I’ve been reading this business about ‘90-year-old arrested in Fort Lauderdale for feeding the homeless!’ and I keep thinking something isn’t quite right with the story.
I commented on a couple of Facebook threads, suggesting that what was happening was probably not what was being reported. MAYBE nobody was getting arrested for “feeding the homeless” and maybe the law, and the arrest, was about something else.
After looking into it, it appears that this might be the case. I’ll tell you some of what I’m discovering and what’s going through my mind right now. I know you’ve seen the stories:
90-Year-Old ‘Chef’ Continues Feeding Homeless Against Fort Lauderdale Law
First off, look at this map. Looks like it’s got chicken pox, doesn’t it? Each one of those red dots is a church.
Now look at the red outline, showing the city limits of little Fort Lauderdale. Near as I can gather, there are 208 churches within this boundary line. Hell, just in the Baptist denomination alone, there are 34 listed churches.
Ft. Lauderdale has a population of 165, 521 and a surface area of 38.57 square miles. That means there’s an entire church for every 168 people in the city, an average of 5.4 churches every square mile. Which means that wherever you are in Fort Lauderdale, you’re less than a mile from SEVERAL churches.
Here’s the mayor of Ft. Lauderdale: “While the ordinance regulates outdoor food distribution, it permits indoor food distribution to take place at houses of worship throughout the City. By allowing houses of worship to conduct this activity, the City is actually increasing the number of locations where the homeless can properly receive this service.”
Which means: On the grounds of every one of those 208 churches, it is legal to feed and shelter the homeless, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.
But what a bunch of assholes, right? They won’t allow anyone to feed the homeless!! Why does Fort Lauderdale HATE THE HOMELESS!!?
Worse than that, the people feeding the homeless have to provide restroom facilities and places to wash hands. To make matters worse still, the temperature of the food has to be regulated for safety.
Restrooms? Safe food? A place to wash hands? Dammit, why shouldn’t a homeless person be able to pick up a sandwich after a morning of sorting through trash cans for recyclable bottles, and enjoy a bite of room-temperature egg salad that’s been sitting in the sun for a few hours?
My god, it’s like Auschwitz.
I’m not saying Fort Lauderdale’s mayor and council that passed the ordinance are harmless fluffy little bunnies. The city was previously criticized for giving one-way bus tickets to homeless people (but then again, that was only half the story; not only was it voluntary and there were a limited number of tickets, plus a waiting list with over a hundred names on it of people who eagerly wanted them, those who qualified had to have family at the other end willing to pick them up at the bus station).
BUT … there’s more to this story than FORT LAUDERDALE WON’T ALLOW PEOPLE TO FEED THE HOMELESS.
What the city intends, from what I gather, is that the homeless can be fed, will be fed, in places other than public parks and beaches.
Why? Why shouldn’t the poor, disadvantaged homeless people eat anywhere they want?? Well, that’s the thing – they can. They can eat anywhere they want. Just like Christian children can pray in school anytime they want. What the city hopes to do is discourage these feeding missions from attracting homeless people to parks and beaches, to instead provide for their needs at churches and private sites – which are already providing, or are able to provide, food and shelter.
Again, why? Why marginalize these poor, disadvantaged people? It might be because “the homeless” are not, each and every one, harmless fluffy little bunnies either.
You may have a totally different take on this than me, but if you focus your compassion only on the homeless (and yes, I know there’s a MUCH larger story here about the economy, the destruction of the middle class, homeless veterans with PTSD, etc.), you may be failing to notice Fort Lauderdale’s other residents.
I can’t help but have a certain amount of compassion for some of those other people at city parks and beaches, and the picture that springs to mind is young mothers with children, or tourists out for a carefree day. Does their right to enjoy an untroubled day at the park or beach, unharrassed, unfrightened, unworried for the safety of their kids, come second?
I’m a fairly healthy, fairly muscular man (and not a rich one, either, I might point out) and I’ve been to cities where the panhandlers were three or four to a block – enough that I would actively avoid those particular streets in future. I confess, as a hypersensitive introvert, some days my compassion on the street is sky-high, and some days it just isn’t.
Think for a second about the catcalling video you may have seen recently, where an attractive young woman walks city streets and gets harassed almost continuously by lurkers along the way. Now picture that same woman with a 3- and 5-year old in a stroller, headed for the playground in a nearby park for a carefree hour out of the house. Should she have to worry about her safety, or that of her kids? Should she and her children face panhandlers and harassers and lurkers in the park?
Everybody’s got their rights, even the homeless. But given a choice of ATTRACTING the extremely varied group we refer to as “homeless” to the park alongside that mother, and encouraging them to gather instead at a nearby church – I say again, NEARBY church – I don’t have great objections to that second option. Even the 90-year-old man retreated from the park in question to his church, the 5th Avenue Temple of God, about 3.5 blocks away, after being notified.
It may be that the city council of Fort Lauderdale are raging assholes who’d like nothing better than to eliminate the poor, wretched homeless from a visible presence on their precious goddam streets. Hell, it may be that my innocent young mother is instead a rich white bitch who shoves homeless veterans off the sidewalk and into traffic as a regular thing.
But it also may be that this ordinance is a reasonable guideline intended to make the city livable for everybody.
Given the available facts – somewhere distant from the shouting and wailing about the rights and dignity of the homeless – to me it looks like the city is trying to balance the concerns of several different parties. I don’t see how giving food to homeless people at churches – rather than in parks and on beaches – is any great abrogation of anyone’s rights or self-respect.
(I also sort of wonder why the rest of those 208 churches aren’t pitching in to solve the problem, but maybe that’s just me.)
But there’s more to this, too, another thought I’ve been having recently, and I’ll bring that out in Part 2.