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Timothy Harris
Executive Director |
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about 10-year plans to end homelessness. With all the front doors closing and back doors opening and so little federal support for the housing that’s desperately needed to make the theory real, I’ve come to think of this paradigm as a wind swept tunnel, where most of the actual motion is from the hot air that constantly rushes through.
A week ago, the city delayed release of their new protocols on homeless camping by four days to dump the story in Saturday’s paper. Ironically, the media frenzy around the Dalai Lama buried the story as well.
Compassion is one of those things everyone says they support. Mayor Nickels presented the Dalai Lama with the key to the city while his staff worked overtime to spin a policy that screws the poor. The value of city concessions to concerns with outreach, notification, possession storage, and shelter availability was more than undermined by new language that radically limits the actual protections provided by these protocols.
The Mayor had an opportunity here to move to higher ground. City rhetoric, which has been all about compassion and ending homelessness, has taken the high road. Their actions, however, have taken the low road of covert policy formulation, consistent media manipulation, and shameful avoidance of responsibility.
The Dalai Lama speaks of compassion as being something more than some squishy idea that’s up for grabs by anyone capable of forming three consecutive syllables. Compassion, he says, is a verb. It is action. This action is informed by empathy and driven by personal responsibility.
The mayor’s policy, which exempts the city from taking responsibility by denying services and basic rights to the majority of homeless campers, falls far short of this very useful definition. |
