Homeless Prove ‘How Leaky Boat Really Is’

In Nancy Holtzman’s, “. . . Good Will” (Times, Dec. 15), Santa Monica City Councilman Herb Katz (and others) asserts that anyone who levels demoralizing charges against homeless citizens during the Christmas season is just “shooting themselves in the foot.” Certainly Mr. Katz knows this tired cliche is most inappropriate. As a matter of fact, the holly, jolly time of year has become the real occasion for purging the worst possible news onto citizens. Just ask 74,000 soon-to-be-laid-off General Motors workers. Just ask Gov. Wilson’s recently debased welfare recipients. Or just take the time to query soon to be ex-employees of Orion Pictures.

Mr. Katz is a clever politician. It does seem logical that peaceable people would take issue with any public diatribe against the disenfranchised--especially at a time of extended empathy (Christmas). But the same reticence that helps keep people compassionate for a few weeks also deters believers from breaking ranks and aggressively challenging any expediency during a “holy” time. George Bernard Shaw noticed this same variety of silent submission 80 years ago and lamented that most people in order to “save themselves from unbearable mistrust and misery, or from being driven by their conscience into actual conflict with the law, fall back on the old rule that if you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.”

Sadly, what we in Santa Monica must believe is that our City Council is not laying the cornerstones for a new, computer-efficient, caste system. I, for one, believe that individuals without permanent shelter walk among us for a very special reason: They remind us home-dwellers just how leaky the “boat” we built really is.

CHARLES E. WINGATE

Santa Monica