The Homeless are Everyone's Problem
Ignoring the homeless will not make them go away When I go to work out at the gym, I sometimes end up with more than finely-tuned muscles. I come away with bits of conversation that force my brain into its own form of calisthenics.
Homelessness made its way into the conversation this morning.
“I went into the Basilica the other morning,” one woman began, “and there was a homeless person sleeping on the back pew. You know some of these churches in the area do so much to help with the downtrodden.”
I thought how refreshing it was to have someone understand that the church is exactly the place where those who have been beaten down by life should find refuge. But she had more to say on the subject.
“I’m all for helping the homeless,” she continued. “But I’m not so sure I want them in my church when I come in for mass.”
I continued pumping my legs and decided not to respond.
Actually I had no response to give, but the words of this woman have not left me alone today as I continue with my work.
The other day at yet another session at the gym, one woman said she always gave money or food to one man who spent his days on the downtown plaza. She described the man.
“I saw that very same man with a laptop computer the other day,” someone else added.
Both women made the assumption that since he had a laptop computer, he did not need their help. They are not alone in their assumptions.
I conducted an interview with a victims advocate in Gainesville for a story recently. She told me that she finds difficulty in educating those on the front lines dealing with victims. She pointed to a case where a homeless woman had been raped. The police officer first on the scene told the victim’s advocate that he did not believe the victim. When questioned as to why not, he responded that the woman was wearing new shoes despite the fact she claimed to be homeless.
“She had just been to the shelter where they were giving away new shoes,” said the victims advocate, “yet this police officer formed an opinion right away based on that simple thing.”
Homelessness becomes more of an issue in Florida during the winter months. Retirees with disposable income and motor homes are not the only snowbirds to visit the state. The homeless will hitch rides from Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Ohio in order to escape the harsh weather in the north.
Several years ago while doing a story on poverty in northwestern Alachua County, I received a call from High Springs Catholic Charities. A woman had just shown up on their doorstep from Wisconsin. She had hitched a ride with a truck driver but could only get as far as north Florida before he dropped her off. She received a small disability check each month and with the little she had leftover she rented a storage unit on the outskirts of town. That was all the money she had left but she thought having a shelter for a month would give her time to figure out how to go further south.
I visited her at the storage unit where she had stacked blankets from Catholic Charities on the floor to form her bed. She suffered from mental illness, but she had enough sense to literally come in from the cold.
A phrase popped into my head this morning when I listened to the woman pontificating on her solutions for taking care of the homeless at a location where she did not have to see it.
“There go I but for the grace of God.”
Supposedly Saint Augustine made this comment upon seeing a vagrant on the street. Wherever its origin, it is one I often say to myself as a reminder to keep judgments out of my head. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 39 percent of the homeless in the United States in 2003 were under the age of 18, making them homeless through an accident of birth. Further, the coalition’s research indicates that 40 percent of homeless men have served in the armed forces and 23 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from a mental illness.
NCH also found that inadequate wages put housing as a luxury for many Americans. One study even found that 17 percent of the homeless are employed, but with a minimum wage job, a person would have to work 89 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom apartment in most cities.
Any one of us has the potential to become homeless. Kicking them out of our churches and off of our park benches and away from our homes will not make the problem disappear.
The only way to make it disappear is to fight for living wages and to insist on services for the mentally ill and for veterans, and children must become a first priority. Working together to solve the problem means God has graced us all.
Thank you for taking the time on this subject. Whether someone be "insane" or "lazy" it is completely beside the point. Even if I were fool enough to believe these people inferior to me, I still wouldn't want to confine myself to a beautiful prison on a hill to escape the real world effects of desperate people left to fend for themselves. It's impossible to see the logic in that, even with a cold dead heart.
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