Today marks 6 months in Seattle. There are blue skies with wispy clouds. The temperature is mild and there are 37 days until the FIFA world cup begins here in Seattle, Washington. I am here in Cherry HIlls and it’s dreary. Homelessness is a devil and most homeless people are demons or are being tormented by demons because they won’t give in to the “state” of lack. But God.
Homelessness for Black older women in Seattle is primarily driven by a “pileup of inequities,” combining skyrocketing housing costs, historical systemic racism, and a lack of accumulated wealth. This demographic is overrepresented due to factors like eviction, gender-based violence, limited savings for rent, and long-term economic disparities.
stateline.org +4
In my case, this might be the reason. However, my homelessness began in babyhood. My biological mother could not keep me. My biological dad was so old over 60 what could he do? So, I was given to a young woman who was married and already had a child, a son. I became homeless from that day on. The only unlimited time I was not homeless was 9 months. I worked for Accenture on the Google YouTube account training AI to be more humane. I worked remotely. So it was just me and Kitten, my little dog.
I have never used drugs. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness but before then, I was picked up for church and Sunday school every weekend. This was very important during the summer time when there was no school which meant no food. It was really painful. When they say homeless children go hungry it’s real because I had a home but no food in the biggest city in Texas, Houston.
My life was full of trauma after trauma but most of all confusion. It didn’t make sense what was happening in my life unless it was done on purpose. I was purposely made to suffer by all the adults in my life except the Christians who came every summer to take us to church. I don’t remember much about those days except all the food I would see at church. I remember slices of chocolate cake on white plates covered by saran wrap. I remember golden brown pies as far as my little eyes could see.
I remember waking up early on Sunday morning, seeing the sun rays filter through the bedroom window. I remember the silence of summertime Sunday mornings waiting to go to church. My foster mother never went to church with us. She slept. That’s what I remember her doing most of her life, sleeping. When she wasn’t sleeping there was constant unhappiness. I never saw her smiling. She was never happy. She only existed. She fretted. She fussed. She was afraid. Mostly, she slept. I guess that was depression. She had a lot to be depressed about. It seemed like my mother loved being depressed. Why do I say that? Because she never tried to fix her situation. Even when she was attempting to be motherly by baking, she loved baking, she wasn’t consistent. BUT GOD.
It was like she was doing it to impress someone else. She cared a great deal about what other people thought. She wasn’t really a true person. Correction: She wasn’t a true person unless she was dancing or fighting. I have saw her fight women and men. I saw her beat up all of her children including me. When we were little it was the ironing cord and the beatings lasted a long time. As we got older she used her fists. Once she broke a broom handle across my back. I expect bones were broken but who was I going to tell? She never took me to the doctor, dentist, nor eye doctor so the emergency room was out all together. Like I said, I have never had a home. I have never had a family. There are no baby pictures of me. There are no school pictures. When I was baptized as Jehovah’s Witness there was no pictures, polaroids, nor a stick figure drawing. When I walked across the stage to graduate from any school there was not one family member there, not one. My teachers were there, my elementary school principal was there.
Do you know when I was in the 6th grade there was a sock hop for the graduates? It cost 50 cents to go. My mother would not pay it. I said nothing so one of my teachers did. It was the best day of my little life. I learned how to dance. Everyone was happy. I drank a cup of punch. I didn’t talk to anyone but I stayed on that dancefloor the whole time. Afterwards, I walked home and never spoke of it again until writing about it now here. But GOD.
My foster mother was born on July 1st, 1943 and she was not a nice lady. She was a very unhappy lady. She never told me a happy story from her childhood. She did tell me she was raped a lot. She was betrayed a lot. I asked her if she ever tried to get away from the people who were harming her. She said no. I used to think it was because she was afraid. No, she wasn’t afraid. She felt powerful.
She felt that she was able to control the people who harmed her by making them harm her more. She stayed around them to weave a canopy of guilt, humiliation, and shame around them. She stayed around to watch them squirm in her presence because she had seen them for their most awful sins. She was a goddess. She was all knowing. She knew their most foul secrets. This is how she missed her whole life.
She’s in her 80s now and she is still existing to see the misery in others. She is cruel but now all of those people are dead who harmed her so long ago. Soon, she will join them and there is nothing wrong with that. She is looking for a body to inhabit. She thought it would be me. However, Almighty God has shown me mercy in every way. I left her back in Houston because I don’t want to see all the suffering. Our zip code was targeted by the leaders of the city and county. We were “set on fire” so that the rest of the city and county could keep warm. BUT GOD.
