Last weekend I had an idea.  I saw video of Palestinians setting up ragged tents in their former homes in North Gaza, where they are going to live while they get on with rebuilding their homes.  I thought, I know a company, Pallet, in Everett that makes shelters way better than those tents.  They build flat pak villages of small units, some for sleeping, some for cooking and eating, some for showering and using the bathroom.  They ship them to a site, and set them up with nothing more than a screwdriver and a socket set.  They provide temperature controlled comfortable functional pods for families to live together while getting their lives sorted: meeting with counselors, getting off drugs, getting into social support programs.  These pods are way better than the crap tents I was looking at.

Of course, this company is not in a position to manufacture and ship units for 1M people on the other side of the world.  But, also in Everett, there’s a company that is: Boeing.  They’ve done it before.  With the right incentive, they could build a line, take the Pallet designs and crank them out, airfreight or ship them to the coast of Israel. They’d need money, and an army of people.

Money’s not the issue, there’s tons of money floating around.  Who knows how to ship, distribute, set up all these things, and has an army of people?  The UN.  And coincidentally one of the more senior UN people is someone from Auckland, New Zealand, who clearly knows who the right people would be to get an initiative like this happening.

Turns out the ex-CEO of Boeing lives right on Whidbey.  I know half a dozen ex Boeing employees.  I know people in New Zealand who could talk to Helen Clark.  This is totally doable.

I talked to everyone I know.  And they all pushed back.  Within a few days I understood that, while this is clearly a fixable problem from an engineering point of view, it wasn’t going to be fixed by someone like me, or by anyone I know.