The Say Their Names Memorial highlights the memory of over 240 Black individuals who have died due to police violence and institutional racism. The memorial will be in Kirkland through November 30, 2020, and can be viewed at six area churches in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland.
The Seattle LGBTQ Commission will announce on Thursday that they are joining calls for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to resign or be removed from office.
The public open letter to Durkan and the Seattle City Council reads, in part:
“It is with a heavy heart that we call for Mayor Durkan’s resignation. Mayor Durkan is Seattle’s first out lesbian mayor and only the second woman to hold that office. We believe that LGBTQ+ people and women, along with Black people and others targeted by white supremacy, belong at all levels of the local and federal government. Such representation is important. However, that representation must involve work to protect our community members from very real harm and violence that has been leveraged against Black and brown LGBTQ+ people. Mayor Durkan’s
actions in office have not only failed to create meaningful change for our community but have
indeed undermined other efforts within Seattle to create a more just future.”
Link to LGBTQ Commission Letter: https://t.co/IZV2Ayv3qo?amp=1
The advisory body of representative residents of Seattle advises the Mayor, City Council, Seattle Office for Civil Rights, and other Seattle City departments on issues or policies and their ramifications for LGBTQIA residents of the city.
The mayor herself identifies as a lesbian. She and her partner Dana Garvey have two sons but remain unmarried and are not registered as domestic partners.
The Seattle Human Rights Commission had sent out an open letter on October 7, 2020. It reads, in part:
“As the Commission charged with amplifying the human rights concerns of the Seattle community and providing the City’s leadership with recommendations on improving the rights of all the people of Seattle, it is our duty to speak up and speak out for our least privileged community members and not to be complicit in the harm done to them by City leadership.
Given this, it is our belief that we cannot wait until November of 2021 to remove Mayor Durkan and replace her with a servant-leader who will uphold the duty to protect the rights of all citizens, to hold their humanity above all else, and to live up to Seattle’s designation as a Human Rights city.
“We call on Mayor Durkan to immediately resign, and in the absence of her resignation, we call on the City Council to begin removal proceedings for willful violation of duty…”
Link: https://www.seattlehumanrights.org/…/seattle-human-rights-c…
The total number of current Seattle LGBT Commissioners was not available but 12 commissioners took part in a vote on the matter. The Commission can have up to 21 members; eight appointed by the Mayor herself. The City Council can also appoint eight members. Four are appointed by the Commission itself. The final Commissioner can come through a leadership development program for 18-29-year-olds.
Malcontentment Happy Hour from October 19, 2020.
Last spring, before COVID, before George Floyd, before the recession, my wife and I took our annual photography trip to the Palouse of eastern Washington. Littered with dying rural towns, southeast Washington is one of my favorite places for photography. I love wide-open spaces, rusty objects, and abandoned buildings as subjects. This region is an area of expanding food and banking deserts and still impacted by data deserts.
The issue of food deserts and banking deserts in America was a dominant topic up until the events of the last six months. A food or banking desert is where the nearest grocery store and or bank is a mile away in an urban and suburban setting and 10 miles away in a rural setting. According to the National Institutes of Health, there is a direct correlation between obesity and food deserts.
The issue of banking deserts is a more recent trend. As I write this, 25% of American households are unbanked or underbanked. Banking deserts create a significant issue for those who don’t have ready access to online banking, burying them in fees. Since 2015, only one state, Rhode Island, has seen the number of in-person banking locations increase.
The rural town of Itta Bena, Mississippi, is a textbook example of a banking desert. The town has no bank and four ATMs. One offers no-fee withdrawals but is chronically out of cash. The other three machines have fees from $5.00 to $7.50. On the worst days, all four ATMs are out of service because they are empty.
A check on Yelp indicates that Planters Bank is still in Itta Bena. However, the Planters Bank and Regions Bank websites indicate there is no such branch (Regions acquired Planters in 2004). In Itta Bena, like other rural towns, cash is king. The remaining businesses don’t have enough credit to accept credit cards, don’t want to deal with fraud, or don’t have the margin to pay the transaction fees.
Why are grocery stores and banks closing in such dissimilar areas – inner-cities and rural towns? Profit. In Itta Bena, Mississippi, it cost Planters about $200,000 a year to operate the small branch, which ran at a loss. The decision to close the branch in 2015 was to save money.