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I tried to make a life for myself in Houston, Texas however I was bombarded on every side. I was working as an Executive Assistant at PricewaterhouseCoopers when the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York city. I was at my desk working and not paying attention to what was going on around me. Someone did come by my desk to say that we were under attack but I thought it was a joke.
When I went into the breakroom for more coffee every television showed the planes hitting the towers and I was shocked. I went back to my desk to check in with everyone on my team especially the ones traveling. Then I contacted all family members to give them statuses that everyone was okay. I had one partner that was in Chicago. There were no flights going anywhere so I rented him a car and he drove back to Houston sleeping at rest stops all the way. He didn’t want hotels booked he just wanted to be back home.
The next thing I did was go to City Hall where the Mayor has spoken to the Governor regarding emergency preparation plans immediately put into place. We didn’t know if more planes were imminent and where they would hit. The Pentagon had been hit as well. President Bush had been taken to a safe place and so had Vice President Dick Chaney. Houston citizens were calm but “hard”. There was a feeling of strong resolve that IF the “terrorists” dared to “mess with Texas” they would be sorry…
Being raised a Jehovah’s Witness, I thought this was it. The thing that I had preached to Bible Students and myself. The thing I had been warned about since babyhood. The thing that would come like a thief in the night and woe to the pregnant woman in those days. I thought this was the day: Armageddon.
Not even the witnesses had known this day nor this hour. After all the meetings and after securing the office, I drove to my children’s schools and picked them up. The schools did not want to release the children. They thought the children would be safer at the school. This was likely true however, they did not invite the parents and family members into the schools. They planned on taking possession of all of our children and leaving us in the streets of Houston to die if another plane or whatever weapon of mass destruction was deployed. This enraged us to say the least. I felt that if this was Armageddon, I wanted to be with my own little family. I wanted us to go to glory together to stand before the altar of sacrifice.
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We all returned home together. I sat on the couch and wept. I wept for the country. I wept for the fallen in New York City. I wept for those who fell at the Pentagon. I prayed to Almighty God for mercy.
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That night I slept like a rock because I surrendered all. I put all my faith in Jesus. If this was Armageddon what is there to be done? My heart was lighter than a feather or it wasn’t. My children were approved by Elohim or they weren’t. Everything that was done could never be undone. Either we did or best or we didn’t. Either way we were destined for the Lord we loved in our souls. Either we loved the divine or we loved the flesh.
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I woke to my alarm the next morning. I took the boys to school, dropping them off with a firm resignation as I met the eyes of other parents and teachers. We were Texans through and through. We had all gone through worse and this would not shake us. I drove through traffic to the Park and Ride like it was nothing. I arrived downtown, badged my way into my office building and took my post in my office. At 9:00 am we all met in the largest company conference room for prayer and to take the sacrament…
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On September 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks, Houston, Texas, was described as profoundly quiet, with restricted airspace, little air traffic, and many residents staying indoors watching continuous news coverage.
- Workplace Atmosphere: Many workplaces were somber and quiet, with employees glued to televisions. In some sectors, the focus was on establishing contact with family members via landlines due to overwhelmed cellular networks.
- Mass and Services: While specific “mass at work” events for Sept 12 are not detailed in the search results, it was a day characterized by widespread community, religious, and workplace gatherings for prayer and solidarity.
- Immediate Aftermath in Houston:
- Emotional State: Many described the atmosphere as numb, fearful, and tense.
- Houstonians in the Attacks: Local news (KPRC-TV) on September 12, 2001, highlighted Houston-area residents whose loved ones were working at the Pentagon or World Trade Center, showing the personal connection many Houstonians had to the tragedy.
- Resilience: Within a couple of days, the city showed signs of unity, with events like a WWF SmackDown at the Compaq Center on Sept 13, 2001, serving as a massive, emotional public gathering.
- http://www.reddit.com·r/texas +3
The immediate days following 9/11 brought a “new normal” to Houston, characterized by increased security, patriotism, and a high level of anxiety.
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As for me and my coworkers, there was an investigation going on: 2001 was an unexpected watershed. For much of the nation, the 9/11 attacks defined the year, and the SEC was not untouched; its New York offices at 7 World Trade Center were destroyed in the attacks, though with no loss of life to the staff. What changed the Division’s work was, however, the collapse of Enron. At the beginning of the year it was by some measures the nation’s fifth-largest company, routinely praised for its corporate governance; at the end it was in bankruptcy, brought down by shady accounting and outright fraud. The next year similar scandals would rock giant firms including Global Crossing, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco, and Qwest. The details would differ, but in each dubious or simply fraudulent accounting doomed the firms. Levitt’s warning about the “numbers game” had been proven correct.
