When neutrality is choosing a side

(TW: sexual assault, emotional abuse)

In October 2021, KUOW published an article in which three women accused Ken Stringfellow, co-founder of the Posies, of sexual misconduct.¹

The Posies broke up shortly before the article appeared because of the allegations.² Others who had worked with Ken denounced him and cut ties as well. As often happens, however, others did not cut ties. Some went silent. Some outright defended him for a variety of reasons, from the subjective and personal — “I lived with him and he was never like this,” “he has always been such a nice guy,” to the surface-level objective — “the accusations have not been adjudicated in court,” “no one but the people involved could know the truth.” And then, the king of fake objective viewpoints: “I only care about the music,” the excuse that implies that someone can do horrible things and the excuser won’t care as long as the accused is talented.

Ken apologized — sort of, one of those wishy-washy semi-apologies — while denying the specific allegations, and said he was going to “take a break from public life to fully examine these issues and, ideally, repair them via therapy. I am committed to recalibrating my life with compassionate and respectful values for all people.”³

Fast-forward exactly three years to October 2024. Ken has a new album coming out. Not just an album. A concept album. A concept album about his last three years.

Promo material for the new album and its singles says things like: “A searing indictment of betrayal and abuse,” and describes it as being written “as Ken recovered from a serious personal ordeal making him unable to sing or touch an instrument, until these songs started to present themselves in dreams.”⁴

If you think the “betrayal and abuse” refers to Ken’s alleged betrayal and abuse of the women who have accused him, you would be wrong. Ken’s current message is that he, himself, has been abused and betrayed and that the accusations are some sort of conspiracy. Ken has directly called the allegations “false” and “malicious,” and says “The truth will come, when it’s ready. The facts don’t support the narrative that was sold.”⁵

He is basing his current career strategy on attacking the women (as well as his former Posies co-leader, Jon Auer) and restating this perspective in every interview and press release.

Let me remind you that one of the things he has been accused of is an attack that by any definition is rape, though the KUOW article carefully avoids the word:

“Stringfellow pushed her to the floor inside a stall, she said. Her head hit the tiles. She said he then pulled down her underwear and bit her vagina.

“‘He was biting me,’ Chambers said. ‘It was very painful.’

“On the bathroom floor, he had sex with her forcibly, she said.”⁶

Let me also remind you that according to KUOW, this account was backed up with medical records and texts. And yet what Ken went through is a “serious personal ordeal”?

It is true that only the people who were there can know with 100% certainty exactly what happened. The rest of us must decide who to believe. (I believe the women.) But what kind of person chooses to base his promotional strategy on targeting and abusing multiple women who accused him of abuse, painting himself as their victim, in a desperate attempt to resurrect the career that he sabotaged?

And to go beyond that — what kind of person makes a point of telling Ken how sorry they are that he’s gone through such a hard time, and giving him a platform to continue abusing the women he’s allegedly hurt? If there is any chance at all the allegations are true, who would do that? Who would choose to add to their trauma? (The number of women who have accused Ken is in double-digits, now.⁷ Do the enablers think they are all lying or conspirators? Really?)

Unfortunately, we now have an answer to the latter question: the (mostly, but not entirely male) podcasters, promoters, and the like who feature him on the air and in their venues.

In the announcement of a Material Issues episode featuring Ken in September, David Bash stated “Yes, we’re aware of the controversy. We’re here to talk about the music; any negative comments regarding the controversy will be deleted, so please honor our wishes and keep them to yourself.”⁸

You might think this means the podcast would stay neutral and not talk about the controversy at all, but since Ken’s story of the “personal ordeal” is fundamental to the new album’s composition, it gets talked about at length.⁹ “It was hellish, and so unfair,” Ken says, and compares it to the Salem witch trials.

Later in the interview, Bash says:

“One person who did stick by you, and this, this should be telling to all those people who think, well, if Jon disowned him, then it must be true — your wife’s stuck by you. …Why don’t people look at that and say, well, then, if she’s stuck by, maybe it isn’t true. But you know, people want to believe the bad stuff all the time.”¹⁰

It’s clear that Bash is not approaching this interview in a neutral, journalistic fashion, but instead providing a scaffold to Ken’s side of the story. It’s not, in fact, just “about the music.”

Some supporters may have been unaware of the scandal; some have canceled Ken’s appearances after being told.¹¹ But if you know and continue to provide him a platform and sympathetically commiserate with him about this? You are not just supporting Ken. You are complicit in abuse. You are not being admirably neutral; you have taken a side against people who had the courage to step forward and tell the world about some of the most painful events of their lives.