After nearly a decade of decline, the population in rural areas started to grow again – barely. In the 2016-2017 period, the rural population in the United States increased by 33,000 people. However, the raw numbers only paint part of the picture. When you look at ethnicity, almost all of that population growth has come from Indigenous and Hispanic peoples. The Caucasian population continues to crash while the Black community has had a smaller decline.
Just like in the inner-cities, where banking and food deserts are well documented, corporate America is abandoning rural America. In some areas where Walmart crushed regional Main Streets in surrounding towns two-decades ago, Walmart is now closing (it is worth noting that Walmart has also permanently closed suburban and urban locations). When Walmart became too expensive for the local population, Dollar General or Family Dollar moved in.
It’s easy to dismiss this as “This is just competition! Why do you hate capitalism!” I don’t, but I do hate capitalism run amok. When Dollar General came to Mowville, Iowa, it opened right next door to the only grocery store within a 30-minute drive. Business at the store dropped 20%, and with margins thin in grocery, they boarded up with no replacement. Want a head of lettuce? An onion? An apple? You’re now going to need to drive to Sioux City, Iowa, and lose an hour of your life on the road. Being poor in America is expensive and time-consuming.
Does Dollar General and Family Dollar sell food?
Yes.
Do they sell a variety of food and options that aren’t heavily processed? Barely. We know this dance music; the local stores close, jobs are lost, minimum wage jobs replace them, product selection decreases. In the heart of Iowa, you have to drive 30 minutes to buy lettuce – take all the time you need to unpack that.
Now we go back to the Palouse, which is another part of the American breadbasket where wheat fields dot the landscape as far as the eye can see. On the edge of that Washington wheat belt sits the town of Washtucna, a dot on the map about 28 miles south of Ritzville. One year when a nervous farmer drove out to ask what we were doing, he told us they grew four kinds of things out there, “wheat, wheat, wheat, and wheat.”
Wastucna got the first Post Office in Adams County in 1882, and the railroad arrived in 1886. The town prospered until the end of the 20th Century when wheat prices dropped, the harvest was poor, and the dotcom recession rippled across America. The town population has plummeted to just 208 people. The per capita income is $17,487, and the median household income is $34,688. For comparison sake, the median household income in Mississippi is $43,000 per year.
The town once had a grocery store, bank, and even a Chevrolet dealership. Now Main Street is boarded up. The last vestige of employment, a restaurant that was well known for great food, had a fire in 2018 under questionable circumstances and remains closed. Groceries? A local gas station has a small offering in a back room, take-out food, and a coffee stand. Bank? The same gas station has an ATM.
The nearest grocery store is 28 miles away, and the nearest bank is in Connell, 33 miles away. Unemployment in Adams County was already almost double Washington state before COVID struck. To inner-city America, they already know this dance music.
“Just sell your home and move!“
Sell your home to whom? At how much of a loss? To sell something, you need a buyer, and relocating closer to Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, or Puget Sound requires capital. For the 200 plus that still calls Washtunca home, they are trapped.
America’s inner-city communities might be reading this and thinking, “Crying me a river; that’s been our reality for decades.” Now we get to the punchline. Rural America is frightened because of the changes happening outside of their control. The population is aging, and the groups that are keeping the population in check are minorities. The mills, the factories, the rail depots closed decades ago. Small farms continue to collapse, inhaled by corporate farms or sit fallow, for sale, and under bank control.
In inner-city America, jobs, and infrastructure disappeared with the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s, and never really returned. While rural America waits for greatness, coal jobs have continued to sink, and in states that flipped from blue to red in 2016, none have seen manufacturing jobs grow. U.S. farm bankruptcies reached the highest level since 2011 in 2019. Even before COVID and the 2020 recession, rural America experienced a significant spike in suicide. Rural America leads in the abuse of opioids and methamphetamine, has the second-highest rate of alcohol abuse by 12 to 20-year-olds, the highest rate for binge drinking, and the highest rate for cigarette smoking and smokeless tobacco use.
The evidence is clear that as a whole, rural America is dying. There are pockets of rural success, such as DeWitt Arkansas. Still, for each DeWitt, there are a dozen Washtucnas. With each gasp from rural America, the rage increases. Corporate America interests have their knee on rural America’s neck. Instead of saying, “I can’t breathe,” rural America seems to be saying, “More weight.“
There is an old saying; a rising tide lifts all ships. Rural America needs to consider that the fight for equality by Black Lives Matter is a fight they should support. The same playbook that subjugated the inner-cities and with it a wide swath of BIPOC America is in use against rural America.
