| This is the first article I had published in an Oregon newspaper: The Portland Alliance. It was in their February 1992 issue. |
| What has been accomplished so far by the third annual homeless camp at City Hall, besides bringing down some very ugly retaliatory actions from the Portland Police? As this year's event has been dominated by homeless teenagers, many people have gotten the impression--especially since this is the way it has been slanted in the TV news--that the protest is solely by and for homeless youths. Not so. It was originally planned by Food Not Bombs as part of a series of Christmastime events designed to draw attention to a lot of different issues. One of these was a vigil in Pioneer Square on December 23 where we sat with our shopping carts and signs and handed out flyers announcing the encampment. Pioneer Square is a major hangout for Portland's homeless teenagers, so it was apparently at this juncture that these people were drawn in to our activities. Some of the other demonstrations we had planned had very poor turnouts, but the City Hall camp has turned out to be the magic one that drew enough people to make it a major media attraction, continued to pick up steam as it went along, and took on a life of its own beyond what we'd originally envisioned. It was one of those Ideas Whose Time Had Come. The majority of these young folks had not been homeless two years ago when the first encampment took place, and most of them had never participated in a political action such as this one before. So they were naive in some respects, but their instincts were in the right place and their energy was boundless. In no time they had essentially "taken over" the protest, thus the perception by the media that they had been the actual planners of a demonstration solely about homeless youth. It was for this reason that City Councillor Gretchen Kafoury--one of the few city officials who actually listened to us--put so much emphasis on youth shelters in a written statement she made in an attempt to answer some of the protestors' demands. But the few token changes she proposed, such as increasing the length of time for keeping shelters open, fell far short of what we'd been looking for. She gave token mention to the police harassment issue we had emphasized, but drew the line at the issue of camp sweeps: that is, she saw no reason why the anti-camping ordinance should be repealed. This betrays a serious lack of understanding of a major dilemma that homeless people face: they have to choose between 1) submitting to the degradation of living in shelters, which allow zero privacy, don't let heterosexual couples sleep together, impose all kinds of Mickey-Mouse rules on them and are often unsafe, and 2) camping outside with their friends, which at least allows them to retain their individual identities and make some decisions for themselves--at the risk of being arrested. The notion that people who make the latter choice should expect to be punished for it is unacceptable to us, as is the notion that shelters provide everything people need in the way of temporary housing. The fact of the matter is, the shelter system with its paternalistic "we-know-what's-best-for-you" attitude, is controlled and operated by people who don't know firsthand what homeless people go through. It encourages feelings of dependence and powerlessness in the clientele by denying them any say in how the shelters are run, rather than encouraging them to think for themselves and create conditions that they feel comfortable with. There seems to be an attitude that homeless people are homeless only because they were too stupid to keep their homes and are therefore not very competent at thinking for themselves, and that they therefore need the guidance of more intelligent, "enlightened" people to help them back onto the path to a "normal" life. To any person with an I.Q. of more than 50 who is homeless because of the worsening economic conditiions in the country this attitude is, to say the least, extremely insulting. What is lacking here, or maybe only partially formed, is the concept of homeless empowerment: that we should have the power to control our own lives, to use our intelligence to find out own creative solutions to our predicament, and that we are entitled to keep our dignity in the process; that we have the same constitutional rights as every other citizen, and that the very last thing we need is to be treated like criminals or idiots while we are struggling to survive. The City Hall protest has been a faltering step in the direction of empowerment, despite the characterization of its star players in the news as a bunch of naive, stupid, bratty kids who don't really know what they're doing and who should simply go back to their mothers. They have gotten some good practice in exercising their First Amendment rights and in voicing their actual needs to city officials. The city is still too paranoid to answer their more "radical" demand of being allowed to use their own campsites as an alternative to the shelter system while they're waiting for permanent housing,which means there is still a long way to go. But hopefully the point has been driven home, at least to some people, that the homeless are entitled to the same right as every other citizen to voice their own needs to the government and be heard, rather than being expected to passively accept whatever the government decides to hand to them while they're waiting to become "real" citizens. |
| ON HOMELESS EMPOWERMENT |