A Rolling Symbol of Society’s Heartlessness
The caller was outraged. “It is criminally irresponsible and a pernicious waste of money to give shopping carts to the homeless,” he said, “and I intend to hold you personally responsible if one of your carts is used in a theft from my business.”
It’s OK for Catholic Worker, a lay Catholic organization that provides services to the poor, to run a free soup kitchen. But giving out 100 free shopping carts to the poor, as it did a few weeks ago, inspired unprecedented anger and even violent reactions from the community. The police have intimated that we are abetting criminal activity; numerous irate and sometimes anonymous callers have castigated us for “trashing the city,” “degrading the homeless” and wasting resources; some members of the business community have actually screamed angry epithets at us, saying that we are providing the homeless with a “license for vagrancy.”
On the one hand our action is a simple, human response to the anger we felt at watching homeless people harassed and jailed for up to 30 days for the mere crime of possessing a shopping cart. We wanted to prevent homeless people from going to jail and give them what they needed to survive on the streets by providing them with shopping carts, complete with written statements giving our permission to use the carts--thereby eliminating all legal impediments to such use.
On the other hand, though, it is a provocative action that flies in the face of cherished beliefs held by most Americans. Nothing symbolizes more graphically the desperation and degradation of homeless poverty than a shopping cart. To give a shopping cart to a homeless person is an act of complicity and codependency, if not outright criminal conspiracy. Rather than reforming the poor or mainstreaming the poor, we are confirming the status of their dead-end poverty.
But it is unconscionable for any social service agency to continue fostering the illusion that it is still possible for the poor to aspire to the American dream. Over the past several decades, our nation has consistently eliminated the lifelines, stepladders and safety nets that historically have made it possible for the poor in a complex industrial society to transition out of poverty. Our collective parsimony has precipitated the elimination of every social program from free higher education to job training to low-cost housing. And now, with the elimination of 80,000 people in July from the welfare rolls, we have we have virtually slammed the door on the poor, creating a permanent homeless underclass.
We need to face the fact that these cuts are leading to an increase in the homeless population, which is aesthetically unpleasant, bad for business and has a chilling effect on tourism. It has become the responsibility of the police to ensure that the public never need encounter the odious consequences of its own hardheartedness.
In San Francisco, for example, it is illegal to serve food to homeless people in the downtown area. In Seattle, it is illegal to even sit in certain areas of the city. And in Orlando, Fla., street beggars will be arrested unless they possess a city issued license to beg.
Here in Los Angeles, the police zealously enforce anti-camping, anti-begging, anti-loitering as well as anti-shopping cart laws, thus sanitizing public contact with the poor.
The real purpose of our free shopping carts is not simply to help the poor or keep them out of jail, though it is definitely that. The real purpose is to ensure that the poor, with the rolling emblem of their poverty and suffering, will not be entirely invisible to the community.
We expect more angry phone calls in the coming weeks when we announce our next distribution of 100 free shopping carts. But that’s just part of the process of breaking through the veil of public denial to expose and heal the wounds of homelessness and poverty.