I’d like to quote @shadowsofcontrol from Threads:

“Remaining neutral in the face of abuse IS taking a side.
Staying neutral hurts survivors because:

• It validates the abuser’s behavior.
• It diminishes the victim’s pain.
• It signals disbelief in the victim’s experience.
• It enables the abuser to continue.

Neutrality reinforces the abuser’s facade, leaving the survivor feeling isolated and unsupported. Standing with the survivor is about doing what’s right, not about choosing sides.”¹²

This can’t be “just about the music” anymore. I think the people, podcasts, and venues who have recently worked with or are about to work with Ken need to consider whether they truly want to be “neutral” or supportive of Ken Stringfellow, under the circumstances.

Ken produced my album, Looking For Buildings, which came out three days before the KUOW article. Though it was painful, I made a statement acknowledging the situation and stating that I believed the women not because of any social media “witch hunt,” but because it was the right thing to do. I then cut ties with Ken. Will these people/platforms/venues do the same? I’d like to think they will.

• David Bash, Mark Hershberger — Material Issues podcast
• PopFuss podcast¹³
• Randy Now’s Man Cave, 119 West Ward Street Hightstown, NJ 08520¹⁴
• Hidden Tracks Records, 520 Main Street Boonton, NJ 07005¹⁵
• Sala Rockville, 32 Calle de Orense 28020 Madrid, Spain¹⁶
• DJ Hollywood, KLBP 99.1 FM¹⁷
• Mal Fantome (band)¹⁸
• Suzi Quatro, Lydia Lunch, Bruce Thomas, Pete Thomas, and others on Ken’s latest album¹⁹

Sources:

1. https://www.kuow.org/stories/as-sexual-misconduct-allegations-dog-ken-stringfellow-of-the-posies-the-band-breaks-up
2. Ibid.
3. https://variety.com/2021/music/news/posies-ken-stringfellow-apology-sexual-misconduct-1235099109/
4. https://towerrecords.com/products/stringfellow-ken-circuit-breaker
5. https://www.threads.net/@kenstringfellow/post/C_gLl3nNNe9
6. https://www.kuow.org/stories/as-sexual-misconduct-allegations-dog-ken-stringfellow-of-the-posies-the-band-breaks-up
7. https://www.believe-women.com/statements/a-joint-statement-regarding-ken-stringfellow — This adds to the women who accused Ken in the 2021 article.
8. https://www.facebook.com/groups/materialissues/posts/902523758359312/
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC4CvCAKaIc
10. Ibid.
11. https://eugeneweekly.com/2024/10/17/the-shows-over/
12. https://www.threads.net/@shadowsofcontrol/post/DBWsxzfMsSp
13. https://popfuss.podbean.com/e/ken-stringfellow/
14. https://www.eventbrite.com/o/ken-stringfellow-17952570432
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. https://x.com/KLBPFM/status/1848164416572764339
18. https://x.com/MalFantome
19. https://kenstringfellow.bandcamp.com/album/circuit-breaker

If you need help:

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline
http://rainn.org
1 800 656 HOPE (4673)
Crisis Text Line:
SMS: Text “HELLO” or “HOLA” to 741–741

I went to Target yesterday to pick up a couple things. I had heard that some Pride items were pulled from the shelves because of “employee safety,” and admittedly, I was a bit curious what would be left. Most media coverage explained that some Abprallen-created items would specifically be pulled, and also referred to some swimsuits.

This was how Target’s official announcement put it:

“Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior. Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.”

Based on that, I expected some items to be removed but the rest intact. This is Atlanta, after all, not rural, conservative Georgia. I did not expect what I actually saw there — most Pride items swept away completely. (Last year, in contrast, the display was there through most of June.) The Pride display was gone — no Pride decorations left. A normal, non-Pride swimsuit display took its place. In the “Bulldog’s Playground” in the front of the store, many shelves were empty, all Pride items gone. (According to some Target team members on Reddit, they aren’t even selling the Bulldog’s Playground stuff elsewhere — it’s being liquidated.)* I saw an empty Pride flag wrapper on one of the empty shelves. Near the bottom of one shelf, I found 3–4 Pride slap bracelets mixed in with some toys. That was all. (See all the fun, cheap stuff that was in that section before this.)

Some Pride items were in an unmarked area partway back where the women’s athletic wear is, but it looked like there wasn’t much left, and the racks were partly facing inward from the aisle (I assume to look less obvious).

What “continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year” is this?

