The holidays are festive, fun, frantic, frolicsome, fleeting—frankly fickle affairs. The sheer number of holiday-themed, family-times-gone-wrong Hollywood movies attests to this fact. And then there is the endless loop of the still popular Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” first sung by Bing Crosby in 1943 as WWII raged on. Supposedly, major record company executives at first refused to record the song, due to its final line, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” They felt it was a downer of an ending. But, of course, it tapped into the reality for many people—not just soldiers—who couldn’t go home and were left with only nostalgic dreams of snow and mistletoe.
It continues to tap into the reality for many people. Not just for people displaced from their homelands by wars, such as the current one in Syria. (For an excellent in-depth article on this for a Syrian refugee family in Canada, see the NYT article “Wonder and Worry, As a Syrian Child Transforms” by Catrin Einhorn and Jodi Kantor, 12-17-16. This makes me love my neighbor country to the north.) And not just for people who never had a safe, warm, protective home to begin with. Dr. Nancy Goldov of the Washington State Psychological Association talks about this, pointing out that some people “find the pressure to be merry and happy difficult,” and that a particular trigger this year is the “highly fraught political situation that’s polarized some families.” (see the Seattle Times article, “Alone for the holiday—and loving it” by Christine Clarridge, 12-16-16.)
Home, not just for the holidays but anytime, is also just a dream for so many of our community members who are home-less. I know this at a personal level, yet yesterday it took on a new level of poignancy. Working in sub-freezing, snow-flurry weather, we helped move in residents of Tent City 3 to a corner of the University of Washington (UW), Seattle campus. Community volunteers helped Tent City residents sort tarps and tents and cans of food. Others moved wood pallets into a line and hammered plywood on top to serve as partially dry and unfrozen “ground” for the tents that residents will sleep in for the next three months. Tent City 3 is part of the organization Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE), which is self-governed, democratic, grassroots, and led by homeless and formerly homeless people.
I am proud of the dedicated work of many of our UW students, faculty, and staff who have advocated for UW to host Tent City 3. I am proud of our public university for living up to its stated institutional values, including:
- “World Citizens We are compassionate and committed to the active pursuit of global engagement and connectedness. We assume leadership roles to make the world a better place through education and research. We embrace our role to foster engaged and responsible citizenship as part of the learning experience of our students, faculty and staff.
- Being Public As a public university we are deeply committed to serving all our citizens.”