The immediate aftermath was investigations, staggering fines, and in some cases imprisonment. The amount of penalties paid by companies caught in accounting fraud would be unprecedented. In 2002, as a result of work by the Financial Fraud Task Force, Xerox had been fined $10 million, at that point the largest fine ever levied against a public company in an accounting matter.(3) Between 1990 and 2002, only four other issuers had been fined, for a total of less than $5 million.(4) Those numbers would soon appear paltry. From 2003 to 2007, the total amount of penalties and disgorgement resulting from enforcement cases was $13.8 billion, the largest single penalty being against WorldCom for $750 million.(5) Large fines were also levied against gatekeepers alleged to have enabled or overlooked the frauds. In 2003, for instance, the investment banks J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup settled with the SEC for their roles in various Enron schemes, paying disgorgement and penalties totaling $255 million.(6)
In the wake of these scandals, the SEC drew both criticism for not catching the frauds earlier, and new powers. The new powers, contained in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, had greater effect. The Act increased the budget for the agency, allowing it boost the Enforcement staff by 30% by 2004, and to pay them more; included a requirement that CEOs and CFOs certify a firm’s financial reports; created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (“PCAOB”), to oversee public company audits; and, in a less-noticed change, included a provision allowing the SEC to direct penalties to investors harmed by fraud (“Fair Funds”).(7) Together, aggressive enforcement efforts and SOX’s new measures had real effect; accounting misstatements and fraud seemed to have been permanently reduced.(8) https://www.sechistorical.org/museum/galleries/enf/enf06d_911-enron.php
(At PricewaterhouseCoopers our files, drives, etc…auditted – we were exonerated. Arthur Andersen lost their license to practice accounting in the whole state of Texas. More business for Pwc.)
Linda THomsen, 2018
Fair Funds’s impact was particularly striking. Debate had long simmered over whether it was appropriate to impose large penalties on corporations, as these would ultimately be paid by shareholders unaware of, and victimized by, their companies’ wrongdoing. Fear of harming these “innocent” shareholders had served as a brake on giant penalties. Fair Funds took that away by creating a mechanism to channel penalties to injured parties, including shareholders. While not the sole reason for the sharp rise in giant penalties after 2002, Fair Finds made such penalties much easier to justify. One former Director of Enforcement described the post-Enron penalty powers being “wielded with numbers and a ferocity that I don’t think anyone had anticipated.”(9) The giant penalties also reignited a debate over the purposes of enforcement remedies: were they chiefly regulatory, to encourage future compliance, or punitive, to punish past wrongdoing?
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We went to war with Iraq. I left Texas. I arrived in Seattle, Washington. I went to work in Iraq witht he Electrical Engineers to keep our soldiers from being electrocuted in their baracks.I came back to Seattle. Barack Obama became President. Covid 19 hit. I worked remotely for Accenture (which is Arthur Andersen). I had to return to work in San Jose without a cost of living increase. I didn’t want to be homeless in San Jose, so Kitten and I went to Denver. In Denver, no matter how hard I tried I found no work. I gave Kitten to a friend more stable than I and I went to find my stability and a home for myself.
I have ended up in Seattle now for 6 months. It has been very unstable because people get barred. They don’t get any help because it’s “self managed”. Because of my background I have sought resources for myself. The other people here mostly men have not been “good people”. The “women” here have been bullies, have been weird, have been cruel…much like my foster mother actually. I stick to myself. There is no community because I don’t drink, I don’t get high, I don’t have stories like many others. I meet with a therapist every Monday, I do volunteer work, I go to the Senior Center for lunch sometimes. I have gone to visit pre Covid friends who are still alive in Tukwila. I have visited other friends that I have known over 20 years. Virgil passed away a year ago so I am virtually on my own. No children as Joseph passed away as well. Jonathan is still alive but I don’t see him or speak to him even before Covid 19. Kaeli, my daughter in law is going to jail on July 1st this year, my foster mother’s birthday, for 18 months. She plead guilty to trafficking fentenal pills. I suppose that’s why they didn’t speak to me…it’s hard to discuss criminal conduct to a person who spent most of her life studying the bible and staying ready for the return of Jesus Christ.