Oddly, there was still a display of pet pride items back in the pets section, so if you want your cat to play with a toy mouse in non-binary flag colors, I guess you can still do that — for now.

I wanted to buy one of the slap bracelets they missed removing from the display. I brought it up to the self-check — and scanning it caused the red screen to pop up for a staff member to come help. You can’t even scan the damn stuff if you manage to find it! Talk about adding insult to injury. The staffer tried to help and had trouble getting the item to work at all, and I ended up having to rescan most of my order. She apologized. I told her it wasn’t her fault and it’s OK. Which is half true. It’s definitely not her fault. But none of this is OK, at all.

It was kind of weird, the way seeing this at Target made me feel a deep pit in my stomach. I am not someone who has had to deal with historic oppression and discrimination in this particular area. My identity (demisexuality — part of the A in LGBTQIA+) is probably the closest to flying under the radar as you can possibly be while still having an actual Pride flag to display. But seeing Target sweep all its Pride stuff away — showing the exact opposite of pride, shame — to the extent of removing items completely from the checkout system, all because of threatened violence, shows me more clearly, even, than I already understood how fragile much of our modern tolerant American life really is. All hateful people have to do is destroy displays, threaten employees, and put it on Tik Tok, and a multimillion dollar corporation kowtows to their hate. The hate mongers have learned from this — they learned how to get what they want. Why should they stop? It worked, and now expressions of LGBTQIA+ celebration have been removed as if they never existed. This isn’t going to make things more peaceful.

We already see that threats of violence and hatred are causing relatively recent advances in freedom for trans people, women, PoC, and more to slide backwards, and much more rapidly than I could have expected.

The fascism many of our grandparents and great-grandparents fought against in WWII is being welcomed by certain Americans who would rather be on a winning Fascist team than a losing team that follows democratic principles. (Family members who support anti-democratic [little d] candidates just so you can win the abortion fight, I am talking about you.) We see books being removed from schools, libraries, and store shelves. What next?

So, yeah, Target is just another corporation that serves only the mighty dollar, and we shouldn’t expect them to seriously back any causes that aren’t, at the core, profit-oriented. But as poster ElderEmoAdjacent said in r/Target on Reddit: “Appeasing groups who use violence only solidifies their belief that violence is a suitable method to achieve their goal. And I assure you, they’re not stopping with swimsuits.” Take this seriously. They really don’t want to stop with swimsuits.

— — — — — —

*Since writing this, I have been told that the Bullseye’s Playground Pride merch was put on “Internal Recall” status, which means it cannot be sold to customers at all, even if they find some of the items on the shelf. So it’s not just withdrawn — it’s been recalled as if it was a dangerous baby stroller or something like that.

If anyone from Target is reading this — consider also the optics of having a red screen and a call for staff show up on the self-checkout machine when someone tries to scan one of these items — “WARNING! THIS PERSON IS TRYING TO BUY PRIDE MERCH!” Well, not in those words. But… wow.

Sometimes we want to not think about something, to forget it ever happened. Sometimes, that thing we want to forget makes itself impossible to avoid.

In the last year and a half, I’ve had to learn to live with the constant background knowledge that I worked closely on my album, Looking For Buildings, with a musician/producer who was shortly afterward accused of monstrous acts toward others. The album’s existence makes it nearly impossible for me to avoid thinking about this on a regular basis. The songs I wrote, the words I sang, the sounds of an album that I was entirely happy with, all now tied to someone whose art meant — means! — a great deal to me, but is now poisoned.

Even without the album, though, I would be unable to avoid this. Since 1993, I’ve operated first a mailing list, then a Facebook group for fans of this artist’s band and their related projects. Yeah, that’s more than 30 years that many of us have been communicating. Like many online groups of this type, some members have been very close — helping each other out, visiting their hometowns, trading recordings, and so on.

When the news of the artist’s actions came out, some people left the group, saying they could never listen to the music again. Some stayed, heartbroken, trying to dance around the topic, focusing on the other band members while ignoring the ghostly presence of the accused. And some refused to believe the accusations and argued with the rest. At least one was eventually kicked out for making the group intolerable with attacks meant to defend someone he was not only a fan of, but had been a close friend of. His defenses were terrible, but still, I felt for him. The identity shift when someone you are close to is discovered to be someone different is, at minimum, disorienting.

After some time, the group settled to an equilibrium. It was OK to discuss “the situation,” but mostly it wasn’t discussed, except for occasional flareups. Occasionally, someone would mention in passing “it’s too bad there won’t be a new album,” or “I wonder if there will be any more re-releases now?” and we all knew what it meant. But that was about it.

