Blue Notes from a Red Zone

The Homeless Among Us

For those of you who don't live in our area - this column of mine was featured as the section front of the Commentary section in the Northwest Florida Daily News last Sunday.

Phillip is in his mid-40s, and has been homeless for more years than he can remember. He works odd jobs for various residents and businesses on the Island, doing landscaping, home and building repair, and some construction. He’s neat, tidy and works hard, and his clients depend upon him because he is dependable. Weekends you will find him at meal programs; on cold nights you will find him taking shelter at a church. Unlike many long-term homeless persons, Phillip does not use alcohol or drugs to soften life on the streets. He doesn’t say why he is homeless, other than to allude to obligations he has to others that prevent him from saving enough for security deposits, first month rents, and other expenses associated with finding permanent housing.

Manuel, a hotel housekeeper in his 60s, has been homeless for about two years. He feels fortunate to work in a hotel, where he can shower and wash his clothes each day. He especially liked his job when it allowed him to buy a trailer, which he kept on a rented lot near the Sound. However, when Ivan tore through the area, he lost everything. A few weeks ago, he was clearly stressed. The hotel was short-handed, which meant he had more rooms to clean. The forecast called for rain, and he was afraid he was going to lose one of the few dry spots available to homeless men if he didn’t get off work fast enough.

Sarah had a different story. Bridgeway Center, Inc. case managers found her when she was 16, after she had been homeless for three years with her mother who was injured in an abusive marriage. Sarah is a bright young woman, who had always maintained good grades. However, she had become depressed. Her grades were falling, since daylight was the only light she could use when doing school work. With winter coming, the daylight hours got shorter, and her time for schoolwork became desperately limited. The family is housed now, but their ability to maintain housing is precarious at best.

These are real homeless people (with fictitious names) who are using our parks, libraries, and sidewalks. They are there, because there is no other place for them to be. We have no alternative sites for them; no place where they can go to get job training, wash their clothes, store their things, cash a check, save their money, or sleep at night on a regular basis. Some homeless fall into despair, or are mentally ill, and use alcohol and illicit drugs as cheap ways to dull the pain of their existence or quiet the voices in their head. Others maintain dignity and never give up the struggle. Many others are women and children without hope.

Our business community and local governments shake their heads of the homeless in our midst, but declare there is nothing they can do about it. “We can’t afford it,” they say. “No one will agree to raise taxes to help homeless people.”

However, the fact is that we are already paying premium dollars to “manage” the homeless population. We use police and sheriff’s deputies to serve as intake officers; the courts as case managers; and the local jail, crisis stabilization unit and detoxification centers as our homeless shelters. One local judge said that 35% of the people he saw at first appearance were arrested primarily for the “crime” of being homeless: of using bathrooms in convenience stores where they made no purchase, or loitering in front of businesses that have registered with the police as being off-limits to homeless (which is nearly all of them). A rough guess, based on a study of the county budget and conversations with various officials, is that we are paying about $4 million per year for a very ineffective method of dealing with homeless issues. This doesn’t count plans for a new jail, which might not be needed if there was a better way to work with the homeless in our area.

Running the homeless out of town is not a realistic option. They have the same constitutional right to life and liberty as do the rest of us. And there aren’t enough bus tickets in the world to stop the flow of homeless into and out of our area. The homeless, like the poor, are with us, and it is our responsibility, as citizens and government leaders charged with the public safety and welfare, to form a partnership among state and local governments, businesses, non-profits and religious organizations to bring solutions to the people who need them.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 7:35 PM 0 comments

The "Values" Voters

For the past week, the media mantra has been to point out the hypocrisy of the “party of family values” when it chose protecting a member of Congress over the protection of teen-age boys. In my opinion, the Republicans became hypocrites long before the Mark Foley affair. Indeed, their hypocrisy dates from the minute they took on the mantel of “the party for the values voters,” and began their cynical pandering to the religious right.

Growing up in the South, I have more than a passing acquaintance with religion and core values. I studied religion in high school and college, attended Sunday Schools, taught Sunday Schools, served as director of Children’s Ministries, and sung in a multitude of church choirs. I have attended worship services in Jewish Temples and synagogues, and Christmas Mass at the Catholic National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I founded my ethical construct on the words of Jesus (Matthew 25: 40) when he commended the righteous for feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick, and clothing the poor: “Inasmuch as you have done to the least of these my brethren, so you have done unto me.”

This Christian ideology is not compatible with the Republican world view, which can be readily summarized as “comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.” Tax cuts designed for the almost exclusive benefit of the ultra rich; opening governmental resources including national parks and forests at bargain rates for corporate profit; energy policies that pile wealth upon obscene wealth into the hands of the oil companies; elimination or ignoring of important safeguards guiding the quality of air, earth and water, as well as food and drugs – this is agenda of the GOP.

As for the social safety net, designed to make sure our most fragile citizens have some measure of protection: the Republicans don’t believe in it. They fought Social Security when it was first proposed, and they would like to eliminate it now. They didn’t like Medicare when it became law, and they have been consistent in their campaign to turn it into a cash cow for pharmaceutical and insurance companies rather than a service for those who are sick and elderly. They hated the Great Society, and have succeeded in unraveling it with amazing thoroughness.

So, how does the party of wealth bring the “Christian” masses into its tent while disavowing Christian ideals at every turn? It appeals to values, such as war, torture, guns, illegal surveillance, and an abandonment of the ideals of tolerance and respect for those who may disagree with them, or are of a different race, religion or ethnicity. I am not exaggerating in the least. A letter to the editor in our local paper blasted the Democrats as the party that is “pro-murder and pro-gun control” (an interesting combination, harking back to the “liberal” position that Terry Schaivo had a right to die). Leaders of the Christian right lectured Congress, warning that a failure to pass a pro-torture bill would have serious repercussions in the mid-term election. The 700-mile barricade between the US and Mexico is a sop to the right-wing, which labels almost all Hispanics as illegal immigrants (although it appears that a sop is all it is, and it won’t be built). How they justify these positions as being godly is a bit of a mystery. Certainly they aren’t taking their texts from the four Gospels. But as long as the Republicans push for war and guns, and chip away at science, education, and women's reproductive rights, including the right to contraception, they have the radical Christians in their pocket.

A party that openly proclaims its only ideals as the maintenance of power along with access to the public treasury will naturally react to a report of a representative’s illicit correspondence with minors as a political problem only. The only hypocrisy is to pretend that anything else matters. The only shock is that they have finally found an issue in which the Christian right isn’t completely comfortable in cheerleading on their behalf.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 1:22 AM 1 comments