"City of Destruction,"

or, "What is Seattle?"

by Eben

Christian, flee the City of Destruction! That was the message to the man named Christian in Bunyan's classic, "Pilgrim's Progress." It was, earlier on, the message given Lot (Abraham's selfish relative) in Sodom. Do you find yourself in a modern Sodom or Gomorrah? Most of us do! We need God's leading, and divine protection, or we will surely be destroyed with the Sodomites who care nothing for God and His righteousness. They love unrighteousness--for that is darkness, when people prefer darkness over the light. Yet, while the Door of Grace remains open, light is still shining into their darkness. How much longer this will go on, only God knows.

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**"Our Sodom on the Duwamish" is Seattle, named after a wise and great Indian chief who did not want his name used for this white man's city. Duwamish is a small, polluted, tidal stream that flows in Seattle's seamy southern outskirts.

***Bumpershoot is a yearly, popular festival in a city that loves licentious saturnalias like Mardi Gras but has to shut own whole festivals and parades due to bloody violence and brutal beatings and killings by the Peace-sign waving participants.

The Supreme Court's infamous "Roe vs. Wade" decision legalizing abortion, which gave women specious and inhuman "reproductive rights" that included killing unborn children in the womb and even during the most barbaric, non-medical procedure of forced birth and murder ("partial birth abortion" is the euphemism for it).

Three of the five infamous cities of the valley plain south of the Dead Sea in ancient Canaan that were destroyed by God's judgment. In the Final Judgment, the people of these cities may well rise up against Seattle's libertines to condemn them, because Seattle had the advantage of Christ's Gospel and the Ten Commandments, which they did not.

Note: the murder incidents cited, except for the audience-partipation program on Seattle's Murder Mystery Train, were real crimes. Also note that "Christian" is the name of the major figure in Bunyan's classic, PILGRIM'S PROGRESS--hence the title of this poem. "Sybarites" were residents of Sybaris, a decadent Greek city of southern Italy famed for its luxury (pronounced lugs-sury in commercials nowadays), pleasure-addiction, and indolence (it was an easy place for the conquering Romans to take over, as you can imagine).

******"Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown!"