This week, Facebook’s all-powerful algorithm decided to show me that the group had a new post — by the disgraced musician. The post in question was announcing a tribute album that is raising money for charity (a charity named after one of the musician’s songs). I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. Clearly, it is something that the members of the group might want to know, and it’s for a good cause. But I know 100% that there are quite a few members who don’t need to see or hear his name, right in front of them as if he had barged into their living room. He had never been banned from the group; he had rarely ever, if at all, posted in it in the past.

But there it was, next to his name and profile pic. “Top Contributor.” Top contributor? Confused, I scrolled down the page, and saw post. And post. And post. All by him. Facebook, in its infinite wisdom, hadn’t bothered to show me in my notifications that there were new posts in my own group over the last few weeks, until now. (This has been an ongoing issue with Facebook over the years, of course, thinking it knows better than its users what they want to read.)

All of the posts are innocuous. Posted by anyone else, they’d all be valuable to the group. But they weren’t posted by anyone else. Seeing them, I feel queasy, and I know I am not alone. But the likes and comments they generate tell me that there are plenty of group members — some who have been there for the better part of 30 years — who like them and approve of them.

So, here I am, founder and operator of a fan community for a band I’ve known in person for decades, a band that has since shattered due to the actions of one of its members. Those actions were, in at least some cases, against actual members of the community, but he himself was never really a participating member. And now he has walked into our clubhouse, sat down on the sofa with his feet up, acting as if nothing ever happened, and some of the members are bringing him a beer and offering hospitality, pointing to his picture on the wall.

There is no clear conclusion to this essay. I do not know what to do in the Facebook group. My immediate impulse is to tell him “Sorry, you aren’t welcome here,” because as a host, I want my other guests to be comfortable. But I know well there are members of the group who are not only OK with him being there, but they are thrilled with the presence of their musical hero. It will start a huge fight and damage the community even more than it already has been. And nothing he has posted has referred to any of the controversy; it all refers to the band’s heyday, when we didn’t know about any of this.

Probably, the right thing to do is just to build up the courage to ask him to leave. It’s hard to do that, even knowing the whole story. Maybe I’m just a coward. It would be easier if I hadn’t worked with him on a musical project that was a great experience, one that went so well I originally planned to ask him to work together again on a follow-up album. Plans for that, of course, have changed.

I miss the days before October, 2021, when I didn’t know about any of this and did not have to make decisions like this. But of course, my ignorance doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There were people already living with a great deal of pain because of the actions of a once-beloved artist, pain of which I was entirely, blissfully, unaware.

Unaware is something I can never be again.

Follow-up:

This is what I wrote to the fan group after mulling this over some more:

I am sorry I have to write this. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last day, and the result is that I removed Ken from the group. (Feel free to forward this to him; I wanted to tell him first and explain, but he seems to have previously blocked me so I could not message him.)

I’m sure we all know about the Ken story. We’ve discussed it before, and some people still support Ken, while others do not. I should point out that some of the people who do not have stated they were actual victims of his, or close to those who were. This is not some abstract thing. It is a very real, personal situation for a non-trivial number of group members.

What Ken posted in here recently was perfectly innocuous, and information that would have been great to have if posted by anyone else. It’s nothing he posted that was an issue.

However, imagine this situation. You have accused someone of doing something awful to you. And then the accused person shows up at your house, walks in, sits on the sofa, and starts talking to you. You don’t want to leave — it’s your house! But the person you never want to see again is making sure you can never forget, unless you leave.

This is basically what has happened. I know some of you believe Ken did not do anything wrong. But the others include friends of mine, in some cases for longer than the Dear 23 list has existed (29+ years!). I refuse to allow this group to cause them more pain.

Obviously, anyone still here is OK with at least seeing his name in front of them occasionally. It is a Posies group, after all. But that’s not the same as having him posting in front of you as if nothing has ever happened, putting his feet up on your furniture and making himself at home.

So, I have removed Ken. If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of his posts, please follow one of his personal accounts or the Posies page, which he still maintains. I’m leaving the posts up that are already in this group.

I apologize I didn’t do anything about this sooner; FB didn’t notify me about Ken’s posts. (I have since been told this may be because I was blocked. I can still see the posts since I’m the group admin, but I don’t get notified, it seems.)

One other thing.

Most groups will kick you out if you block the admins. I didn’t have that as a posted rule here because it’s never been an issue that I know of. But now I know why it’s a rule, and it’s going to be a rule here.

