Some days, I feel a little like Bullwinkle. "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" Again? "Buckle up my sleeve. Presto!"
Suddenly, there's a damn lion leaping out of my top hat. I have him by the mane. He's all in my face, doing his ferocious thing. It's scary, but I'm a magician. "Oh, that?" I say, looking bored. "That's just a lion. We get them sometimes."
When you support the needs of more than 400 poor and homeless people a month, publish a weekly newspaper, and organize a revolution on around $630,000 a year, you get used to that sort of thing. At night, you hear them rustling around. Sometimes, they get so close you can smell their breath. They're waiting.
The good news is that you know you're alive. The danger, risk, and uncertainty of life on the edge is all very bracing.
Eventually, however, the attraction fades. You start thinking, "A little more distance between us and those lions might be nice." Your youthful motto of "Live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse" is feeling less and less noble. You start thinking that reaching the age of 30 might not be so bad.
This is Real Change at 15. The lions are sniffing around, waiting their chance. We're thinking, "They way things are going, we'll be dead by 30."
We're thinking we want to live.
On Oct. 20, we're celebrating our 15th anniversary breakfast at Seattle Center, and looking forward to a long future. We need you to help us get there. Activist travel journalist Rick Steves is coming, and so is hip hop/slam poet Laura Piece Kelly. We need to raise some serious money and are looking to see a lot of new and old friends. For more information, email [email protected].