Homelessness And The Tourism Space Race

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” — Oscar Wilde

The morning Jeff Bezos launched into space, a homeless woman with a walker was assaulted by a group of men on the border of the Seattle Amazon headquarters. Within the pristine confines of the company’s territory, you will find no homeless people in spite of Seattle’s teeming housing crisis. A stealth army of security guards dressed in stiff polo shirts, the same bright shade of Blue Origin’s logo, patrol the invisible boundaries of the Amazon headquarters at all times. They whisper into radios and cast keen glares at anyone who looks out of place. I always feel out of place and scurry past. I used to be homeless here. As a teenager, before Amazon took over Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, I slept where there is now a restaurant for dog food. I used to hide from the rain where Amazon buildings now tower, rising from a tropical landscape of plants imported from faraway continents. I feel dizzy and disoriented, walking through what feels like a real-life simulation of the videogame Myst that I played as a kid, before my mom kicked me out, before I was a homeless teenager on the streets of Seattle.

Watching the Blue Origin launch, I thought of how the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded the day before I was born…