Crazeh

A lot of homeless services actively encourage homeless people to stay in a particular area and this then becomes "homeless central" once you hit some critical mass of enough services to make life survivable on the street. I wanted to help other small towns address their problems as the only hope Aberdeen has of walking back this issue rather than being bled to death by other towns not dealing with their piece of the puzzle.

That piece links out to Brown Bag Lunches and I never used a shopping cart. As noted previously, within 72 hours of me posting the second piece, things were visibly better in downtown Aberdeen and in the months I continued to live there before being illegally evicted, they remained permanently better.

IF they implemented a zero tolerance policy for stolen shopping carts within 72 hours of me publishing that, someone in town had to be stalking me and closely monitoring my every online move, if not the actual chief of police then someone who knew the chief of police and whom the chief of police would take seriously enough to promptly act on the suggestion.

If one of the free meal sites in Aberdeen implemented my brown bag lunches idea, that also would have helped keep the problems in town down to a dull roar. And the only thing most people would notice is that Aberdeen has fewer homeless hanging out on the streets of downtown all day everyday and things were cleaner and more civil.

It probably wouldn't have been announced in the local papers because it's an attractive nuisance likely to bring yet more homeless to Aberdeen instead of improving things for Aberdeen. 

By then, the buses were all free and took you to multiple other small towns in the county plus the city of Olympia. If they began giving out brown bag lunches and gift cards per my writing, odds are high that local homeless people began going elsewhere for part of the month because those programs would NOT require you to stand in line at a physical location and wait for your free meal. You would be free to move about the region while eating for free and trying to sort your problems instead of being chained to the physical location of free services and many homeless people would be happy to jump on the opportunity to do exactly that.

Aberdeen, Washington was drowning in homeless when I moved there. By the time they threw me out into the street and I left town, things were visibly better and crime was way way down.

I noticed crime was way way down because I lived in downtown and stopped hearing sirens and seeing police activity all the time. I also verified it once by looking up crime stats that said "Yea, verily, data matches Doreen Traylor's impression in that regard." And I had reason to believe MY presence in downtown and MY activities were a significant root cause of the drop in crime, though, no, I cannot prove that.

I never got a dime from them and no acknowledgement at all that I did anything for the town. All of the above programs plus the van pool could have been quietly implemented without me ever getting ANY hard evidence that people were closely following my writing and enacting programs based on it while NOT paying me, not thanking me, not promoting my work etc.

And ALL I can really say for sure is that I noticed that within 72 hours of ONE of those pieces being published that things got better in a fashion that made me SUSPECT they were hanging on my every word and promptly implementing my ideas while harassing me on r/aberdeenwa and apparently actively promoting r/aberdeenwa by word of mouth and also most likely actively encouraging locals to be intentionally abusive and disrespectful to me on r/aberdeenwa.

I effectively wrote an economic development plan for the town and I've looked once or twice to see if Panda Express or Chipotle opened up there and last I looked, no, they hadn't. I checked those businesses because I no longer live there and those are national chains that list their locations on their own websites.

So I don't need to count on LOCALS in Aberdeen publishing some kind of announcement about it. If Panda Express or Chipotle opened up there, they would say so and I know it's information I can trust, not gaslighting lying BS for some stupid reason.

I'm absolutely certain that Aberdeen, Washington has a big homeless problem because Aberdeen is a Christian enclave and LOCALS are HAPPY to create and support a shockingly large number of homeless services for such a small town. Homeless people go there because that's where the services are.

Early on in my efforts to "get involved" in community development work in Aberdeen, Washington, I was going around to various places to give them copies of various flyers I had made and see who bit and what worked and yadda. I went one place and he took my stack of flyers and then gleefully went "So YOU have a HEART for the homeless..." and began nattering on about his grand plans to turn the ENTIRE downtown area into endless homeless services.

The guy actually in charge of the program was not there. This guy was some gumby, thus not likely to actually do any such thing. So I was like "MY! Look at the TIME. I'm late for a MEETING." and left.

You know what I think and absolutely CANNOT possibly prove?

I think Aberdeen is full of Christian nutters who want to see me as their personal savior and in the Christian tradition that means I need to suffer and be sacrificed for the benefit of other people. 

I'm not interested in being a Christian icon for crazy people. I'm not a masochist and I have ZERO interest in martyring myself for the benefit of other people.

I did "free" stuff for two reasons:

1. Free samples are a long-standing means for a business to get people to TRY their product so you will be willing to BUY their product.

2. If you have NEW and unproven ideas, you need to first somehow PROVE that it works.

IF I had done all this writing -- all this WORK -- for free for Aberdeen and THEN Chipotle and Panda Express opened up there, I would have verifiable evidence that my ideas WORK. And I don't have that because they never opened.

Me TELLING you that I personally saw stuff that makes ME think people in town were STALKING me and hanging on my every word and implementing my ideas is NOT proof that will convince OTHER PEOPLE that my stuff actually works. 

I believe Panda Express and Chipotle probably TRIED to open up locations there and locals sabotaged it. 

Because they don't want economic development. They want a religious experience in line with their COMPLETELY insane ideas that the best thing in life is to intentionally victimize someone and then have that person understand and forgive you and do good things for you.

Free meal sites and other homeless services aren't inherently evil. But if "charity" is the only thing you have for the homeless and that charity is actively designed to deny them the opportunity to find a job and get back into housing, it absolutely is evil.

And if people in Aberdeen, Washington were stalking me and being intentionally abusive to me while using SOME of my ideas to "help the homeless" but simultaneously intentionally sabotaging actual economic development such as the opening of Chipotle and Panda Express to deny me any means whatsoever to take credit for my work, then Aberdeen is the new Sodom and Gomorrah and planet Earth would be a better place if a giant tsunami washed them all out to sea.

Aberdeen, Washington isn't a victim of the lumber industry changing and the shipping industry changing and other circumstances beyond its control.

It's a victim of a handful of "Good Christians TM" pretending to do "economic development" and, instead, actively and intentionally strangling economic development while playing at having big hearts by constantly "helping the homeless" while no one notices that they are actively preventing the homeless from getting their lives back so a few well-heeled people can feed them and gift them things and expect those wretches with wretched lives to sing their praises and make them feel good about themselves and their intentionally evil, abusive policies and deeds.

The only people who might be able to provide supporting evidence this is true are people high up in Panda Express and Chipotle who would know if they tried to open up a location in Aberdeen, Washington based on my market analysis only to find their efforts to do so sabotaged by the locals. Because the local nutcases certainly will NEVER admit any such thing.