Thanks for your patience. ❤ to everyone.

I was horrified this week when someone I know changed her Facebook userpic to show a Confederate flag over her face, in the way that many of the rest of us have rainbow flags on ours this week. And I said so. Response? It’s “Southern Pride!”

And this is what I say to that.

To the majority of people in this country that flag doesn’t stand for pride. It stands for racism. It stands for hate.

It stands for intimidation of African-Americans and other minorities.

It stands for burning crosses on black folks’ lawns.

It stands for sundown towns.

It stands for Dixiecrats and separate drinking fountains.

It stands for segregated trains and buses.

It stands for children having to be escorted by police or military to desegregate a school because of the racist crowd trying to keep them out.

It stands for the noose and a crowd of sightseers cheerfully watching a black man die.

It stands for four girls blown up by 15+ sticks of dynamite in a Birmingham church in 1963.

And right now, by God, it stands for nine dead in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Even if you yourself don’t have that kind of hate, and the rebel flag really does mean absolutely nothing but Southern heritage to you, you should have enough empathy to realize how it makes others feel when you so proudly display that symbol.

“We’ve told you for years it offends us, yet you continue to fly it, and that shows you hold us in disregard and much disdain,” said Nelson Rivers III, National Field Operations for the NAACP in 1999, during a previous flag controversy in South Carolina.

By displaying the flag at this point in our history, you should also take note of who you stand alongside.

The KKK loves them some rebel flag, all right.

So displaying it for “heritage” tells a large portion of the population that you must be racist, that you don’t care about hurting others, that you think some people’s feelings are worth far less than your own, and that you are willing to stand alongside the Ku Klux Klan. When you get down to it, it doesn’t matter what you think the flag stands for. You are communicating another message entirely, one that the rest of us hear loud and clear.

South Carolina State Senator Paul Thurmond, who has pretty good “Southerner” credentials himself, had this to say about the “heritage” argument:

“I am aware of my heritage. But my appreciation for the things that my forebearers accomplished to make my life better doesn’t mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions and, for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery. Think about it for just a second. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves and continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will. I am not proud of this heritage. These practices were inhumane and were wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Thurmond is right. There are some things you shouldn’t be proud of, and some messages that you shouldn’t send. The message sent in 2015 by the Confederate flag is pretty close to the top of that list.

POSTSCRIPT: Later in the evening I was talking to someone else who insisted that the problem with this issue is that the Confederate battle flag is not and never was about racism, just about treason and sedition, and that some Northerners were slave owners, and some Southerners abolitionists. Well, yeah, it’s about treason all right, and considering how many young (and not-so-young) Americans died because of that treason it seems inappropriate to display it on government property anyway. And of course the North was not universally made up of the righteous, and the South was not made up entirely of hard-hearted slavers. Still, there is no question that the flag and the Civil War itself were racist, and this is the foundation on which the entire conflict rested.

A few things that I hope you will read that elaborate on this:

• The Confederate Flag Was Always Racist
• William Thompson Designed the Confederate Flag Explicitly as a Racist Symbol
• White supremacy's gross symbol: What the "the stars and bars" really represent - and why
• They're still fighting the Civil War - and still lying about the Confederate flag
• What This Cruel War Was Over

by Wendi Dunlap

June 26, 2015

I loved being married. I took it very seriously and it meant a lot to me. I remember that when we made that commitment it really did feel to me as if it changed the relationship in a positive way; it added depth that wasn’t there before. The knowledge that we were always there for each other and had stood up in front of friends and family to pledge so — it was a powerful thing. We were each other’s home, then.

I have a tremendous amount of sadness still that my marriage turned out the way it did. I could not have foreseen the result even the day before everything fell apart. But I enjoyed enough of what could be in the 14 years before that, and have seen enough true commitment in the people around me, that I cannot imagine denying anyone the joy and power of a good marriage just because of their gender. It is, in a very fundamental way that I feel down to my bones, unjust.

As the dominoes fell state by state in the last few years, I’ve cried every time, watching people who waited so long to stand in front of a judge and marry, and thinking about those we lost who never got to. And today, here go the tears again. But finally, this time is different. The law says that if we — Americans, not Washingtonians or Iowans or Californians or whomever — want to marry, we have that freedom. Gay, straight, it doesn’t matter. Love matters. Marriage matters.

Love each other, be happy, be each other’s joy and home. I am so damned happy for everyone this weekend.

