(Image: The Reef)

They missed 4/20 but Capitol Hill pot shop The Reef was back open in time to celebrate Memorial Day weekend.

The E Olive Way at Denny shop reopened this weekend after three months and $300,000 of work to rebuild and reinforce its 1926-era storefront. The protective sidewalk bollards are back in place. The business also continued to pay employees through the closure.

“When our Capitol Hill location was forced to close, our top priority was taking care of our team,” David Olivas, director of operations at The Reef, said in the announcement of the grand reopening. “We were able to keep our staff on payroll so no one lost income from hours, but their ability to earn tips was impacted.”

CHS reported here in February after a group of thieves used a car to ram the storefront, partially ripping open the 99-year-old masonry building in a middle of the night burglary, the third time, The Reef says, it has been targeted.

The damage left the building leaning precariously and forced the temporary closure of Denny until emergency permits to stabilize the property were secured.

Smash and grab pot shop break-ins continued to plague the pot industry in Seattle but the cash-only businesses aren’t being targeted for the reasons you might think. Former policy director for Seattle City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth and co-owner of the Hashtag Cannabis shops Logan Bowers says cash is not the issue and that most stores aren’t being targeted for their cash any longer. “The problem is it’s so easy to steal cars, the perceived risk is so low (rarely caught), and maybe COVID made them crazy, they’ll do it for trivial amounts of product,” Bowers said.

Police were looking for the suspects and two SUVs reported leaving the scene of The Reef break-in and likely involved with another smash and grab in SoDo only 30 minutes later that same Friday early morning. No arrests have been announced in the cases.

Burglaries and break-ins also continue to be a challenge beyond the cannabis industry with broken glass part of the price of doing business around Capitol Hill. In 2022, the city launched a Storefront Repair Fund to help businesses pay for vandalism or damage. Funding for that program is now closed, the city says.

This weekend, The Reef was focused on getting back to business — and getting back to work. The store opened in the summer of 2018 as the first I-502 retail pot shop on E Olive Way and the third pot shop shop on Capitol Hill.

“Reopening this store isn’t just about repairing a building; it’s about restoring a vital source of income and community for our employees. We’re thrilled to welcome everyone back and get our Capitol Hill team thriving again,” Jaime Levitt, general manager of the Capitol Hill location, said.

The Reef is located at 1525 E Olive Way. Learn more at seattle.thereefstores.com.

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Provocative point here in this Dissent review of the Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do nothing in practice?

This question haunts Omar El Akkad’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a powerful account of our failures to stop the war in Gaza. What makes El Akkad’s book especially striking is the doubts he comes to harbor about his own profession, writing, and how it shapes our moral convictions. When Kamala Harris can stand at the Democratic National Convention one night and say she wants to end the war and then send bombs to continue it the next morning, is there any logic left to making moral arguments? In El Akkad’s painful refrain: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?”

El Akkad takes us up to the point of utter resignation before ultimately reasserting the value of this work. The journey itself, the willingness to tarry with this nihilistic possibility, is what gives this book its strength. He does not leave us in hell but insists that we recognize we are already in one.

For many of us outside the halls of power, writing remains one of the most visible means of fighting back. Even as El Akkad doubts its utility, he still writes a book that he hopes might eventually change how people treat one another—both morally and materially. He scrapes language, stories, and every element of his imagination to find some way of writing and speaking that might finally push the powerful from vague invocation to concrete action. His book is urgent as much for its potential success as for its insistence that we grapple with the painful limitations of the world of ideas and values to which many of us have dedicated our lives.

….

So he keeps telling us stories, hoping they might help get us there. He tells us of his family fleeing Egypt for Qatar, and then Qatar for Canada. He tells us of his dreams of the West, of free speech and democracy and liberalism as an embodied way of life where he can choose how to be, what to say. He tells us that he has no false consciousness about the cruelties of where he came from, that he knows it is ruled by autocrats who have no more concern for Palestinians than the extent to which supporting them subdues domestic rebellions.

Then he tells us about the path he has taken to become disenchanted with everything his younger self sought and held dear. He learns quickly that, in his privative phrasing, one finds the “harbor never as safe as the water is cold.” And he sees that Western liberalism is not a development of fiction, of narrative’s capacity to expand our ability to see through the eyes of others. Rather that very idea is itself a fiction: “the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self” comes with a “dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefitting from the systems that oppress them.”

El Akkad refers to the belief that our empathy makes us righteous even as we benefit from an uneven world as a “fortress of language.” Such fortresses “pen” some lives in a permanent elsewhere, caged on the other side of morality—“a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.”

For the young El Akkad, it was “enough” for there to be pockets of liberalism accompanied by a general desire for freedoms to spread noncoercively. It was the job of morality to care about other people and the job of governments to put that care into action. But he learned all too quickly that there was a profound geographic fracture in our moral vision.

Everyone cares, of course, about the child being bombed. The penury of being human is that too often what follows is a second moment, a hideous and repressed moment that we rarely dare to speak aloud, when people think, “Oh, but if some child has to be bombed for the world order to continue, I don’t want it to be my child.” The deepest problem of moral scarcity that El Akkad traces occurs not when one cares about a limited number of people. It is rather this belief that life can only be good for some, that one side will always be consumed.

