I am still very heartbroken regarding the terrible treatment received by the homeless population of Walla Walla and College Place, Wa, at the hands of the city management.
The present camp the disadvantaged officially inhabit was inundated this season by the worst winter weather we've had since the 1960s. I personally cannot even imagine waking up daily in a windblown tent in a frozen field, only to have virtually nowhere to go.
We are likely going to lose a great deal of the grapes this year, and some farmers believe the vines will die all the way to the root.
Many people would say that connecting these two conditions in a causative manner is mere magical thinking. That the city council's cruelty cannot be blamed for the terrible weather.
I wonder how many of those people own Bibles and know who Moses is.
When Pharaoh refused to release God's chosen people from slavery in Egypt, one of the first things God did was send storms to destroy the livelihood of the offending slavers. Their crops, homes, livestock, and vineyards were totally compromised by wind and hail, the most terrible and capricious of weather for a farmer to endure.
Egypt was the agrarian center of the ancient world, much like Walla Walla pretends to be. Does Walla Walla believe it owes anything to the Good Lord for all the natives and Chinese they disenfranchised after ruthlessly using them? Do they think that God's eye, his Providence, is hidden by the Rocky Mountains, limited by the curve of earth and time? Do they believe God cannot see how the people here treat other human souls, that he can't hear the "No's" and "Don't Wants"?
Do they think God can't hear the prayers of the honest poor?
Too long has this city been comfortable in its storehouse of stolen goods. For a hundred and fifty years the whites have oppressed all others, even their own poor, and now we have a city manager with no genetic ties to any of the people here, who apparently feels nothing for them in the place others would call a heart. I'm not trying to be racist, I'm pointing out that in a so called Christian city, even a Masonic city, the leaders should not be allowing a foreigner to strip civil rights from our homeless as if we were living in a New Delhi slum.
The state and city make money hand over fist on alcohol and marijuana. They tax the shit out of the people. Yet when personal finances go under from a lack of coherent insurance coverage or a person loses a car or home, where is the state? Where is the city? They pick the bones and don't even bury them!
Just like Chief Yellowbird: taken in, lied to, chained up, skinned alive, and tossed like garbage. This place would make Fallujah look like a playground if one could time travel.
Truly, one feels like a Stranger in a Strange Land, looking down at this tiny piece of America and realizing how far we have come from civilization.