I want to see some wedding pix, folks! Get to it!

by Wendi Dunlap

I heard gunfire again the other night while sitting at home in front of the computer. One pop sound, and this time I knew it wasn’t a car backfiring, or firecrackers, or any of the other loud noises that you occasionally hear in a city neighborhood. This time I knew. I knew because it’s the fourth time gunshots have been fired within two blocks of my house in less than a year.

You might guess that I live in a rough neighborhood. You’d be wrong. North Beacon Hill, for many years, was a working class neighborhood, largely populated by Asian-Americans who were limited by redlining to certain areas within the city. When I moved here 19 years ago, that ethnic character was only just beginning to change, and the North Beacon neighborhood was a quiet, friendly small town inside the larger, busier city. “The forgotten neighborhood,” I called it sometimes. No one came here unless they needed to — it’s not on the way to or from anywhere — and often it felt like the rest of the city didn’t even know we were here.

Of course, there were the occasional crimes, like any other place in the city. House break-ins, car prowls, drug deals, a guy stealing people’s landscaping. Sometimes worse things — assaults, domestic violence, and the like. Graffiti on some neighborhood walls showed that we were not immune from the presence of gangs. Nor were we immune from gun violence. As the editor of the Beacon Hill Blog, our local news blog for several years, I was aware of many incidents taking place here on North Beacon. In general, however, it was never the kind of place where you felt unsafe. Far from it.

One: the momentary delay

Oddly, this feeling of general safety hasn’t really changed. The four times I’ve heard gunfire near my house have very little in common. The first time, I was in my living room when I heard the first three loud pops. “Firecrackers?” I wondered in the momentary delay before a fourth pop. Behind that thought was another. “Gunfire?” But it really did sound like firecrackers. I put it out of my mind for what must have been all of 30 seconds, when I heard multiple sirens, all getting closer and closer. And that was when I realized I’d heard a gun after all.

María Isabel Vélez on Twitter

@melissajonas @beaconhillblog Was having dinner at BdC's back deck when heard 1st shot, woman screaming/crying, more shots. Ran inside.

Behind local pizza place Bar del Corso, two men got in an argument. One man took out a gun, shot the other man, then himself. (That was the delay I noticed.) The shooter died from his self-inflicted wound; the last I heard, the victim was expected to recover completely. It was horrifying, but was pretty clearly an isolated incident. The Seattle Times noted that the shooting took place in “a normally quiet and safe residential neighborhood.”

Two: stop and drop

Life went on. Then in December, my boyfriend was at my house with me. He was visiting from Pennsylvania, on his first visit to Seattle. A sudden loud CRACK!, much louder than the August shots, and I was flat on the floor, having not even consciously thought before dropping to the ground for safety. “That was a gun, it was a gun —” This shot, as it turned out, was only a few feet from my front door.

Again, the sirens came closer and closer as just about every neighbor within sight called 911, and the crowd that had been hanging out in front of my house in the first place got the hell out of the area. Again, I was shaking with adrenaline. Scott tried to calm me. This shot had been so much louder than the previous one that calm was difficult.

I watched the police lights in front of my house, and the officers walking around. I wondered if they would want to speak to us, though there wasn’t really anything I could tell them. I heard a shot, it was close, that was all I knew.

After a while, though, most of the police cars went away and the sense of tension outside died away. As it turned out, a gun did go off directly in front of my house, but no one had actually been shot. Someone, apparently, was just being really stupid with a loaded weapon. I was relieved, but still jittery.

Three: the high school senior

Three months later the sound of gunfire again echoed through nearby streets, this time in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. “I was watching TV and I heard ‘pop, pop,’ ” a neighbor told the Seattle Times. She went to the window and saw 17-year-old Cleveland High School student Robert Robinson Jr. lying on the ground at Forest and 15th. As before, the Times noted the quietness of the neighborhood, and the disbelief of neighbors that such a thing would happen here.

Nick Abraham on Twitter

My roommate worked w/ Robert Robinson, killed Sunday in Beacon Hill in a drive by. He was 17. http://goo.gl/pMwQ4K pic.twitter.com/uq8sUqatQ5

David Myers on Twitter

RIP Robert Robinson. Since news keeps mentioning, Rob not gang affiliated at all. Sweet & funniest kid. Joy in class http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/fatal-drive-by-shooting-reported-on-seattles-beacon-hill/ ...

The community mourned the loss. Everybody wanted answers. So far, there have been none.

Natalie Swaby on Twitter

Students, community gathering now at Beacon Hill Station for walk to remember homicide victim Robert Robinson pic.twitter.com/I0nCVQiyqK

Four: “car covered in blood”

Surely, that has to be enough. No, that’s the wrong word. It implies that there is some amount that is all right, and no amount of this can ever be all right. But at least that should have been the last one.

