Keeping Sidewalks Pure for Free Enterprise
There is no cheer, no joy, no good news for the homeless on skid row this Christmas. Except for a few scattered tents and cardboard shelters, there are no homeless in downtown Los Angeles.
According to police statistics and street gossip, some homeless are spending the holidays in jail. Others, to escape City Hall notice and police harassment, are sleeping rough under Los Angeles River bridges and freeway ramps, in out-of-sight doorways and in hard-to-see spaces outside downtown skyscrapers.
For its part, downtown goes all out for Christmas. Office lobbies are festooned with huckleberry sprays and wreaths of yew and boxwood, with winterberry and cones from Douglas firs. Boughs of Colorado juniper and fir trees of all sorts weigh heavy with gold and silver and lights that shine and twinkle for all to behold. And chances are, all who pass have a home to return to each night. Holiday cheer abounds.
To ensure that holiday shopping downtown is not spoiled by skid row’s unsightly poor, the city simply vanquished them. Walk the streets of skid row and the nearby shopping districts: few homeless are visible.
Most on skid row accept abuse as a constant fact of everyday life, hardly worth noting. The handful of homeless still sleeping on the row are roused each morning by police and a convoy of seven public works trucks that clean the small areas of cement on which the poor have slept. Nowhere else are sidewalks washed with so much determination and water.
Flower Man used to get by selling discarded flowers until police took his grocery cart. Lloyd used a cart to collect cans and bottles for recycling. Noble conservation efforts in any other neighborhood. On skid row, grocery carts help many of the unemployed create employment. Yet the city uses taxpayers’ money collecting lost carts on behalf of multibillion-dollar grocery chains.
Lloyd not only lost his cart but was given a ticket. Having no money, his ticket will go to warrant and he will be arrested next time the police stop him. One more homeless person soon to become invisible.
A Christmas parable written more than a hundred years ago by Henry van Dyke tells of a wise man in Persia who sees a new star in the night sky, the sign for which he has been waiting. Selling all his possessions, he buys three precious jewels to give to the newborn King and Savior and sets out to join other wise men traveling to Bethlehem.
On his way, he comes upon a sick traveler and stays to care for him. Because of this, he misses the appointed hour to meet the other Magi. Arriving in Bethlehem alone, he cannot find the Magi or the Christ Child. With a heavy heart, he spends his life searching for the King of Kings, while his jewels are spent one by one to help the poor and sick.
As an old man, he arrives in Jerusalem on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. An earthquake shakes the city as Jesus dies and the wise man is fatally injured. While he lies dying, a kind and loving voice speaks to him: “In as much as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” He knows now that he met the Christ Child the moment he stopped to care for the sick traveler.
It was into real life that the Christ Child came and in which the hope of Christmas remains irrepressible. That is the good news for skid row’s homeless.
