Cities are different.
When I was younger, I took the differences out on Cincinnati, my spurned home town. But I prefer nowadays to focus on the positive side of the differences, the Seattle side.
For starters, Cincinnati, shrinking population and all, has three times as many homicides per year as Seattle.
Seattle has Puget Sound, the Olympics and the Cascades, Cincinnati has a few hills and the muddy brown Ohio River.
Cincinnati has black people and white people, pitted against each other one way or another since the 1829 race riots.
Our communal history is fresher and unfinished and much more diverse. America is full of cities, especially east of the Mississippi River, with divided populations, growing crime rates and declining, Old-World industries.
None of that describes today's Seattle. We've got plenty of problems I'm not planning to stop writing about, but sometimes it helps to see how other folks choose, or are forced to live.
Seattle and its environs may not always be heading in a direction congenial to me, but it doesn't look anything like a city in freefall either.
I'm still glad I live here, in a place where fast-food franchise restaurants aren't reviewed in the dailies, a place where there isn't just one six-screen theater for all the independent films that keep anyone with an I.Q over 115 from taking an ax to his or her DVD player, a place where you don't have to drive two hours to see a relatively clean body of running water.
Look-alike condos everywhere isn't good. But even they are an improvement on falling down tenements built before World War II even started.
The sound track inside my head as I climb aboard Amtrak for the return to the Northwest is Perry Como singing about the bluest skies he's ever seen - that's Seattle, folks.[[In-content Ad]]