Where Are Diane and the Other Homeless Supposed to Live?
I wonder if Diane Grue knows about Rosa Parks.
I’ve never spoken to Grue and don’t know the answer, but the two women could strike up an interesting conversation. They could compare notes about living in a society but not really being of it. Of being seen, but, in another way, being invisible.
Parks is the black woman who in the the mid-1950s refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala.
Today, in her late 80s, she’s guaranteed a place in history for her defiance.
Grue is a homeless woman with a bum leg who just turned 67. For her defiance, she’s guaranteed a court date on July 23.
Grue is fighting Buena Park’s arrest of her for sleeping on public property. It’s her sixth arrest. The city says that it doesn’t want to take her to court, but that Grue has forced the issue.
If a jury convicts her, Grue could be sentenced to six months in jail. In losing, she would at least get a roof over her head.
But I don’t see her case as ironic.
I see it this way: Where is a person who doesn’t have a home supposed to go?
Jon Alexander is Grue’s attorney (and, for disclaimer purposes, a friend of mine). He says Grue has been homeless about eight years. Her Social Security check lets her stay in a cheap motel about half of each month, he says. For the other half, she’s on the street.
Theoretically, I guess, Grue could find a shelter. But it’s fairly well documented in Orange County that the homeless population outnumbers the shelters’ beds by anywhere from 8-to-1 to 10-to-1.
Alexander says Grue survives in large part because kind-hearted grocery store and restaurant employees slip her food. He says she doesn’t have a mental incapacity and would much rather live under a permanent roof than under the stars.
I don’t know that Grue is claiming any particular right, say one as fundamental as sitting where you want on a city bus. Her defiance, such as it is, stems from her belief that she hasn’t committed a crime.
Obviously, she knows that a crime is what a city says it is, but Grue is on to something deeper here.
To me, it’s the premise I laid out earlier: If you have no home and there is no shelter space, where is a person supposed to go? Oh, Grue could camp on someone’s private property, but we know how that would end up. None of us is too keen on people sleeping in our yards. Grue could sleep in a tree, but we tend to reserve those spaces for animals.
So she got in the habit of rolling up some blankets and sleeping on the ground.
“There’s a little bit of Tom Joad in this woman when you hear her talk,” says Alexander, citing the Dust Bowl hero of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”
“She has a tough streak in her, and I admire that immensely,” Alexander says. “Where they arrested her [next to a freeway confluence and truck parking lot], all the NIMBYs in Buena Park couldn’t be offended by where she was.”
Whenever I write in defense of the homeless, some readers take me to task.
Do I want them sleeping in my backyard? No, I don’t. Do I want them urinating or defecating outside my business? No.
To that extent, I sympathize with neighbors or merchants who deal with the unpleasant effects when human beings have no place to live.
But those callers never seem to address the simple question: Where are these people supposed to go?
Why isn’t the city or county’s answer to that building more shelters for them? Why aren’t the legitimate gripes from merchants and homeowners addressed by local governments?
No matter how you slice it, folks, if you don’t have a place to go, you don’t have a place to go. The homeless can’t make themselves disappear or stop their bodies from functioning.
The feeling is that Buena Park is cracking down on the homeless because of its tourist reputation--as if any city relishes dealing with the homeless.
No, it isn’t a civil right to be homeless.
But unless we want to relegate them to nonhuman status, don’t we have to grant them the human right to lay their bodies down somewhere without calling it a crime?
*
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821; by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626; or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.