A month or so later, I heard the fourth shooting, late at night while I sat at my computer just as I am now. This time, I had no doubt of what I’d heard. The pop, followed by shouting voices scattering to the northwest, and a slammed car door. I knew. I heard sirens within moments, but the siren sound died a few blocks away. I went out to the living room, looked out the window, and saw a ton of police officers and flashing lights. They got here fast, and mostly quietly.

I turned on the police scanner and all the chatter was about the shot. One comment made my blood run cold: “…shot in the head.” I stayed in the living room for a while, watching the police. They put crime tape (pictured above) around most of a block, and two intersections. Several of them walked around, searching and pointing out what they saw. “…Shell casing.” “Blood drops.”

It was obvious by this point that anyone involved had gotten out of the area, so I went out to my porch. The officers walked by the front fence. “Did you see anything?”

No, I told them. I only heard noises.

“We hope there’s not a gun tossed here in your yard somewhere.” I wondered why they’d hope that. Wouldn’t they like to find the gun? I looked around and saw nothing.

After a while they had the information they needed, and they took the crime scene tape down. It didn’t seem to be a murder investigation, so I was a bit confused about the statement I’d heard over the scanner earlier. It turned out that a bullet did graze someone’s head, which was not quite what I had visualized (thank God), but an injury that can still produce a lot of blood.

Police searching the area found “a single shell casing in the street and a car covered in blood.” While I was happy that no one had been killed, it disturbed me that it was even that close. The bullet was fired only feet away from where I live, and where many neighbors live. Why? What reason could someone have to fire a gun at the gas station late on a North Beacon Saturday night?

No more

So that was four. Four too many. No more. The neighbors who live here want answers. It’s been only a week or so since that last incident, and I don’t know if anyone’s found any specific answers to the gas station shooting, or any answers to the death of Robert Robinson. All of the gunfire could be unrelated, a sad coincidence in a small area. (The alley shooting in August was almost certainly unrelated, as far as I know. The others — I have no idea. Were the folks playing with a gun in December the same ones who fired one again last week? Did they have any connection with the drive-by killers? Will we ever know?)

I am hearing a few people on the neighborhood mailing list talk about suddenly feeling uneasy here on the Hill — in some cases, people who have lived here for decades. They are starting to think, even a little bit, about moving. I am not to that point. I still feel as safe as I can ever feel.

I know well that danger can be found even in safe neighborhoods, and moving doesn’t necessarily solve anything. When I was a child, one evening we were all watching tv in the living room when there was a loud sound and the window glass broke. I remember being very frightened. My parents told me that someone had shot at the window. A B.B. gun, they said. Someone driving by in a car, shouting and laughing, had fired at the picture window, as if it was nothing. And this — this was in North Seattle, in a “safe and quiet” neighborhood where people probably congratulate themselves for not living in “scary” Southeast Seattle.

So the only answer I can find for these things is that people (some) are awful. And those people can be anywhere. Other people (most, I suspect) are wonderful, and those people can be anywhere too. Many of them are here on Beacon Hill, and they are the ones who define this neighborhood. The shooters may or may not live right here on North Beacon, but by what they have done they’ve forfeited any claim to being “neighbors.” They aren’t making the neighborhood a better place. I hope the rest of us are stubborn enough to keep doing that instead.

I write this to convince myself that we will.

by Wendi Dunlap

This week I drove through Seattle’s University District to visit the legendary Scarecrow Video store for a movie screening. On the way, I stopped at a traffic signal on 11th Avenue Northeast. Two blocks away from one of my old apartments. Four blocks away from another. And two blocks away from the house where I spent a month couch surfing in 1985 because I had nowhere else to live. (I do not fondly remember that month.)

I know that neighborhood intimately. I walked University Way (The Ave) almost daily for a few years in the 80s—eating a single slice of pizza for lunch at Pagliacci ($1 including tax!), selling records to Cellophane Square to earn rent, playing Pole Position II or Paperboy at Space Port, and chatting with friends at Discount Records. I could probably get you to any of those places while blindfolded.

But I can’t, except for Pagliacci, the only one that remains. Through the 90s and 2000s, most of the businesses that had been “The Ave” to me slowly disappeared, replaced by new ones. Books replaced the jewelry store (this, to me, a major upgrade). Rite Aid replaced Pay ‘N’ Save. Computers replaced vintage clothing. And this was fine. Not every change was for the better, but the University District was still the U District, mostly the same shape and sound and feel that it ever was, with a new batch of students every September.

