Over at Facebook’s City Builders page someone was not happy with my tone in the last post about Councilmember Sawant’s latest creation, a $150 million tax on jobs for housing. But Brandon Adams offered the following analogy with completely explains my tone: total frustration. I’ve made allusions to Cassandra and Laocoon (a liberal arts education is a terrible thing to waste) but I think Brandon put it in modern terms everyone can understand. 

On the flip side, I like curmudgeonly Roger. It’s an attitude I understand from someone that has been working to keep Seattle from harming itself.

Imagine if your job was to keep 9 full-grown, mentally competent adults from ingesting Tide pods. Every day you go to work and you’re in a room with those 9 adults and a bowl full of Tide pods. If a majority vote to eat the Tide pods, they get to eat them, and you’ve failed at your job. You tell them why eating the Tide pods is a bad idea, you tell them they can just order some healthy food, you show them examples of people that have gone to the hospital after eating Tide pods. However, they can’t let go of the idea of eating the Tide pods. Every day at least one of them makes a comment that the Tide pods look really tasty and that we should all just try one. Sometimes they actually do vote to eat them! And then they have the audacity to tell you nothing bad happened, even though the next day they call in sick. And then the next day that you do see them, they’re still staring at that godforsaken bowl of Tide pods and licking their lips. They’ve learned nothing. You question the meaning of your life.

Now remember that outside of the analogy, every time we “eat a Tide pod” the negative impact isn’t on the council, it’s on everyone in the region. Would you be able to keep a sunny demeanor?

Image is from Use Your Brain for Science in an article called The Human Brain is the Crowing Achievement of Evolution, so Why Are People Eating Tide Pods?