On Tuesday, February 12, District 7’s Bob Kettle presented his “6 Pillars addressing the Permissive Environment.” These were, according to his reasoning, “the underlying factors behind crime tied to the lack of deterring structures that allow people to endanger themselves and our city.” The first concerned “police staffing”; the second: “legal tools”; the third: “closing unsecured buildings”; the fourth: “graffiti remediation”; the fifth: “public health”; and, last but not least: “collaboration with the county and state.” Considered as a whole, the pillars said something that even a child in preschool could understand: If we use a bigger stick and hit all the harder, bad people will stop being bad. And that’s about it. That’s the extent of Kettle’s wisdom if you remove the adult-sounding words “permissive environment.” Pain really hurts.

Now I must tell the children a story. Children love stories. This one happened near Watsomba, a “growth point” (as developmental economists call it) in the Zimbabwean province of Manicaland. It’s around 1983, and the day is coming to an end on a small farm. (All good stories happen at dusk.) Now picture this: In the distance, fluffy clouds, misty hills, and balancing rocks. Near the farm’s house: A boy is hitting a cow repeatedly with a big stick. A few minutes before this bad beating business began, the boy was trying to lead the cow into a kraal, or livestock enclosure. But for no apparent reason, the cow stopped and refused to move. And so, at dusk, the stick-wielding boy is striking this cow, which moans in pain with each blow. And each blow comes with extra boy-force. 

Eventually, an adult, alarmed by the commotion, leaves the farmhouse (they were preparing sadza and chicken stew) and approaches this horrible situation. At first, the adult can’t make sense of what’s going on. Why is the child punishing this poor cow? What has she done? The dusk deepens.

The adult asks: “Child, what’s this all about?” The boy replies: “It’s so stubborn, this stupid animal. It will not listen to me! It just wants to stay right where it is. I will teach it a good lesson. I will hit even harder.” He whacks the cow again; and the cow moans again. The adult looks at the angry-faced boy, then all around the cow, and discovers the cow’s foot is stuck in the barbed wire of a fallen section of the farm’s fence. If the cow moves, the barbed wire punctures and hurts her right front limb. If she does not move, the boy hurts her rump. The adult frees the cow from the barbed wire, and, as the stars appear in the sky, as smoke rises from huts on a hill, she runs away from a disturbing moment she will never ever forget.

That is the story.

Now, can you see what it’s getting at? Who is Kettle in this story? Can you guess? Yes, the boy. But who should he be? The adult. Why? Because he has lived much longer than the boy and so should know more. Right. He should. One expects a grownup to see the world from a wider perspective. Maybe they’ve also learned a little economics, a little history, and some sociology—you know, the things a child would never understand. But instead he is thinking just like a boy, a person whose experience is very limited. This, sad to say, is our city council. It’s packed with childish thinking. 

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

12 replies on “Seattle’s City Council Is Now Run by Children”

  2. Charles,I will tell you another similar story. There once was this child at school who got beat up by bullies every day. Every. Single. Day. He would have bruises on top of bruises and eventually one day the bullies tried beating him up and because he was beaten so many times,he eventually became used to the pain and beat up the bullies himself. This is the same situation with the city council. They can hit harder and harder and we only grow stronger due to their abuse.

  3. Cows can’t talk, and have no agency to deal with barbed wire. Humans can and also have agency. They have a choice, and if that choice is to be a useless parasite, then it’s not on the rest of society to cuddle and coddle them.

    But cute story, regardless of it’s utter inapplicable status.

  5. And shot spotter will allow us to blame more cows that just happen to like to eat crunchy nuts that “explode”, but not actually solve any real crimes.

  6. This is a dumb analogy, but for the sake of argument, how does the prior city council fit into this? They failed to make any meaningful progress on homelessness, housing affordability, the overdose crisis, and public transportation. I guess they are the adults who didn’t come out of the farmhouse to see what was going on?

  7. @3 “Humans can and also have agency. They have a choice, and if that choice is to be a useless parasite, then it’s not on the rest of society to cuddle and coddle them.”

    Right that’s why we need to defund the police

  8. @6 if you want to equate the story to the previous council then here you go. The boy is walking by the cow and the cow kicks him in the face and craps on him. The child is upset and asks the adult to help. The adult says, sorry child, you have a home while the cow sleeps in this barn so the cow is right to kick you in the face. If you give us money to build a nicer barn the cow will stop. So the child does but no barn is ever built and instead more cows show up and kick him in the face again and again. Each time he asks the adult for help the adult tells him it’s not the cows fault. It’s his fault for not doing more for the cow. Finally after years of being crapped on and kicked in the face on a daily basis the child asks a new adult for help who puts the cow in a corral. The previous adult curses the child and claims he is ungrateful and a horrible person because he got tired of being kicked in the face.

  9. @9 where’d you go to school that had physics class in 6th grade and, having gone to such a school, how did you turn out to be such a sad loser?

  12. Lol, this is almost comical. The Kia-Hyndai theft spike alone disproves the whole thesis. People were talking about lead exposure, economic cycles, racism, COVID unemployment, blah blah and their effects on crime. Sure, they probably have some effects on crime. However, when Kia and Hyundai thefts spiked out of nowhere – there was no rapid increase in lead, no rapidly increasing racism, economy is fine compared to many recent time periods, no new pandemic, etc.

    The only thing that changed? People found out it’s easy to steal (certain) cars again! Literally the only change.

    That just goes to show that vermin was always there, deterred by improved anti-theft measures, and as soon as it was provided the opportunity it crawled out of the woodwork.

    Deterrence works. A small fraction of people (I’d estimate 0.5-1%; as seen in crime stats everywhere, disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a small number of criminals, from murder in Scandinavia to retail theft in Seattle) simply suck and need to be locked up or put down.

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