I suppose that only "liberals" care about things that don't make billionaires like Trump richer

 

There is a large wetland area in Kent…

 

 

…that is part of the Green River Natural Resources area. But before I talk about that, let's talk about Kent. I don’t spend that much time there  these days, except to visit a storage unit where I keep my over-abundant video disc collection in a “cool, dry” environment to avoid disc rot, like you see here in this “new, sealed” DVD I purchased from an eBay seller who had the audacity to demand that I return it in order to get a refund (probably to resell it as “used, like new”):

I once spent a lot of time Kent since most of the temp jobs seemed to be located there, and more were created in recent years after Boeing sold off most of the property of its “space center” to be replaced by industrial parks, which I talked about here 1. Boeing of course did leave behind some other indications of its presence, as I wrote about here 2 after I did some investigating about that fenced-in area that yuppie bike riders always sail past on the Interurban Trail without a clue of its sinister past.

But then again there isn’t much to do in Kent anyways unless you are looking for a place to hide, although to be honest there isn’t much to do in Seattle anymore either; for me, the “touristy” sites are just been there, done that, and all the book, video, music and even computer stores I used to spend time in have all mostly disappeared; the “independent” book store (non-chain) Elliot Bay Book Store still exists, but it moved out of Pioneer Square into Capitol Hill, although they don’t sell video discs so it’s not on my go-to-visit list.

I suppose if anyone remembers that locally-produced sketch comedy show Almost Live!, Kent was lampooned as a “white trash” Republican town, although since the show ended there has appeared (like in Seattle) a steady stream of Asian immigrants, especially from India, which we can see from this festival held at the Showare Center where just one demographic (the Sikhs) present themselves en-mass...

 

...even demanding the city to block a street and provide them police protection:

 

So much for "assimilation"; there is supposed to be an "international" festival in a few weeks, and you can be sure these folks won't make an appearance, for "cultural" and "religious" reasons. 

Kent is also making an effort (not too successful) to attract those “yuppie” types to fill all those spanking new “affordable” high-endish housing units built in the past five years or less.

It is probably not in its favor that there is not too many places to shop in the general vicinity of those numerous new housing units, unless you count the Goodwill junk-picker store as a suitable “replacement” for the K-Mart and Big Lots that closed down; when the latter first opened it had a great selection of electronic and video product, but that was probably just to attract customers. If I had known that they were just being a temporary dumping ground for soon-to-be OOP Blu-rays titles with this moniker…

 

…I would have paid a lot more attention to what they had besides the odd Marilyn Monroe titles; I could have had this title for $7 brand new, except that I didn’t know then that I would be a “fan” of Gene Tierney after watching Leave Her To Heaven:

 

But I digress too much from the topic at hand. The other day this appeared in my email inbox:

 

Oh, now I remember this, uh, July of 2023. I was sitting on that bench overlooking the wetland that you can barely make out amongst all the trash someone probably hauled a few pick-up truck loads to disposed of there...

 

…to see if I could spot the occasional bald eagle, a rare appearance of a swan or two in the far distance, the herons and those river otters. Once I saw what appeared to be an egret, or maybe my eyes were deceiving me; but that was certainly a Wood Duck pair I saw swimming in the nearby creek, with the male bird squeaking like a mouse. 

All this came back as I reflected on how I had completely forgotten about this and never even knew if the public works department had actually done anything about it, since I never returned to the spot and never heard back from them—until now???

Maybe they were cleaning out the “junk” in their hard drives, and saw the late date on this report...

 

...and decided to assure me that they actually had taken my report seriously after all, although I noticed that there had been some ping-ponging going on as to who would be “responsible” for cleaning up the mess; it appears to have taken six months after it was decided who would be tasked to this and get around to doing something about it:

 

I ask myself why I was motivated to contact the Kent Public Works department at all, since at the time the local police always seemed to have an “interest” in what I was doing. I can’t even say that it mattered one way or the other if anything actually was done to clean-up that mess, since I never visited the place again. 

But on the other hand, there are things that really annoy me, like people driving electric scooters really fast on sidewalks, and people who are unaware the “unspoken” rule that you are supposed to walk on the right side,  for the same reason there is a “right side” rule on the streets. 

Now, I could be “high-minded” about it and say that whoever dumped all that garbage there was obviously someone who had no regard for nature, or for people who appreciated it (like me?). I could say that I was “motivated” out of outrage and indignity about the carelessness, the disrespect not just for the wildlife in this “protected” area, but for people like those joggers taking a rest on the bench, and those (mostly white) vagrants who camped out there before being the subject of complaint and police action.

To be honest, all of this stemmed from less a “public service” motivation, but from one of, well, selfishness. People went up there because they wanted to be alone, and all this garbage here was proof that someone didn’t respect your desire to be alone with the "beauty" of nature, instead making it look like a garbage dump. 

When I was a kid, heading out to the woods was an opportunity to get away from people, as Walt Whitman would say when congregating with the inhabitants of nature:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

But today we are being bombarded by images of a different sort of animal in this country; out there on the streets roams feral dogs in the form of ICE agents and those who aid their lawless, uncontrolled marauding, who act more like the gang members they are allegedly targeting, but in reality are trained to instinctively attack any human being with mainly brown-skin, sent out by that person who had trained that puppy to be a killer (only to be punished for being insensible about the "new priorities"), and now unleashing her "properly-trained" dogs to be "killers."

Unfortunately, you can’t “live off the land” or all be billionaires who can live in their castle on top of the hill like Prince Prospero, thinking they are safe from the tribulations suffered by mere mortals. I’ve spent my entire life looking for a way to “live” without having to endure other people, and mostly failed, but at least I’m doing something now in the waning years of my working life that I only feel bothered when my phone rings.

My only real concern now is if Social Security will still be there. That is of course provided that Trump and Republicans that New York Rep. Tony Simone referred to as “jackasses” in a recent Tik-Tok video doesn’t do anything more to “kill” it. The representative also called Stephen Miller Trump’s “sniveling henchman” who “one day will be held accountable” for his “crimes against humanity.” At least history will hold him to account.

But even if I had a “selfish” motivation to report the polluting of an area that even most people who live in the general vicinity don’t even know exists, the result is in the end a constructive, positive one. Not at all like what we are seeing in this country today under the Trump administration, where improving or saving natural areas is considered “woke” or a waste of money that should go to tax cuts for billionaire more interested in destroying nature for personal enrichment.

Why would someone who lives in a “tower” or a country club care about what is happening “out there”? It’s “drill, baby, drill” or “dig, baby, dig” on public lands, or firing park rangers so that there are not enough to control the damage caused by those who can do as they wish as promised by those executive orders. Destruction is the order of the day, because if Trump doesn’t care, why should you?

Besides, only “liberals” care about things that don’t “make money” for the rich. If something like removing illegally-placed industrial waste from a wetland makes these “jackasses” unhappy, I’m all for that. But then again, what are we doing about the polluting of our compassion, morality and ethics by those “jackasses”—and that includes voters who despite everything still support the destructive path merely because the lies make “sense” to themselves?