Craig Watts is a minister friend of mine who lives in Florida. He wants to get arrested.
I suppose that’s a bit strong. I should say he is willing to get arrested if that is what it takes to continue feeding the homeless in Fort Lauderdale.
It’s all because of city ordinances initiated by Mayor Jack Seiler who is trying to make the homeless there invisible, perhaps in hopes they will somehow go away.
The ordinances are what you would expect, such as prohibiting panhandling, sleeping on public property, and allowing police to confiscate the few possessions the homeless temporarily store under a bush or park benches.
But there is also a new ordinance prohibiting the serving of food to the homeless in public. That’s how Craig got involved.
Churches and groups have had outside food lines for the homeless (this is Florida, remember) for years, but now this act of compassion is illegal. Some genuine Christians and other compassionate people have chosen to defy the ordinance. In several instances police have shut them down and issued citations to volunteer workers that carry a fine and up to six months in jail.
Craig has not been cited yet, but it is probably only a matter of time.
As expected, the Mayor’s office says his efforts are “actually trying to promote the safety and well-being of the homeless.” Of course, and the moon is made of cream cheese.
I was thinking about Craig’s courage on behalf of the homeless when I read in the paper that a report just released by the National Center for Family Homelessness says that at some point during 2013 there were 2.5 million children living on the streets of America.
In America, the land of opportunity, one out of every thirty children were homeless.
Why? Because their parents are homeless. Why? Because they are lazy, don’t want to work, are looking for a handout, enjoy the insecurity of not knowing where they will spend the night or get their next meal? Hardly.
It’s because they have spent one, two, and even three years looking for a job, have run out of unemployment compensation, and in the process lost their home and now have nowhere permanent to live.
These are the chronic unemployed for whom Congress refused to extend unemployment benefits earlier this year. Conservatives said they didn’t want to encourage people not to look for work. Maybe that is where Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler got his cue?
The truth is, the unemployed want to work, continue to look for work, but every day face the harsh reality that the jobs are not there, and when they are they seldom pay better than minimum wage, making it impossible for them to remain financially independent.
These are the people Congress cut off, adults who once had good jobs and a home but are now living on the street at various times during the year, along with their children.
I couldn’t help but wonder about how frightened and scared our two six year old twin grandchildren would be if they lived on the street, or their eight year old sister, or their nine year old cousin.
Just thinking about it made me want to scream at all of us in this country for letting such a thing exist.
In states politicians are trying to ban abortion, gay marriage, and make voting harder, and in Washington there is talk of another government shutdown, all the while 2.5 million of our nation’s children are sleeping in parks, under bridges, on sidewalk grates, in dangerous shelters, and standing in line for food given to them by Craig Watts and others like him across the country.
Maybe this doesn’t bother you, but it sure bothers me. And it makes me wonder just what kind of country have we become.
linnposts.com 
The reason for all this homelessness and starving people is because the politicans don’t give a damn. We keep saying we live in a Christian nation, yet the power folk who could make a real difference in all this tragedy don’t believe what Jesus said: “Feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”
Rev. Rezash’s comments say it better than I can, but I can give his views a VERY strong second. I am developing a very large sensitivity to the Christian nation myth. Maybe at some time in the past our nation practiced some basic Christian principles, but I think those days are long gone. Today we seem to be driven primarily by “military might”, petty politics, and “me first” thinking.
Jan,
You must have made this up! An ordinance prohibiting the serving of food to the homeless in public? There could not be a mayor who is that f’ng stupid or heartless. Please tell me it’s not true so I will not feel obliged to go to FL and strangle this worm!
Bill, sadly, Jack Seiler is real and so are his actions as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale!
So take the food lines . . . INDOORS!
That’s the idea. Get the homeless out of sight. How terrible to have “the least of these” on church property. After all, it’s their own fault they’re on the street. Why should churches care about such people? Besides, they can’t give any money to keep the church going, and they certainly don’t pay any taxes. This is a land for people who want to make something of themselves. The rest can eat cake.
I do believe we’ve been here before. I read in his epic work “The Road to Wigan Pier” (about Britain’s unemployed in the 1930s), the author George Orwell had much to say about a society that gave people cheap luxuries in lieu of the things they really needed. Orwell commented that ‘…you can shiver all night through lack of bedclothes, but everyone has access to a radio’. Not much, but at least it took the edge off the discontentment.
These days (in my country at least), everyone, even the destitute, has access to the Internet – albeit through the local library. Perhaps it’ll take time for man the producer and consumer to catch up with man, the organiser and distributor, as it did in the 1930s to the 1950s. But let’s hope to God it won’t take a war to make this happen, as it did in the days of George Orwell.
Very thoughtful comments, Nigel. Thank you.
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I’d move to a better nation. Like ……., fill in the blank. I would not pay one dime in taxes to any country that was as “honestly” nasty as you people make America out to be. What happened to your “Honest talk” when you people are just here to agree and feed off of each other’s lies and listen to “your news” outlets.
Maybe China can start feeding more people, they’re the richest nation in the world. Oops, they can’t feed their own people, remember, only one child per couple so lets kill all the girls. Russia has a better idea, let’s supply the world with small arms on both sides (they don’t care!) so both sides will kill each other off. If we’d just pay women to have abortions, instead of making them do it for free, we could be a better “Christians nation” and end up with fewer mouths to feed to boot.
You people are sick, sick, sick!
Ah, reminisces of the Viet Nam War days when super patriots had bumper stickers on their cars that said, “My country…love or leave.”
Or as Wilfred Owen captured it in the final lines of the best anti-war poem ever written (re WWI after gas attack):
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Yes!
There are very few problems I can think where the solution is ignoring it until it goes away. People are definitely not in that area in terms of solutions.
When the little people gather and march it usually ends bad for those laughing inside with plush furnishings.