The Sirens again

© SGHolland Jul 27 2023

About four months ago I moved myself, my goods, and my chattles,
to the city of Seattle where I could spend my Senior Citizen life near my
grown children and their families.

One of the things that was BLAM in my face, here in my Senior Living apartment, was the NOISE. Especially the noise of emergency vehicles
whizzing by, or stopping by, or being part of some emergency near the local firehouse (on Linden Ave N).

I have gotten used to the noise of traffic and the noise of the hallways outside my door. But I am still stricken by the siren noise.

I watch local news. There is so much local news here, after having lived in a relatively quiet part of New Mexico. Yes, bad things happen in New Mexico.

I have written elsewhere about the recent New Mexico range fires and the reality of those causing evacuation and rebuilding and relocating of me and many others in that fire-torn state. The death, and destruction!! All in the peaceful plains and canyons of that historic place!

Sirens there were, and still are, very alarming. The smoke! Even in our little town! The evacuation alarms! The deaths! The daily news.

We did evacuate historic Las Vegas NMexico. We went to Santa Fe.

The crimes were there in triplicate!

We were safe in a gated community. Still, there were emergency warnings of killers and shooters loose in the community. Shutter up, and be ready. A lot of that even in our safe little condo!

So we decided to live elsewhere. I thought Seattle would be much more “normal”, since I have spent over 30 years living in “The Emerald City.”

Today I saw the statistics about the city of Seattle’s crime problem.
And I realized, again, as I have been realizing for months, that Seattle
is a very dangerous city now.

EVERY DAY there are murders and attacks and sirens. I am about a block away from the notorious “red light district” on north Aurora Avenue. And all districts of the greater Seattle area are literally littered with so-called “homeless camps” — — one day they’re there and next day there’s a “cleanup” and after the cleanup, there’s the revival of the tent cities that spill out from the famous greenery that the “Evergreen City” has bragged about in this climate.

The reports are always full of gun shots, stabbings, fentanyl, meth, opioids and alcohol addictions. People are now not only complaining, but they are also waging battle against these unwelcome gangs of people who have decided to weave themselves into the sidewalks and back yards of the once
lovely city of Seattle. Don’t go out at night.

Don’t leave shades open.

Keep up with the local news.

That’s the part that I am drowning in right now. The keeping up with local news.

While I have typed a few brief lines in this first writing of this “story” for Medium, there have been at least three separate parades of whistling and honking emergency fire engines, shrieking police cars, special equipment vehicles streaming by my window toward some criminal or accidental incident.

We have organized crime here!

This is what some young people have become good at. Not school, and not college. It’s the university of sucking life out of the responsible homeowners of the city. Stealing, arson, drug dealing, robbery of convenience stores, very well designed mass shoplifting/reselling, auto-theft on a huge scale, and terror attacks on any vulnerable person, place or thing.

The young who are often children, legally, as well as the “adults” who are running the crime world and teaching crime tactics on the very same level as the famous Crime rings of New York City and Chicago that the old “who-done-it?” books and TV and films were selling to the fascinated adults as I grew up near Philadelphia.

Know what?

These crime entertainment modes still break records with the same good old police chases, but with contemporary bad guys followed with great admiration by not only the young, but the old retired folks like me.

We have more crime shows on TV (I have discovered) than we used to!
We have favorite writers of best-selling fame, and a lot more war stories and dark crime shows and reading matter than I remember from my 80 plus years of watching and reading.

I am about to quit watching all this stuff, to tell the truth. I am like the “kids” I used to shelter from this bad entertainment.