Commentary : As the Hapless Line Up for Food, the Focus on Their Plight Sharpens

There I was living in the rarefied atmosphere of my inflated ivory tower from where I could view all of Orange County’s issues in stark black and white. I was certain I could tell all the bad guys from all the good guys.

But then I descended into the catacombs of the County Courthouse where the Orange County Grand Jury is housed, and I was given the opportunity as a grand juror to look at the big picture. Even on a clear day, it is not a pretty sight.

Here the major concerns revolve around overcrowded jails, air quality, water shortages, waste disposal, budget deficits and airport overrides, not to mention growth and gridlock.

Something was missing. So, at the start of my 1-year term last June as an official county watchdog, I decided to join the Human Services Committee studying homeless families.

Immediately, these very real people came sharply into focus. It was easy enough to relate to their need for food, shelter, clothing, medical assistance and some kind of income (not necessarily in that order). Essentially, this is called survival.

Still, it is one responsibility to gather cold facts for a final report to the Board of Supervisors and another to translate those facts into warm bodies (which many of them weren’t this past winter). Fortunately, I found a partial response to illuminating a small segment of the problem right in my own back yard.

Mary, the grand jury secretary for the past 12 years, had a pile of blankets in one corner and a stack of canned goods in the other when I entered the office for typing help. The outpouring of donations had come, she explained, from her friends in the courthouse.

Sometimes viewed as less than sympathetic, they included marshals, bailiffs and prosecutors from the tough criminal justice system. Then I learned that Mary spent one of her days off going to the park to feed the homeless.

So I followed her one Sunday to a small park in Garden Grove. Waiting on one side of the table were the men, women and children, temporarily down on their luck. The line seemed endless, but the efficient and fast food operation was over in less than an hour and no one went away hungry.

Supporting recent statistics, there was an increased number of young couples and mothers with small children lined up with the people one sees, only if one looks, on all the street corners of every busy intersection in all the county’s 28 cities.

Viewing the hungry and the homeless just as their neighbors was the handful of volunteers in charge of dishing up the salad and ladling out the homemade soup. They are unique, because they have no official name and they don’t represent any established group.

Rather, they’ve been operating for the past 2 1/2 years by word of hungry mouth. They don’t solicit funds, but they raise conscience levels. If they have a credo, it’s that they don’t serve any food in the park that they wouldn’t give their own families.

Heading up the loose-knit organization is an older couple on a fixed income who have learned the hard way to measure generosity not in terms of what one gives but what is left over. They know that often in California, the only place “family ties” exist is on television. They are aware that even picnic tables can turn and they could, one day, find themselves on the other side. There’s a fine line between Orange County’s would-be and could-be homeless.

So they stand and serve the guy from the car wash who lost a week’s pay because of the rain. And the couple who can’t afford to pay 60% of their combined minimum wage income on housing, even if they could find it. And the single mother whose night-cashier job doesn’t qualify her for welfare or leave enough to feed her 6- and 7-year-old daughters either.

It’s for these working poor and countless others that the food providers have asked their City Council for a patio cover over the picnic tables. Symbolically, it will be a roof over their heads and that of the people they feed. City officials are supportive, but they worry about both liability, in case of contaminated food, and a number of complaints from nearby residents about transients in the park.

Now, as in other situations where NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) surfaces, the argument becomes ludicrous. Authorities fear that if the roof is flat, the homeless might climb up there to sleep. However, if it is sloped, there will be no problem because anyone climbing up there would fall to the ground. Or slip through the cracks, in bureaucratic lingo.

In plain talk, these days few cities appear willing to run the risk of being labeled compassionate. They fear this will only attract hordes of the hungry and changing community attitudes doesn’t happen overnight.

If volunteerism at the grass-roots level is on shaky turf, I have to wonder where the people fed in the Garden Grove park on Sundays go for a warm meal the rest of the week.