How Society Treats (Mistreats) Homeless

* Recently your paper carried two stories relating to the treatment of the homeless. The first dealt with a good Samaritan facing a felony charge in San Francisco for feeding a homeless person, for which the city has so far made 720 arrests and has expended $5 million hassling the homeless.

The second story pits Msgr. Joseph Carroll of San Diego’s St. Vincent de Paul Village for Homeless against Councilman Juan Vargas who maintains the village attracts the shiftless and hurts the neighborhood. High on booze or drugs, the homeless and shiftless are attracted with free food, he maintains, enabling them to wallow in their addiction as well as hurting the neighborhoods.

Leads one to wonder to what better use the fair “City by the Bay” could have put the $5 million. How many meals, how many shelter beds? How much good could have resulted from all that money?

This seems to be more of society’s eagerness to make the problem of the homeless just go away, as if calling the ranks of the homeless “invisible” will make them so.

At the Costa Mesa soup kitchen where I have worked on Fridays these past three years, and at the one in Santa Ana for five years before that, many of the people being fed are in fact people who are out of work, who have just enough to pay their rent, but not enough to buy food. Because they own a car and other meager possessions they’re ineligible for the usual social programs and so we see them: some with briefcases, in laundered shirts and pressed clothes looking for work, and glad for a hot, free meal. There are young families too, some of the small children with washed faces, some not, but all hungry for the food, which we dispense without any questions. What we see mostly are the “working poor,” all victims of a sick economy.

Shame on San Francisco, which has made it a crime to feed the homeless. Shame on those whose concern for a “neighborhood” would justify letting an innocent child go hungry to sleep at night. Shame on those wastrels responsible for using wrong thinking to dissipate $5 million of the public’s as well as the homeless’ money.

ALEX WALDER

Irvine