So none of this prepared me for the moment of vertigo I felt at the corner of 11th and 47th this week. A moment when I looked around and realized I recognized nothing. Had I not driven there myself, I would not have had a clue where I was.

The row of houses further north has been gone for some time, taking at least one friend’s old home with it. But the rest of the street that used to include low-rise car dealers, an old church, and a parking lot is now lined with tall buildings — a tunnel of cars through a forest of apartments and businesses. Change is constant around here, but this big change seemed to have happened almost overnight.

I can’t be too surprised. The population of Seattle has gone up by at least 200,000 residents since the 80s. Probably more. Crazy. This city—always seemingly in the second tier, small town with high rises — is now bigger than Boston, bigger than Denver, bigger than Washington DC. It’ll probably pass Detroit soon. Those 200,000 new residents are the equivalent, roughly, of the entire population of Montgomery, Alabama. Or Tacoma, Washington. All shoved into a city that, face it, is probably way less dense than it ought to be. People want to live here, and they have to go somewhere.

I support an increase in density, and support reducing a few of the zoning restrictions that came into effect during the 20th century. (The ones requiring huge yards for every house, for example. Or ones that limit the ability to have tiny mother-in-law apartments.) Those particular restrictions make the city less livable in the long run, causing sprawl and forcing us into our cars whether we like it or not. When people complain about new density “ruining the neighborhood,” I roll my eyes a bit.

And yet. This week I looked at that row of giants along a street where once there had been bungalows, and the disorientation I felt gave me some insight into the NIMBY complaints. It felt, somehow, like my past had been erased. That part of me had been erased. The house I visited to adopt a tiny polydactyl calico kitten (I named her “Fang”)— erased. Like it was never there. The sign that flashed the temperature “6F-6F-6F” as I walked by on one of the coldest, snowiest mornings I’ve known in Seattle—erased. The sounds of the guitar a friend played in the big old house—erased.

Does any of this matter? Well, in a very real sense, it does not. There is no reason anyone anywhere should care about my memories. I still have them, besides. They aren’t gone. The kitten, the cold snowy morning, the music—those things are never going to be more than those ghostly memories in my brain. And I’ll have those memories as long as my brain allows.

Every day new memories are forming in the same city. Those buildings that make me feel so lost are someone else’s cherished places. The birthplaces of the memories they’ll carry around as long as they can, until a generation after I am gone. And then another generation, and another, all living in what has become their city, though their city is different from mine.

Knowing this does not eliminate the quiet ache of knowing that the places, people, colors and sounds of your memory are being erased to make room for others, and in the meantime the places that were a part of you become more and more invisible, and you, with them, fading away.

In my neighborhood right now, neighbors are currently fighting about whether to add a mountain bike path to a greenspace. The fighting has gotten ugly, and the emotions involved seem — to some—inexplicable. But they, too, feel that disorientation from change. The change may be good. Certainly, the new apartment buildings in the U District are better than parking lots. But, if nothing else, change by definition means things will be different. What you counted on to be there as part of the music (foreground or background) of your daily life will be gone, and it’s never coming back.

We should respect that people feel strongly about that loss. Most of us are going to feel it at some point, more and more as we age. And it is painful, that twinge you feel the day you get online and find that your favorite nightclub was torn down or the house you once lived in is made unrecognizable. When people fight change, they’re often just trying to avoid that pain, the feeling that the city is no longer theirs.

But the world changes around us and we have to make peace with the understanding that it will not always be ours to manage. This is something that no one really wants to believe. Still, not every change that erases part of your past is a bad one; many changes will make things better for the people who follow you here and remain after you’re gone. Good changes should be supported.

Are the new buildings on 11th a good change? Probably. The changes in density needed to happen, there as elsewhere in Seattle. New homes, businesses — they are absolutely better than the parking lots that some of them replaced. Sometimes we forget about good change like this, and think that keeping things exactly the same as our sepia-toned nostalgia is best for everyone. It’s a natural impulse, if not always the right choice.

This is not to say that everything should change and that all change is good. Of course not. There are still changes that need to be fought, but only while remembering that what we all want—new neighbors and old locals both—is a livable, human-scale city, and achieving that will sometimes require change.

I will get over my feeling of displacement with time, while still mourning the Seattle that once was and never can be again. The scenery has changed, but the city is still my city, still the place where most of my life has taken place. These changes won’t really erase my memories, or me. At least, not yet.