It’s for this reason that, while he doesn’t love individuals bypassing community input and had his own questions about the crosswalk’s safety, Greenwood resident Rob Fellows can understand why someone would take matters into their own hands.“It’s impatience,” he said. “It’s a form of activism — let’s get this thing going, let’s change the city’s priorities. It’s well meaning. The people who put it out there were trying to do something good for the neighborhood, I don’t have any question about that.” Advertising Skip AdSkip AdSkip Ad There’s a name for when community members make unsanctioned changes to city-owned streets: “tactical urbanism.”“Tactical urbanism to me is essentially what a fed-up citizenry takes into their own hands when it comes to their own safety on their streets and sidewalks,” said Ben Scott, a Greenwood resident who’s documented the saga of the 83rd Street crosswalk.

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement

Edmonds passes law criminalizing camping in public spaces — but lacks local homeless shelter options

“Don’t put people who are having problems at the top of the pyramid and ignore the citizens who are here and pay taxes and support the city government,” said Edmonds resident Bill Herzig.

That fiction, reading and writing fiction, is the best technology we have for getting inside another person’s mind and heart. You can’t do that in journalism, you can’t even do that in poetry, but you can do that in fiction. You can give the reader access to somebody else’s deepest thoughts. And I think in Mercy Street, regardless of your own personal convictions about abortion, it’s very illuminating to get inside of the mind of someone who thinks very differently about it.”

If you just skim the news headlines or flip back and forth between pundits – or worse, obsessively scroll through your own algorithmically-curated social media feeds – to reinforce your own views or fuel your indignation against another’s view, you may end up spending a good part of your life just skating along the surface.The value of human life and support for the common good has plummeted in recent years – at home and around the world – and it could be that good fiction has the chance to open up windows to increasing a true “respect life” ethos that other forms cannot. 

Narratives like the one Haigh tells in Mercy Street open new possibilities to see and understand each other across divides in ways that political analysis and advocacy doesn’t. There’s something about the current media and political culture that is zero-sum, cutting off possibility of empathy, or understanding the views of another even if you don’t share them.