Share Our Selves

I have followed with great interest the reporting and editorials of The Times regarding Share Our Selves. I live on the west side where I am heavily impacted by my neighbors who use the services of SOS.

At the Costa Mesa City Council meeting on July 17, almost all of the Costa Mesa residents speaking on behalf of SOS do not live in the area impacted by SOS. I’m afraid theirs is not so much a voice of compassion as it is of fear that SOS just might be relocated in their back yards. I can assure you that wherever SOS is located, anyone who really needs it will be there. And the logic follows that it will be “where it should be.”

I would venture to say that not one of those individuals experiences the daily frustration of picking up after people who drop anything and everything in the front yards of their neighbors. We encounter fast food garbage, liquor/beer bottles and even a dirty disposable diaper.

SOS has had compassion upon the poor and needy, but it is a hollow compassion when they fail to see and hear the cries of the other needy in the neighborhood.

SHARON WILLIAMSON

Costa Mesa