Daily Archives: August 24, 2012

A day shelter for Madison?

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I’ve written about this before but an article in this week’s Isthmus addresses both the efforts on behalf of a day shelter and the forces arrayed against it. Here is the letter I’ve written to Mayor Soglin, County Executive Parisi, Madison alders, and the Dane County board.

A few weeks ago as I was leaving Grace in the middle of the afternoon, I noticed a man sitting on the stone wall in our courtyard garden. I greeted him and asked him if he needed anything. He told me that he had been released from the VA hospital earlier in the day and sent here. He asked me about the shelter–when it opened, what the policies and procedures were. I told him that the shelter wouldn’t open until that evening but that it would be best if he waited on the grounds of the Capitol or somewhere else.

I realize that this brief vignette raises all sorts of questions about our society–our treatment of veterans, our healthcare system are both implicated in this man’s plight. What I would like to focus on, however, is that this man had nowhere to go. Staff at the VA could only tell him about the shelter, a place to stay that night, but there was nowhere for him to sit comfortably, his possessions secure, while he waited for the shelter to open.

His is not an isolated incident. Madison’s hospitals discharge patients directly to the men’s shelter; the jails and prisons do as well. And there are those who find themselves homeless for the first time. They have no idea where to go or what to do. If they’re lucky, someone tells them about the shelter. If they’re really lucky, when they check in, they find someone who will show them the ropes, help them negotiate through the night, and tell them how to keep themselves and their possessions safe. I can’t tell you how many times I encounter someone who’s been in the shelter several days or even weeks, and has never seen a representative from a social service agency or been directed to places and people that might be helpful.

The effort to establish a day resource center for homeless people is one of the few hopeful signs I see in Madison’s approach to homelessness. I’ve lived here for three years. When I arrived, I was shocked to discover that homeless services here seemed to lag behind what I had observed in Boston twenty-five years earlier. Even Greenville, SC, where I had lived and worked most recently, and hardly a center of progressivism, has facilities where homeless people can come during the day to receive a nutritious meal, get a shower, do laundry, receive mail, and stow their possessions. More importantly, there is an array of services offered, including GED classes and the like.

The reality for most homeless people is that most of their energy is spent trying to survive on the street, making sure they know where they will spend the night, where they will get a meal, where they might find a warm (or cool) spot to spend the day. There is little physical or emotional energy left to negotiate the system in order to access resources necessary to find permanent housing, a job, or to get training or education.

A day resource center, or day shelter is just such a place. It an bring together all sorts of resources not only to provide protection from inclement weather, but to provide the infrastructure and services that can help someone move off the street and into a more stable living situation. The fact that Madison lacks an adequate facility of this sort is an outrage.

I urge the Mayor, County Executive, members of the Madison Common Council and Dane County Board to support this effort financially. Such a center is not a bandaid, it offers concrete solutions to the problem of homelessness. It offers hope to the hopeless.

 

Perfect love casts out fear: Christianity and the American culture of violence–updated

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Another act of mass violence today. The media went wacko. Meanwhile, yesterday in Chicago, nineteen people were shot, including eight in a drive-by shooting. Roger Ebert pointed out the parallel.

A story on inner-city Philadelphia examines the effects of gun violence on the community and on individuals, focusing on the trauma caused by the level of violence:

Between January 1, 2001, and May 29th of this year, 18,043 people were shot in Philadelphia. That equates to about one shooting every six hours. In that same time period, there were 3,852 murders—a new body yielded up for disposal nearly every day. The entire length of the conflict in Afghanistan hasn’t produced as many dead Americans as we’ve picked up off our city’s streets.

As others have pointed out, media coverage of mass shootings conforms to our own fears. Random shootings seem to receive more attention than targeted ones (does this explain the relative lack of attention to the Oak Creek shootings?) We’ve become inured to certain kinds of violence–the shootings in Chicago being an excellent example, and our own ongoing participation in wars abroad. It’s only when that violence affects us, or people like us, that we seem to take notice.

There have been many attempts to make sense of the recent epidemic of shootings. Of course each shooter had his own set of fears and disappointments, his own set of demons, to make generalization dangerous.

What strikes me about our national mood is our level of fear. We are afraid of the future and afraid of the future direction of our country and world. We worry about the economy, about our jobs and families. We worry whether we will be able to make ends meet, or whether we will have adequate resources or medical care in our retirement. That fear percolates under the surface all of the time and is given voice in our degraded political culture.

One thing that unites these recent shootings is that the perpetrators are all white men. Elizabeth Drescher has pointed to the significance of this:

Whatever the unique complex of psychosocial, religious, financial, moral, political, or other issues that tormented the mass killers recently populating Twitter feeds and news headlines, they all sought to solve their problems with a particular expression of gun violence that maps easily to particular configurations of masculinity—apparently across classes and political ideologies. Those of us concerned with how religious ideologies participate in narratives of domination and violence, then, would do well to explore the masculinist roots of Christianity or other religious traditions, particularly as male authority and normativity are emphasized in more conservative expressions.

How do we as communities of faith respond the shootings as well as the underlying fears, the very notion of “redemptive violence” that permeate our culture? How can we offer hope and life in this culture of fear and death?  How can we proclaim a gospel that might work toward the transformation of our society? How can we name and combat the evil in our midst and offer life-giving alternatives?

That phrase from I John 4, “but perfect love casts out fear,” has been running through my head the past several weeks. If we can experience that sort of love in our hearts. If we can experience that sort of love in our congregations, if we can invite and express that sort of love with those we encounter in our neighborhoods and communities, we will go a long way toward overcoming our national culture of fear and violence.