So, I am in Seattle. There is no path out of here planned for me. So, per usual, I put my faith in Almighty God, my Savior…
PROMISES – LYRICS ( Great is Your faithfulness to me ) Joe L Barnes & Naomi Raine Maverick City
Great Is Thy Faithfulness | Maranatha! Music (Lyric Video)
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It’s been tough. It’s been hard. Almighty GOD saw me throughout this road. Even here in the United States, Almighty GOD is faithful, Almighty GOD keeps His Promises… He has prospered me, He has given me a life, He is my salvation, and the LOVE of MY Life, MY Soul, He is my HOME. HE always has been and through HIS Grace and Mercy HE ALWAYS WILL BE because HE WILL NEVER LEAVE ME NOR FORSAKE ME. Hallelujah!!!
A Letter to the Exiles
29 This is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 2 (This was after King Jehoiachin[a] and the queen mother, the court officials and the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the skilled workers and the artisans had gone into exile from Jerusalem.) 3 He entrusted the letter to Elasah son of Shaphan and to Gemariah son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. It said:
4 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” 8 Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. 9 They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the Lord.
10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.[b] I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”
15 You may say, “The Lord has raised up prophets for us in Babylon,” 16 but this is what the Lord says about the king who sits on David’s throne and all the people who remain in this city, your fellow citizens who did not go with you into exile— 17 yes, this is what the Lord Almighty says: “I will send the sword, famine and plague against them and I will make them like figs that are so bad they cannot be eaten. 18 I will pursue them with the sword, famine and plague and will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth, a curse[c] and an object of horror, of scorn and reproach, among all the nations where I drive them. 19 For they have not listened to my words,” declares the Lord, “words that I sent to them again and again by my servants the prophets. And you exiles have not listened either,” declares the Lord.
20 Therefore, hear the word of the Lord, all you exiles whom I have sent away from Jerusalem to Babylon. 21 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says about Ahab son of Kolaiah and Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, who are prophesying lies to you in my name: “I will deliver them into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he will put them to death before your very eyes. 22 Because of them, all the exiles from Judah who are in Babylon will use this curse: ‘May the Lord treat you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon burned in the fire.’ 23 For they have done outrageous things in Israel; they have committed adultery with their neighbors’ wives, and in my name they have uttered lies—which I did not authorize. I know it and am a witness to it,” declares the Lord.
Message to Shemaiah
24 Tell Shemaiah the Nehelamite, 25 “This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: You sent letters in your own name to all the people in Jerusalem, to the priest Zephaniah son of Maaseiah, and to all the other priests. You said to Zephaniah, 26 ‘The Lord has appointed you priest in place of Jehoiada to be in charge of the house of the Lord; you should put any maniac who acts like a prophet into the stocks and neck-irons. 27 So why have you not reprimanded Jeremiah from Anathoth, who poses as a prophet among you? 28 He has sent this message to us in Babylon: It will be a long time. Therefore build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.’”
29 Zephaniah the priest, however, read the letter to Jeremiah the prophet. 30 Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: 31 “Send this message to all the exiles: ‘This is what the Lord says about Shemaiah the Nehelamite: Because Shemaiah has prophesied to you, even though I did not send him, and has persuaded you to trust in lies, 32 this is what the Lord says: I will surely punish Shemaiah the Nehelamite and his descendants. He will have no one left among this people, nor will he see the good things I will do for my people, declares the Lord, because he has preached rebellion against me.’”
Footnotes
- Jeremiah 29:2 Hebrew Jeconiah, a variant of Jehoiachin
- Jeremiah 29:14 Or will restore your fortunes
- Jeremiah 29:18 That is, their names will be used in cursing (see verse 22); or, others will see that they are cursed.
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Amen. Our Heavenly Father, Hallowed be THY NAME, THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from all evil. For THINE is the Kingdom, the Glory, and the Power in YOUR Beloved son we pray Yeshua, Emmanuel, Jesus Christ, the Nazarite who got up with the keys to Death and Hades in His hands who is returning in Majesty and Power to Accomplish YOUR HOLY WILL again against the lovers for everything but YOU… Hear my prayer I beg YOU Father! Remember YOUR elect, Remember YOUR holy ones, Remember YOUR Promises and YOUR Faithfulness. Deliver us FINALLY and COMPLETELY out of the mouths of our adversaries and oppressors for YOUR Glory and YOUR Name. Amen.
Jehovah Jireh, YOU are everything.
Ms Coletha's Blog 