Annoyed
because he hits me up twice or three times in a day—shouldn’t once be enough?
Annoyed because I give him three dollars—enough for bread, ham and orange
juice, and he wants five dollars for “a hamburger at Burger King.” Annoyed
because he now has taken to coming into the café where I “work” and asking for
money while I’m busy writing. In short, he isn’t acting like a properly
grateful beggar—I have become his bank. And so? I am not a cheerful giver,
which I should be.
Right—so
why don’t I tell him to go to hell?
Because
he’s hungry, dammit.
How do I
know? Well, he’s rail thin. And I see him “selling” parking spaces on the
street, as well as pushing shopping carts with food for customers at the
grocery store. In short, he’s struggling, and he’s just getting by.
I write
this because Susan has sent a link to a church website in Raleigh, North
Carolina, which has apparently banned
churches from giving out food to the homeless. The church, Love Wins, had
for 6 years given coffee and sandwiches to anybody who came by on Saturday and
Sunday mornings. They were recently told this is illegal.
Second
confession—I have not been able to access the link, and I suspect that
everybody else in the country is having the same problem. I did read, however,
news of the affair in The Daily Kos, and here’s the link.
In chasing
down this improbable but seemingly true story, I came upon the interesting news
that many major American cities have done the same. In Philadelphia,
Mayor Nutter has prohibited groups from distributing food in city parks,
saying the practice is unsanitary and lacking in dignity. (Hey—just the facts;
that’s what he said…)
And it goes
on and on—New York City, Orlando, Dallas, Las Vegas and Houston have all
restricted feeding the poor in some ways. Here’s what one blogger wrote:
New York City
has banned all food donations to government-run homeless shelters because the
bureaucrats there are concerned that the donated food will not be
"nutritious" enough.
Yes, this is
really true.
The following
is from a
recent Fox News article....
The Bloomberg
administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking
food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.
In conjunction
with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless
Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at
city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food,
shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.
You know,
I’ve often believed that the internal
combustion engine was the ruination of America. Why? Because too many of us
wake up, leave our houses, drive to work, come home, eat, and go to sleep.
Maybe it would be better to take the bus, as I do. Then people would see, as I
once did, a whole family in a parked car at five in the morning. They were all
asleep, all except the father, sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor will I forget
his eyes, which plainly told me—“this is all we have, all we can do.”
Or people
would see—as I do—the guy who routinely goes into the dumpster up the street,
fishing out scraps of food. Oh, and the guy in Houston who did so in March of
this year? Here’s
what the Houston Chronicle said:
James Kelly
was hungry and looking for something to eat. He tried to find it in a trash bin
near Houston City Hall.
For that, the
man, who said he spent about nine years in the Navy but fell on hard times, was
ticketed by a Houston police officer.
According to
his copy of the citation, Kelly, 44, was charged on Thursday with
"disturbing the contents of a garbage can in (the) downtown business
district."
"I
was just basically looking for something to eat," Kelly said Monday night.
"I wasn't in a real good mood."
Houston, by
the way, passed an ordinance in 2012 requiring organizations to get a permit to
distribute food, and socking any organization in violation with a $500 fine.
You know,
there are days when I think the Victorians did it better.
However bad the workhouse was, it provided shelter and food. I give it to you,
which would you prefer, the streets or this?
 |
| Workhouse in Ripon, England |
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