The same playbook – predatory banking, high fees, no access to healthy food, limited healthcare that is low quality, the marketing machines of corporate America telling you to spend your money on slow suicide. Corporate interests have crushed the mills, farms, factories, and small businesses that were your economic engines. Your students learn in low-quality schools lacking educational basics like high-speed internet access and STEM resources. They can’t compete in a college environment. The jobs? They aren’t coming back.
The warning bells of the decline of rural America have been clanging for decades in pop culture and music. From Randy Newman’s Baltimore, The Pretenders’ Ohio, and Bruce Springsteen’s Death To My Hometown. In parallel, Black musical artists have sounded the alarm through music since Edison created the phonograph. In more modern times, this includes Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece album, What’s Going On, NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, and Ghetto by Akon.
History has shown that when changes are made to support BIPOC people, all races improve. Without change, food, banking, and data deserts will continue to grow in rural America. Washington D.C. nor corporate America are coming to save you. On the contrary, they are bleeding you dry.
I want to start this with the direct statement that Black lives matter.
The thoughts and observations here are my own. As an individual who is a BIPOC ally and motivated to take bold action after witnessing SPDs repeated treatment of peaceful protesters, I have spent long hours in CHOP.
I’ve had rubber bullets shot at me, teargas and pepper spray in my eyes and lungs, and dodge flash-bang grenades. I have carried the wounded from advancing SPD treating peaceful protesters as a free-fire zone. I have watched SPD repeatedly lie despite undeniable video evidence from every imaginable angle. I have been threatened online and in-person for documenting history.
I have received only a small taste of what the BIPOC community goes through daily and find it mentally exhausting. How can anyone live like this? The nation’s maltreatment of BIPOC peoples has gone on for four centuries, that is four centuries too long. We have to admit our past, to acknowledge our ugly history, and demand an end to institutional racism.
Since May 31, 2020, CHOP’s (CHAZ) message is becoming lost due to the deteriorating security situation and the actions of some who are overtaking the space. Change is never a straight line, and change can be frightening and painful. There are people deeply invested in the current system, from all sides, who don’t want to see change. Others are looking at change as if it were a transaction, and preying on the opportunity to profit from it. Others want to see violent change, to serve as proof that the status quo must be maintained.
CHOP is a mustard seed trying to grow in a harsh desert. The fractures we see in our nation, and the support for Black lives matter around the world, are screaming in a loud voice, we need to change.
As I write this, I am well aware that Mayor Durkan has a press conference planned at 4 PM. We may well be seeing the end of CHOP. At the minimum, we will likely see the beginning of the political will to end CHOP. I appeal to the organizers that they should not let this happen, and have the message of Black lives matter fade with it. But clearly, there is a need for change within CHOP.
When George Floyd was a child, he wanted to be a supreme court justice. In Houston, he was known as a man of God, a man who learned from his past and trying to show others a better way. I am not a religious man and have my sincere doubts about Heaven and Hell. If there is a place after this, it is incumbent upon all BIPOC allies to not let this catalyst of change disappear in a cloud. We can continue on the path Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. started over 50 years ago. A journey rekindled in the American spirit through George’s Floyd’s dying words. Black lives matter. No one should ever again declare, “I can’t breathe,” as their essence is squeezed out by the very people who are supposed to protect and serve.
I believe that CHOP can survive the events of the last 72 hours, but all of us who are allies must take swift action. It is incumbent upon those who support equality, an end to institutional racism, and an end to police brutality to make the required adjustments to keep this movement going.
Radalyn King drove her Nissan Sentra at speeds up to 80 MPH on the city streets. She closed her eyes and laughing crashed her car into the sidewalk, killing two and injuring two others. She then tried to run away from the wreck, where citizens held her until the police showed up. Laughing and drugged out of her mind, King was arrested.
Jonathan James Wilson, who had multiple arrests for violence and assault, grabbed a woman in broad daylight as she walked to work and declared, “Do you want to go over the edge?” The 270-pound Wilson tried to throw her 40 feet to her death until a passerby intervened.
