Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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addictions, to negotiate the social service maze and what Ms. Baxter calls “the paperwork of poverty.”
We can do much more of this, or we can continue to waste time and money moving these people around like so much furniture. One of the craziest ladies on the streets of Center City, a woman considered totally lost to normal life, lives in a group residence and works full time now, and Mary Scullion says that since that woman has been getting enough food and sleep and medical attention it’s amazing, the resemblance she bears to you or me.
Discussions about the homeless always remind me of a woman who told me that she was damned if her tax dollars were going to pay for birth control for the poor. Come to think of it, she said, she didn’t want her tax dollars paying for any social welfare programs. I wanted to say to her: If you don’t pay for birth control, you’ll have to pay for schools. If you don’t pay for schools, you’re going to pay for welfare. And if you don’t pay for any of those things, you’re going to spend a small fortune on prisons.
The question is not whether we will pay. It is what we want to pay for, and what works. The negative approach, the deciding where we want people not to be, has been a deplorable failure. There are those who believe the homeless are either criminal or crazy, that one way or another they should be locked up. It’s worth remembering that it costs far more to lock someone up than to give them, as Ms. Scullion and Ms. Baxter have, a key of their own.
ROOM AT THE INN
December 11, 1991
Ten years ago Harold Brown decided to do something that he had never done before but that he believed his Catholic faith required him to do. He began to help house the homeless. He and his wife, Virginia, and a group of volunteers from Sacred Heart Church in Queens set up a small shelter in the basement of the church in response to a call to action from the mayor, the cardinal, and the Partnership for the Homeless.
For a decade they have provided a bed each night, as well as breakfast, a bag lunch, a hot dinner, a change of underclothes, and, after the plumber hooked up extra waterlines, a shower and the use of a washer and dryer. The city housed almost seventy-five hundred people in shelters the other night; Sacred Heart housed ten. Alleluia and pass the excuses. This is an answer to people who have said they’d like to help the homeless but don’t know how.
This is an answer to all those people who find the holidays a fearsome round of eggnog and revolving charges. It doesn’t haveto be that way. Even now there are friends preparing polite ecstasies for gifts they neither want nor need. Even now there are people penciling your party into their datebooks and quietly wishing they could spend the day at home.
The important thing to remember about Christmas is not closing time at Macy’s but the story of a pregnant woman and her husband who looked for a bed for what some still think was the most transformative event in history and were told to get lost. The irony of the fact that there is no room at the inn for millions in this country is potent at this time.
Ten years ago this month the Partnership for the Homeless began the church/synagogue network with a simple premise: that with thousands of institutions in New York built on charity and compassion, surely there must be some willing to provide a bed for the night. Tonight there will be something like 1,365 homeless people sleeping in 126 churches and synagogues. At a time when homeless men and women are being rousted from public buildings, subway stations, and assorted doorways, apparently in the belief that a moving target is less offensive to community comfort levels, that is no small thing.
These small shelters, all with fewer than twenty beds, are scattered throughout the city. Their success gives the lie to dire predictions surrounding the city’s plan to build small shelters in residential areas, predictions ranging from
We can do much more of this, or we can continue to waste time and money moving these people around like so much furniture. One of the craziest ladies on the streets of Center City, a woman considered totally lost to normal life, lives in a group residence and works full time now, and Mary Scullion says that since that woman has been getting enough food and sleep and medical attention it’s amazing, the resemblance she bears to you or me.
Discussions about the homeless always remind me of a woman who told me that she was damned if her tax dollars were going to pay for birth control for the poor. Come to think of it, she said, she didn’t want her tax dollars paying for any social welfare programs. I wanted to say to her: If you don’t pay for birth control, you’ll have to pay for schools. If you don’t pay for schools, you’re going to pay for welfare. And if you don’t pay for any of those things, you’re going to spend a small fortune on prisons.
The question is not whether we will pay. It is what we want to pay for, and what works. The negative approach, the deciding where we want people not to be, has been a deplorable failure. There are those who believe the homeless are either criminal or crazy, that one way or another they should be locked up. It’s worth remembering that it costs far more to lock someone up than to give them, as Ms. Scullion and Ms. Baxter have, a key of their own.
ROOM AT THE INN
December 11, 1991
Ten years ago Harold Brown decided to do something that he had never done before but that he believed his Catholic faith required him to do. He began to help house the homeless. He and his wife, Virginia, and a group of volunteers from Sacred Heart Church in Queens set up a small shelter in the basement of the church in response to a call to action from the mayor, the cardinal, and the Partnership for the Homeless.
For a decade they have provided a bed each night, as well as breakfast, a bag lunch, a hot dinner, a change of underclothes, and, after the plumber hooked up extra waterlines, a shower and the use of a washer and dryer. The city housed almost seventy-five hundred people in shelters the other night; Sacred Heart housed ten. Alleluia and pass the excuses. This is an answer to people who have said they’d like to help the homeless but don’t know how.
This is an answer to all those people who find the holidays a fearsome round of eggnog and revolving charges. It doesn’t haveto be that way. Even now there are friends preparing polite ecstasies for gifts they neither want nor need. Even now there are people penciling your party into their datebooks and quietly wishing they could spend the day at home.
The important thing to remember about Christmas is not closing time at Macy’s but the story of a pregnant woman and her husband who looked for a bed for what some still think was the most transformative event in history and were told to get lost. The irony of the fact that there is no room at the inn for millions in this country is potent at this time.
Ten years ago this month the Partnership for the Homeless began the church/synagogue network with a simple premise: that with thousands of institutions in New York built on charity and compassion, surely there must be some willing to provide a bed for the night. Tonight there will be something like 1,365 homeless people sleeping in 126 churches and synagogues. At a time when homeless men and women are being rousted from public buildings, subway stations, and assorted doorways, apparently in the belief that a moving target is less offensive to community comfort levels, that is no small thing.
These small shelters, all with fewer than twenty beds, are scattered throughout the city. Their success gives the lie to dire predictions surrounding the city’s plan to build small shelters in residential areas, predictions ranging from
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