I was on San Juan Island, lying on a flat driftwood bench at Dead Man’s Cove, when Anna Minard of The Stranger called for a reaction to the city council vote against homeless encampments. “I could hang up right now, and you could forget I called,” she offered.
We’d known we were at least a councilmember short of passage, but thought we had five councilmembers who’d agree to delaying the vote for another month. By then, the reality of Nickelsville’s closure would be more imminent, and maybe that would help. That was the plan anyway, until Councilmember Jean Godden flipped.
Island reception was unstable, but as long as I kept my back against the log, it acted as a sort of signal amplifier and the connection held. I stared at an eagle that circled overhead and thought about what to say.
“It is just sad that the majority of the council can’t wrap their head around the idea that encampments are a harm-reduction strategy and they save lives,” I said. “There is really no excuse for them to not pass this other than just cowardice.”
When I saw this in print, I wondered if I’d been unfair. Later, while reading an Andrew Jackson biography, I came across the word “poltroon,” a noun meaning wretched, craven, coward, usually employed as a fighting word, often preparatory to challenging one to a duel.
“My God,” I thought, “I called half the council poltroons.” I visualized Councilmember Tom Rasmussen slapping me across the face with a cavalry glove. For some reason he was wearing a Civil War uniform. Union side.
I wondered again whether I’d crossed a line. The thought continued to fester.
Last weekend, I was reading Margaret Heffernan’s “Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril.” She describes how it is human nature to ignore that which emotionally threatens us or is at odds with our understanding of reality.
One striking example was Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s embrace of Ayn Rand’s radical free-market ideas. His utter conviction that the least-regulated economy works best survived numerous challenges, including the derivatives meltdowns of the early ’90s, the Enron scandal and, finally, the banking crisis of 2008.
And even after all of this, he could only admit that there might be “a flaw in the model” that otherwise worked “exceptionally well.”
And so, my mind returned to Richard, Sally, Jean, Tim and Tom, and their touching faith that affordable housing, in all of its obvious scarcity, was the only answer to homelessness. This idea is at the heart of the Ten Year Plan, a set of ideas about ending homelessness that dates to the Bush administration that, by now, should be somewhat discredited.
Were one to admit that churches and the nonprofit sector, with a bit of help from local government, can’t compete with the misery created by unregulated capitalism, then one might have to admit to numerous other disturbing realities.
That maybe some homeless people, in opting to not crowd themselves into the bug-infested and mostly dehumanizing emergency shelter system, are making rational choices. That their refusal is both justifiable and, in some ways, a political act.
That the mantra that “the Ten Year plan would be succeeding if it were not for the recession” ignores that we live in a system where such economic shocks are frequent and predictable, and that this might be part of the problem.
That maybe instead of attacking “non-compliant” homeless people as undeserving, we should be attacking the financiers and housing speculators who profit so lavishly from human misery.
And then I thought that maybe cowardice really was the right word, but only in the sense that we’re all cowards about some things sometimes. To fear what we don’t want to see or understand is only human.