If we don’t confront and overcome this second moment, the goal of politics is no longer seeking justice, but rather ensuring the right to consumption—while maintaining the language of justice. “It is not without reason,” El Akkad writes, “that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on earth [Yemen] to keep a shipping lane open [the Strait of Hormuz].” Never mind that ships in the strait would not have been targeted if, instead of bombing Yemen, the United States stopped sending bombs to Israel. This is the perverted moral calculus of our age. Some lives must be made good, no matter the cost to others, no matter the logic or truth of any of it.

So I guess here’s the question–does your empathy matter at all? Or does it just make us feel good and thus is another part of the individualist fundamentalism of contemporary liberalism?

The post Does Empathy Matter? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Five years ago today, Derek Chauvin arrested George Floyd Jr. in Minneapolis for using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, and murdered him. 

I photographed the protests that followed in Seattle. 

It took me weeks to stop panicking just touching my apartment door handle. Months to stop jumping when I heard the dumpster slam shut outside. Five years after George Floyd’s murder and the protests that took over Seattle’s streets, I’m still unpacking the trauma I carried from covering the frontlines — fighting for my right to live here as a Black man.

I didn’t have a choice but to document it. As a Black photographer, I felt a moral imperative to be there, to capture the raw truth. I saw a man get shot five feet in front of me for stopping someone from driving a car through a crowd. I watched cops tear-gas a child — a child — because they didn’t know how to defend themselves against a five-year-old holding flowers. I watched peaceful protests escalate under the heavy hand of the police, only to be twisted into “riots” for the cameras.

But I also saw something I never expected: a movement that transformed from trauma into community. I stopped focusing on the fear I felt at the frontlines and started focusing on the people who stood shoulder to shoulder, who kept me safe, who kept me coming back. We were terrified — but we were together.

My photos were never just about documenting the violence. They were about capturing the resilience of a community that showed up, day after day, to resist it.

Five years later, I’m not sure what’s changed. Things might honestly be worse now—I got slurred on the train three days ago. Police killings have continued to rise. But here’s what I do know: these photos aren’t some congratulatory souvenir of a moment we survived. They’re a reminder.

Five years later, the fight is still happening. And it still needs you to show up.

A year after its release, many trans people credit Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow for inspiring major changes in their lives.

The post These Queers Saw the TV Glow appeared first on Autostraddle.

An open letter to Lands End

Dear Lands End,

I bought beautiful Lands End flannel shirts for my husband and myself last Christmas. They weren't the matchy-matchy ones - which you evidently don't make. His was of a substantial, durable-seeming material, nice buttons, sewn well, and had, oh, at least two front pockets. Mine was also well-made, nice fabric, great comfy styling... and ZERO pockets. Why? I also have two hands, carry all sort of things, and would have loved a place to stow some carryables. I even double-checked the side seam because sometimes they put girl pockets there. Nope. Nothing. (NB: Even your "Boyfriend Shirts" for women don't have pockets!)

Maybe you think that I can use my purse? That capacious tote that sometimes doubles as overnight-bag and survival kit? But I don't carry it with me when I am stacking wood, doing chores and just hanging around the house. Pockets. Pockets are great. Pockets are needed by anyone who needs a shirt. Perhaps you think it is infringing on my femininity or my modesty to place to big patches over my chest region? Really, I don't mind. I don't need your shirts to accentuate my positives, wherever they may be located. 

I need pockets. As many as you can give me.

Sincerely,

A Pocket Gal

If I could count the phones I've dropped and broken because measly little pockets won't hold them! If I could name the things I've misplaced because I "just set them down for a sec while I did something"! If I could get back the dollars that have fallen out of narrow, shallow pockets that were basically pockets-in-name-only! When it starts to hit the old pocket... well. 

What's the big deal?? Women have fought for the vote, for equal pay, for the ability to decide what to do with our own bodies - heck, we're still working on that one! Do women have to fight for the right to have pockets? 

I will send a shout out to my favorite purveyor of stylish clothing for women-of-a-certain-age-who-still-feel-somewhat-young-ish: J Jill - those folks put pockets in all sorts of things! Side pockets, patch pockets, hip pockets, deep back pockets, zip pockets. They've got 'em all. 

In the history of human sartorial advances, I believe that the pocket stands right at the top. Collars? For straight-up cowards! Zippers? Nothing a button can't do. Sleeves? Well, that one's basic. Pockets enabled our prehistoric forbears to carry home berries and nuts, stow some dried protein for laters, and put away that slingshot and rock until they were good and ready. I can only imagine the chaos that reigned before we could carry stuff hands-free. 

So, in the name of all that is holey (pocket pun, get it??), please, please grant me the serenity to use pockets for loose change, the courage to ask for pockets, and the wisdom to know the difference between carefree clothing and careless design. To quote my elder grandson's favorite joke: "Why did the golfer have a hole in his pocket? So that he'd always have a hole-in-one." To that I will add another joke: "Why did the seal carry fish in her mouth? Because she didn't have any pockets." I feel ya, seal, I feel ya.