If there’s one thing that I really feel strongly about, it’s the importance of helping other people who are less fortunate than we are, and although lord knows I don’t do it as often as I should, I still feel good when I do make an effort to lend a hand because I know that the vast majority of those on the other side genuinely appreciate the effort. And it’s hard because I’m often left wishing that I could do more because clearly there’s plenty that still need our help at the end of the day, which is why coming across a story like this is just so damned frustrating…
Earlier this week, we saw for the first time the City of Orlando enacting one of the sickest laws ever to go on the books. You see, last July the city made headlines by joining Las Vegas in making it illegal to feed homeless people in public parks and near other public areas, such as City Hall for example. The specifics of the Orlando ban require a permit for feeding more than 25 people at once in an attempt to “clean up” the downtown area, as allegedly some business owners and residents complained that the assistance made the parks look like soup kitchens. Orlando’s ban followed a more strict law in Las Vegas, which banned the giving away or selling of food to anyone who could otherwise receive assistance from “official sources” in an effort to stop attracting the homeless to city parks where said “mobile soup kitchens” often formed.
The nerve of those homeless people, really – flocking to where they can find food.
This is beyond ridiculous. In fact, it’s downright evil and it’s enough to truly make you question just how insidious people can be, to think that a group of elected officials and businessmen – human beings - all sat around in a conference room to brainstorm how to take care of the “homeless problem” in their cities and the best that they could come up with was, “Let’s make it illegal to help them. That’ll solve the problem!” It’s enough to make you sick to your stomach to think that tax payer money would help to fund such an effort, or even that anyone who considers themselves a person would dare even consider this to be a part of the solution.
Some of the officials in Orlando cited this as being a “health and public safety issue,” but let’s be honest here – that’s just what they told themselves so that they could sleep at night, that the homeless or the residents or somebody was being endangered by allowing these people to be fed in public places around the city. In reality, the only thing that’s in danger is the city’s image, but frankly, I’d much rather be known as the city where you always see the homeless getting help than the one who shoved them all out the door via police enforcement. Seriously, what’s wrong with these people?
The sad fact of the matter is that this is truly a money-grubbing, elitist-driven issue that stems from a small, wealthy group of individuals who are used to buying off their problems rather than dealing with them. They feel that they’ve earned enough money to not have to be exposed to vagrants and lesser folk anymore, and thus they throw big fits when suddenly they’re not getting their way. Unfortunately if there’s one thing that politicians listen to, it would be money and thus stupid laws such as this one come to fruition…
I recall something similar happening here in Tampa last year, where the owner of an upscale Cuban restaurant in Ybor City, one of the city’s “classier districts” (at least during the day when everyone isn’t drunk) complained to local officials that there were too many homeless people hanging around his restaurant asking for food. It made some of his customers feel uncomfortable as they dined on more for lunch than these folks could hope for all week, so we were all expected to feel sorry for him and whisk the homeless away to another neighborhood that was more used to that kind of people. Later a letter to the editor appeared in the local paper stating that he did care about the homeless, but just that his business was hurting from it, etc, etc…
I call bullshit on this one because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to stop people from helping those in need unless you’re going to step up in their place and offer to help yourself. In neither of these situations did the local governments make any plans to put additional funding into more soup kitchens or other viable alternatives – they simply declared loud and strong, “Not in our backyard!” and it’s an embarrassment not only to those cities themselves, but to humanity as a whole.
Money can’t wish away your problems, and just because an issue as massive as homelessness is off your own porch step and out of mind, that doesn’t mean that the problem has been solved by any stretch of the imagination. Despite the fact that it doesn’t affect you anymore because you don’t have to look at it everyday, there are still people starving in the streets around you and if that doesn’t make you concerned in the least, I just don’t know what to say to you except that that’s very sad. These are people at their worst possible moments, struggling just to survive and get enough food to live another day, and yet all you can think about is money and aesthetics?
Far too much time and energy and money has been wasted trying to sweep this and so many other pressing issues under the rug – homelessness and poverty, healthcare, the quality of education. How’s about we stop spending our money on stupid laws like this to sweep homelessness out of the rich neighborhoods and start actually doing something useful like maybe feeding the homeless and helping them get off the streets altogether?! Representatives from Food Not Bombs, the group who saw one of their members get arrested in Orlando, have stated that they will continue to feed the homeless illegally because it’s the right thing to do. Instead of wasting their time “enforcing” such nonsense, the undercover officers who caught the man in the act and later arrested him could’ve been helping to feed the homeless themselves.
This is a classic case of senseless bureaucracy at its worst and it needs to stop.
Our problems aren’t going to go away overnight, but we have to start sometime and it’s actions like these that frustrate the rest of us who are trying for progress because all it does is move us backwards rather than closer to our goal. There’s always going to be a convention coming to town or new business to drum up, and pushing things off to the side only postpones progress … except in this case, eventually people will die if you postpone their eating for too long. We’re a society and it’s our job together to help those who need it, whether it makes you feel uncomfortable or not.
Of course, you never know when the tides could change and you might find yourself homeless. You can’t really truly appreciate what those mobile soup kitchens do until you’re on the other side of the table, but for those of us fortunate enough to be where we are, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus our efforts so that everyone can be on this side of the table instead of just telling the table itself to pack up and go somewhere else?
It’s simple humanity, really – I don’t know what else to say, but that it really makes me sad to know that this kind of thinking goes on around America every single day. I breathe just a bit easier in knowing that it by far isn’t the majority who thinks like this, but sometimes the few at the top get a greater say than the majority anyways. Here’s to hoping that the rest of us can keep up the good fight and drown out the idiocy that tells us not to help our sick and our fallen. We’re all in this together, no matter how shiny our shoes are…
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