AT HIS INSTALLATION CEREMONY IN ST. MARY’S CATHEDRAL UPON TAKING OFFICE AS THE ARCHBISHOP OF SAN FRANCISCO, THE MOST REV. WILLIAM J. LEVADA PROCLAIMED THAT THE FOOD LINES IN THIS CITY AND ELSEWHERE “STAND FOR OUR FAILURE.”
Though it is not often I agree with the Archbishop, he was right on when he said that. It is too bad that the dyslexic mayor of San Francisco and the mayors of other cities do not yet get the point. Nor is there any reason for them to get the point when the dutiful automatons of the mass media praise them and the churches and the “do-good” organizations for providing “shelter” and “free food” for the thousands of “homeless” people in this city and this nation. If the mass media automatons could think independently and rationally instead of reacting to stimuli in the manner of Pavlov’s dog, they would be writing instead of the damage being caused by the “do-gooders” and they would be explaining that the majority of the so-called “homeless” people are not “homeless” at all; rather, they are better classified as “street people” or “disenfranchised people.”
The dyslexic Mayor of San Francisco, and other mayors and other public officials, pretend with the help of the automatons of the mass media that they are helping the terminated, cast aside, unemployed, disenfranchised, mentally disordered, and alcohol and drug-addicted street people, by providing them with “shelter” and cooperating with churches and “do-good” organizations that dole out “free food” and a certain amount of fifth rate “counseling” along with methadone shots as the substitute for heroin and other drugs used by the addicted. This is what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom calls his “care not cash program” that purportedly substitutes the different kind of handout for welfare money. The trouble is that it is still a handout, it still locks these people into their kind of street existence which entails an utterly wasted life and a complete loss of self-worth or pride, and it still perpetuates the problems they cause: the tossing of trash and garbage on the streets, urinating and defecating on the streets, screaming at passersby, blasting of racket on boomboxes they somehow get hold of, riding out of control on rickety bicycles on sidewalks crowded with pedestrians, spreading of disease, persistent abuse of alcohol and drugs, returning again and again to hospitals and clinics at a cost of billions of dollars nationwide, etc. etc. etc.
In short, the “care not cash” kind of program initiated in San Francisco and elsewhere does not solve the problem or problems entailed in the national disgrace of people displaced from the society at large. Instead, this kind of program perpetuates the problems, which continue to grow worse, resulting in the “do-good” help turning into an egregious do-bad mistake. What else would you expect? Do you expect any significant number of these people who have been displaced, who have lost any feeling of self-worth, who do not see any real chance of leading any other kind of life, and who therefore have resigned themselves to being locked into an existence wherein they get “free food” and “shelter", to try to get out of their situation? I put those terms in quotes because the “free food” is not free, and the “shelters” are little more than sleeping places, and there is no way the people placed there are going to remain in them for any length of time day or night. Instead, they are right out on the street where they started, causing the same old problems, and leading the same locked-in, useless existence.
George Orwell (Eric Blair) expressed it better than I can in his moving book Down and Out in London and Paris [understanding that the “tramps” of his time are the street people of our time]: “The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually…The other great evil of a tramp’s life is enforced idleness…He lives in a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever…Each day they [tramps or street people] expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy - enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of roads, put up dozens of houses - in mere, useless walking…They cost the country at least a pound a week a man, and give nothing in return for it. They go round and round, on an endless boring game of general post, which is of no use, and is not even meant to be of any use to any person whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we have got so accustomed to it that we are not surprised. But it is very silly.”
He then went on to explain that the reason why the opulent and the people in power perpetuate the condition of the displaced is their attitude toward the poor in general, put in the words of what an “intellectually honest” rich man would say in a moment of truth: “We know that poverty is unpleasant…but don’t expect us to do anything about it [he spoke earlier of only putting the poor on the dole]. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any [real] improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free…”
Imagine, if you will, this scenario: Instead of running thousands through the food lines three times a day, the responsible church and organization leaders organize the wretched into the same kind of sitin used by Negroes [as they were once called] to break down discrimination. Imagine marching the thousands of them at lunchtime into the restaurants where the mayors and other government officers and corporate executives eat, and sitting them at the tables. Where would you get the police to arrest all of them? Where would you find all the jail space for them? Or would you have your goons beat them up or shoot them? Or would the embarrassment and disgrace finally become so monstrous that instead of the dole, instead of perpetuating the wasteful and destructive kind of existence that the displaced street people experience now, the basic elements of society - government, business, and labor - would have to get together a program to restore these people to useful work at pay that enables them to return to the overall society and lead a decent life?
Until the attitude described by George Orwell (Eric Blair) changes, until the Gavin Newsoms of the U.S. are made to realize that their way of treating the problem of disenfranchised people is the failure of which Archbishop Levada spoke, the problems and the disgrace caused by the wretched existence forced upon the poor and socially displaced will continue to grow worse.
