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After helping clean up glass from a bullet that went through the window at Seattle’s A 4 Apple Learning Center on Oct. 16, community organizer DeAunte Damper arrived at a nearby City Council candidate forum filled with fear and frustration.
Fear for the more than two dozen young children who had to “army crawl” across the floor of a place that should have been a sanctuary. Frustration for the day care owners, who were like family to Damper and who have been trying for years to get the city to take action on public safety at the intersection.
I was co-moderating the event when Damper told District 3 candidates Joy Hollingsworth and Alex Hudson that he did not want to tap dance around the issue of gun violence.
Damper, a community organizer for VOCAL-WA and a board member of the day care, shared in an interview last week what was going through his mind.
“I went off in there because, at the end of the day, I’m scared,” Damper said. “I might put on these events and you see me in all these different rooms … because, honestly, I’m in fear of losing someone to gun violence, to overdose, to suicide. I am not in these rooms to perform. I am in these rooms because I care. And I’m tired of losing people.”
I heard the same sentiment at a community event a few days after the shooting right outside the day care in which a 47-year-old man was hit multiple times. Several day care owners — all Black women — including Appollonia Washington, the owner of A 4 Apple, spoke of how terrified they were for the children in their care, and in a heartbreaking sign of our violent times, pleaded for action and support to purchase bulletproof glass for their windows.
Reaching the “bulletproof glass for day cares” stage of our gun violence epidemic should shame each and every one of us.
In about a week, we will select our next City Council and, I hope, shift how we approach politics in our city.
As I have written many, many, times, yes, we need to be laser focused on upstream or root cause solutions that provide our communities with the financial, housing and health resources they need to reduce inequality, despair and their perennial bedfellows: crime and violence.
But as we focus on longer-term solutions, we also need to do a much better job of immediately supporting community members bearing the brunt of our failure to ensure all of our basic needs are met. That includes not just our precious babies at their day care but also our teens who are just trying to get to school safely without being robbed, Asian American elders who want safety in their homes, business owners who face immeasurable tragedy being continually violated by gun violence, and so many more.
By late September, Seattle’s 2023 homicide total had already exceeded the toll for all of 2022. At the same time, deaths of despair also continue to rise. By last week, 1,073 people had died this year from overdoses, the vast majority due to opioids, surpassing last year’s total with more than two months left in the year.
I am grateful to live in a community where so many genuinely care about the welfare of other people and have an underlying belief that we are all responsible for one another. But it seems as we debate how to support people in the short term, only the loudest voices in the room are heard, not necessarily the people who are most impacted by the problem. Worse, some who face less direct harm from crime drown out the voices of those who are more impacted and minimize real community concerns as hysterical copaganda.
The inconvenient truth is that when you talk to people dealing with these issues on the ground, you find there is a lot less unanimity of perspective than what you hear in City Council chambers. There is less of a commitment to ideological fealty to the Seattle progressive mold and more interest in solutions of all kinds to protect our loved ones.
It takes humility to listen to regular people and actually understand where they are coming from. It also means you might hear things that surprise you or disrupt the policy prescriptions that have become conventional Seattle wisdom.
My message to the next City Council: Listen to people who might disagree with you, especially people who are furthest from positional power or privilege. Listen, even when you think you know better, and their solutions don’t agree with yours. Consider if they might know something you don’t about their lives. Be less interested in grandstanding or certitude of position. If, in the end, we end up sacrificing the people we are supposed to be advocating for on the altar of ideology, we are doing this wrong.
As with any experiment, ask how the solutions we have tried are working. Test your theories. Find out if there are unintended consequences to what seems like smart policy that are actually making peoples’ lives worse, not better.
These are serious times and serious problems. We need to stop the social media-fueled tendency to act like people with whom we are in 80% agreement with are mortal enemies who need to be destroyed.
Damper said action, not “lip service” is what is needed most now, and it can’t just be action from weary community members.
“This is not a damn game. We are organizers, people that are of service, parents, pastors, and we are exhausted. People are burnt out.”
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