Charged in 2018 for another assault, Wilson was walking a free man in March of 2019. Prosecutors didn’t file their case against Wilson for the 2018 incident until October 2019.
In February 2019, a report indicated that 100 offenders in Seattle had been in and out of the criminal justice system for thousands of cases combined. By November 2019, 90 of the 100 in the February report had reoffended. Most are still on the street as I type this.
David James, a business owner in Pioneer Square, struggling with crime and filth to keep his business running, confronted two homeless people throwing their trash into the street this November. Beaten to the point of needing hospitalization, no one intervened from the public to stop the daytime assault. When police arrived by bicycle, and the assailant ran, they told him, “He’s a drug addict on the street, and whoever decides if charges are pressed probably won’t press charges, so there’s no reason to bring him in.”
On August 2, 2019, Michael Caballero, homeless, assaulted four women in Pioneer Square as they were trying to walk to Second Avenue as part of the monthly art walk.
Downtown grocery store Uwajimaya filed 261 complaints with the city of Seattle for criminal theft in 2018. Of those 261 cases, 11 resulted in guilty pleas or pretrial diversion.
In September, Bartell’s announced they are closing their Third Avenue location because there have been so many assaults on their staff, and the police do – nothing.
The King County Courthouse has become so unsafe, and there have been so many assaults, officials closed the Third Street entrance. Well closed to all but the disabled, which will still have to run the gauntlet.
In November, the people of Seattle had a chance to make their voices heard at the polls. They said in a loud voice, “we want more of the same.”
We want more human feces and urine on the streets.
We want more random attacks and violence.
We want more used needles in our parks and playgrounds.
We want more assaults and thefts.
We want more store closures.
We want more derelict RVs illegally parked and dumping their human waste and gray water on the streets and down the storm sewers.
Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!
Never mind the mail theft, car break-ins, home burglary, porch pirates, and bike theft. Take heart Seattle, things were worse in 1987 so don’t you dare complain about the situation today. Why, did you know that car theft was worse 15 years ago? All of this is fun with statistics as many citizens don’t even bother to file criminal reports anymore. There is no point. It will be hours before the police show up, if at all. Why should they? The city and county won’t prosecute the cases anyway.
While this happens, officials in Seattle would like to remind you:
All of this is happening while ordinary citizens have watched their rent skyrocket, their property taxes spiral out of control, their car tabs increase exponentially, their wages stagnate, and Millennial tech bros take over the city. Seattle is the same city that, while ignoring the crime on our streets, was inspecting the trash of citizens looking for recyclables.
“OK, Boomer – whatever.”
I’m not a Boomer, I’m Gen X, and we’re completely out of fucks to give. We hate Millennials with the same fury that we hate Boomers. Here is an idea, quit bitching about your student loans, quit bragging about how woke you are and move out of our Goddamn basements. But I digress, back to the topic at hand.
Just like in Gotham, the frustrated citizens of Seattle lift their eyes skyward and wait for Batman to appear. Is that the Amazon logo I see upon the clouds? Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-BEZOSMAN!
No, that’s not Bezosman, or Batman, or even Phoenix Jones. That’s the Amazon cloud you see, and the ever-spreading tentacles of Amazon, which is akin to Walmart, Microsoft, Kroger, Google, Netflix, and Apple, rolled into one big happy smiling logo of domination. Forget Boeing, 50 years from now robots will assemble rocketships for Blue Origin.
Meanwhile, at Bezos manor, Amazon plays let’s pretend to deal with the problems they have contributed to (not caused, a significant difference) with feel-good headline-grabbing projects like building a homeless shelter in their headquarters. They care! That’s why they put that shelter in such a high visibility location and cranked up the public relations machine. See what we’re doing? We’re helping solve the problem. Funny, I have never seen a Ronald McDonald house at an actual McDonalds.
While Amazon security watches the sidewalks of South Lake Union, Belltown, downtown, and Pioneer Square are a hotbed of unchecked crime. Not our problem, our rent-a-cop contract security team paid a non-living wage have our offices and employees covered. Don’t feel safe walking to your Tesla after your 13 hour day at AWS in the Kumo building? We can escort you to our clean garages that don’t smell of urine.
The reality is Bezos’s altruism is about as fragile as his South Lake Union glass testicles. He’s too busy counting thousand-dollar bills and sending e-mails with the subject line of, “What’s This,” to wrap himself in AWS super-science to save Gotham.
