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A former Marine named Matt Payne gave an emotional speech during public comment at the Seattle City Council meeting yesterday. Just before the meeting adjourned, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck (generally regarded as the most progressive council member) acknowledged his remarks and added her own comments. (I was there in person and thanked them afterwards. The Marine mentioned that he goes to progressive rallies with an American flag and there’s sometimes a misunderstanding where people think he’s a counter-protester; I said the same thing happened at an immigrants’ rights rally where some immigrants went in a truck with a big American flag and people thought they were Proud Boys. Let’s take the flag back, people!) Matt Payne: “So, I’m Matt. I’ll probably get emotional, sorry. I’m a former Marine, and I signed up to defend the Constitution a long time ago. And all those Marines, sailors, they died defending the Constitution and the rule of law. And the rule of law is under assault. And so I don’t know – I’m new to Seattle, I’ve lived all over the world, I’ve seen dead bodies in the street, the governments that don’t care, and I don’t want that here. But that’s the way we’re going. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I see one of my neighbors who I know is on a visa, if masked people without identification are trying to snatch her, I’m not just gonna stand back and say gosh, I should probably film this on my camera. That scares me. I don’t want to get shot trying to help somebody getting abducted on the streets of Seattle. So what can you do? You can be on the right side of history. You can be a Harvard, versus a Columbia. You can be a Perkins Coie versus a Paul Weissman. We can stand up and fight, we can sign up with California, I know this is just Seattle but we can sign up for Californians who are against the tariffs. If you aren’t waking up every day and thinking, how can I fight this – we don’t know if the 2020 elections will be real at this stage, with the changes he’s trying to make. I want my voices heard, I want your constituents’ voices heard, and if we don’t do something – we just keep talking about budgets. You’ve probably been in this role for a long time – there’s always been a budget problem, there’s always been. But there’s not always been a fascist threat to our democracy and the presidency. And we have to stop treating this like it’s normal. Thank you.” Remarks by Councilmember Rinck: “Thank you Council President. Just for the purposes of the good of the order for today, and thinking about the public comment that was given today, I find myself at times, up here, and with all due respect to the body and the work that we do, at times just disillusioned when we look at the broader context that we’re working in and in which we’re conducting our work. This is not business as usual. I think we know this, we are in a growing constitutional crisis. As families are preparing their own safety plans, whether they are legal permanent residents or citizens. And I think that is a really frightening reality for many of our residents. When our own residents are thinking of moving out of our city for the sake of our safety, when we have so many residents who are even looking at international opportunities for work because their job prospects have dried up due to losses in federal funding for research. And now, as we’re continuing to learn on the human services front and housing front, very real losses when we’re looking at things coming down the pipe like Section 8 potentially going away. Which, as a reminder, Section 8 in King County between the Seattle housing authority and King County housing authority, houses 25,000 households. This doesn’t even factor in all of our agencies that rely on Medicaid billing reimbursement to keep business going. This doesn’t count the emergency housing vouchers that we had a 100% successful lease of, as a region, that was 1,400 households that we were able to house and promise 10 years of housing affordability as early as the end of this year. These are just a couple of things that I know we take this up in committee, and I know we’ll continue to talk through our separate committees about the various impacts that are happening, but I think it’s worth naming that I know this weekend I talked to a number of families that were terrififed for their safety in this city. And we are going to have to get really creative and move differently as we go about our work for the months to come. So, I wanted to name that for the record today, and again, I look forward to working with each of you in partnership so we can truly protect our residents. Thank you.” submitted by /u/bennetthaselton |
