of homeless people.
I am sick of hearing this “cleanup” language.
It’s all about playing into stereotypes of dirty homeless people who don’t want to be clean and have to be forced to bathe. It’s a language of degradation to justify endless harassment and cruelty. And it’s a lie.
It’s not what sweeps are actually about.
Destroying tents and sleeping bags in the winter? Who does that to anyone? Why are the orders to do this being given? Why are the people doing it not refusing those orders?
The whole thing is an atrocity.
The fact that it’s going on in other cities around the country is no excuse. It only makes it more urgent that we stop it here, so that it will have ended somewhere.
The city’s acceptance of tent cities has been portrayed as humane. It’s the humanity of a bully who stops punching you, provided you do what he tells you to do.
Because this is a depressing state of affairs I have decided to cheer myself up by trying to think of still more ways to describe the sweeps.
They are state-sanctioned, happy joyful tidyings. wsdot washes. The Seattle Police Department spit and polishes. Puget Sound waxes and shines.
Being tossed out of a tent in a cold rain: getting an official beauty soak. A brush-in with cops for a brush-up and a brush-down.
When tossing belongings, the crews aren’t supposed to toss valuables. But they regularly toss papers.
Papers such as court documents, for instance, with dates and times of appointments. It’s just paper, right? Papers such as ID or birth certificates.
Here’s an idea: What if the city lived up to its own euphemism? Instead of sending police and “outreach” workers in black to destroy tent encampments and euphemistically calling the violence and destruction cleaning, what if they sent actual cleaning people?
You’re resting in your tent at 6 a.m. tucked away in a greenbelt with five other tents nearby, thinking it’s too cold to get out of bed, when 20 cleaning people show up to actually clean everything. They have portable showers with warm water. They’ve got soap. They’ve got portable laundry equipment. All the sleeping bags go into the laundry, all the tents, even the resident’s clothes, while the residents dry off from warm showers in a portable warm room with warm fluffy towels.
Then the tents would be set back up, the campers invited to stand in front of them in their newly clean clothes and get their picture taken for souvenirs. Everyone would also take away a bar of soap imprinted with the Chief Seattle logo.
There’d still be complaints.
I’m sure I would hear such whines as “Man, would you believe it? The cleaners woke me up for cleanup at 4 a.m. today! Can’t a guy ever get some sleep?”
But they would at least really have been cleaned, instead of having been robbed.