“Alexa, deploy the Amazon rappelling cable.”
“OK. now playing My Testimony by Rapper Able.”
“No Alexa, deploy Amazon rappelling cable.”
“OK, adding coax cable to your Amazon shopping list.”
“Alexa, you killed me………………………..”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Did you say Alexa, splat?”
Still, that isn’t the real problem. The real challenge lies in the prosecutor offices of King County and Gotham.
Over 50% of criminal cases referred to the Seattle City prosecutor’s office go untried. The police are so frustrated that they’ve all but given up. Who can blame them when they arrest a person and bring them to jail, and then the same officer arrests the same person during the same shift in the same store. Mayor Durkin is so tone-deaf that she expresses surprise. Well, when you’re the mayor of Gotham, you don’t have to deal with the criminal element like ordinary citizens. The situation is even worse at King County, where 18% of cases referred to the office go to trial. So if you’re homeless in Seattle, what incentive do you have to remotely follow the law? Scratch that. Remotely follow common decency? You can commit felonies at will and the police are powerless. Now tax-paying citizens that contribute to society, you better follow the law.
Carmen Best is not Commissioner Gordon.
Pete Holmes is not Harvey Dent.
Jeff Bezos is not Bruce Wayne.
However, Seattle is Gotham, and the Joker is running wild.
Don’t worry, good citizens of Gotham; your city leaders have a plan! If we add a few more taxes, we can get more money for housing and the homeless. A city that has taken hundreds of millions in tax dollars for the “homeless” for years with nothing to show for it.
According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, approximately $1 billion with a “b” is spent every year on homelessness in Seattle. That comes out to about $100,000 per homeless person, per year. Do the math. If we just build tiny homes and give the homeless a place to live, all will be solved. That idea turned into a complete disaster and has been all but abandoned. From the Licton Springs “low-barrier” tiny home village to the broken promises of three mayors to build thousands of units with the money, Gotham keeps collecting your dollars with nothing to show for it.
Maybe if we build a few more bike lanes, take away more parking spots, permit millions of more square feet of office space with no corresponding housing plan, we can make it better. Let us squeeze the local business owners more by taking away more parking spaces, increase the taxes, and hold them accountable for the crime going on outside their doors.
Why, in another few years, we can gentrify out the small mom and pop restaurants and businesses in the name of progress. What a perfect utopia Gotham will be of major chain stores and restaurants, Amazon office buildings, Amazon Go stores, Amazon book stores, and Starbucks. The Amazon employees can step over the piles of shit and dodge the needles, that contractors can clean up in the overnight hours. Well, that is until Amazon itself has had enough and leaves Seattle an empty shell.
Also remember, Gotham’s leaders are busy at the moment protecting Washington state from I-976. We have money, lawyers, and resources for that in King County and Seattle. Amazingly we don’t have money or resources to keep repeat criminals off the street. I feel so…safe. So well represented.
In September of 2019, KIRO reported, after filing a freedom of information act filing with King County Metro, that over 230 Metro drivers have been assaulted. In June of 2019, a homeless man threatened to blow up a Metro bus and shoot the driver. The man was arrested, charged with harassment, and released from jail. It should come as no surprise to anyone they were arrested again, for possession of a stolen firearm. Take the bus Seattle! It’s faster, it’s safe, and it’s good for the environment. Just don’t sit in the urine covered seat and don’t make eye contact with the person shooting up heroin.
As far as representing the interests of King County as a whole, I’m sure the residents of Skykomish are excited about the express bus lines and light rail coming to their community. Oh wait, they’re still waiting for Route 2 to be less of a death trap.
Now someone will get pedantic and points out Route 2 is a WADOT issue – no kidding, thanks, and I do understand that. It’s called an analogy. It doesn’t change the fact people on the edges of King County are getting ass-raped on car tabs and taxes to support transit they will never use or derive benefit. Thanks for your money, suckers.
Now someone will get upset because I used the term ass-rape, and taxes don’t equate to being ass-raped, and I shouldn’t minimize rape by using the term.
Stop being so sensitive, Seattle!
Executive Dow Constantine has our best interests in mind focusing resources on blocking the will of the voters. Anyone complaining isn’t aware of the real problems Seattle is facing! Cars are evil. That’s the real thing we need protection from, the Tesla and Prius death machines! Derelict RVs by the thousands are, of course, OK. We have to think about the needs of everyone. Except when the will of the people goes against what ironically named King County wants.
No, Batman is not coming to save Gotham. The Joker has taken over, and I guess I should ask myself, “Why so serious?”
![Why so serious? - Mark Hamill Impression [Animated]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/G7XHMR3n0WY/hqdefault.jpg)
I should just put on a happy face!
Tech bros will continue to spike rents and housing pricing. The city will collect more hundreds of millions for homelessness and have no accountability. Criminals will continue to attack law-abiding citizens who have no recourse. Our streets will be covered in more feces, urine, and used needles, and eventually, a Hep A epidemic will come during the summer months. Emergency services will continue to be afraid to respond to aid calls without police and support. Police will have their hands tied because prosecutors will continue to do nothing.
It is a madhouse.
The Joker approves.
I may not live in Seattle. I may not have a voting voice in the new Gotham, but I can vote with my wallet. I can also vote for our King County officials. I’ve reached my breaking point, and be put on notice leaders of Seattle and King County, I am not the only one. I am ending my affiliation with the Democratic Party. As part of the exhausted middle, I can make that much of a stand. Be advised Dow Constantine and Dan Satterberg, the good people of King County have had enough. We may not be able to save Gotham, but at least we can try and save King county.
Oh, and if you’re reading my statement of ending my affiliation with the Democratic Party as I’m now a Republican, you’re incredibly wrong. The party of Lincoln is a moribund, perverse, corrupt shell of itself. The leader is a wannabe dictator, a criminal, a huckster, and the GOP leadership enables him. No, I’m joining the growing ranks of Independent voters who feel abandoned by both political parties.
Climate is not the weather.
The weather is not climate.
Weather patterns are changing globally. When looked at as a whole, there is a growing body of evidence that these changes, which started hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution, are resulting in climate change.
The Arctic regions have seen one of the biggest shifts with extreme warm spells, shrinking glaciers, ice sheets, and seaside communities washing into the ocean. Permafrost frozen for more than 40,000 years is become less – permanent. In other regions, like the lower 48 of the United States, the changes are more subtle. Earlier springs, longer falls, increased rainfall when it rains, longer dry spells when there is drought. Here in Puget Sound, a growing addition to this change is smoke.
It is with a hardy and sarcastic, “congratulations,” Puget Sound now has some of the worst air in the United States. Those bluest skies I’ve ever seen as in the song have turned increasingly hazy, and over the past two summers, toxic. Most of this change is due to wildfires that have surrounded our region. Prevailing winds blow the smoke into the Puget Sound region where it gets trapped. The only thing that pushes it out is marine air off the coast, which then turns our skies gray with clouds and drops the temperature into the 60s and low 70s. Our spectacular Augusts replaced by days of 90 plus degrees with orange skies and the smell of burning forests or 65 degree days with drizzle and low gray clouds – but on those days we can breathe.
The reasons for the fires are more complex than weather events or a shift in climate. Poor forest management, increased human activity in forested areas, communities expanding into forests and grasslands, and an increase in “dry thunderstorms,” has conspired to generate more fires. The longer growing seasons, which are weather related, generate more fuel, while hotter summers dry out that fuel faster.
The ironic part is the smoke moves more people to motorized transit, which increases traffic, which creates more pollution, which makes it worse – but the pollution created by vehicles is not the particulate matter created by wildfires. The engineered congestion in Puget Sound creates lung congestion on our worst days.
Our declining air quality due to climate change and forest management isn’t just a Terra Firma Thursday issue; this is also a Weighty Matters issue. In other parts of the world, it isn’t just common, but it is socially acceptable to wear masks when sick or when pollution is severe. In the United States, this is met mostly with snickers.
The fine particulates that turn our skies orange in the summer are terrible for your lungs. The particulates accumulate, that is get trapped inside your lungs, and over time permanently damage your lung capacity. This decrease in capacity is insidious as it happens gradually and over the years. Of all the functions in our bodies, lungs go the longest before revealing to us there is a real issue – and then it is too late to reverse the damage.
As we start to approach summer, with another long-range forecast model of, “hotter and dryer than the norm,” now is the time to get prepared.
