Homeless are harmless in Westwood

Otero is a third-year English student.

By Vanessa Otero

I’m so sorry that Matthew Knee has to deal with the
unbearable discomfort of hearing men with nothing to their names
but the clothing on their backs jingle the change in their free
Subway paper cups. I can’t imagine the personal distress he
feels when these men try to make eye contact with him to say,
“Even pennies help” ““ what horror. But they
should be removed from our sight. Panhandling is illegal, after
all.

The fact that Knee in his column “Limiting
panhandling aids homeless,” (Viewpoint Feb. 5) complains
about the inconvenience of seeing real American poverty and
attempts to stand behind petty laws to help get rid of it ““
this may be an insight into how he and too many other people feel
about the homeless.

Maybe when he steps out of his Westwood dorm where he and his
parents pay anywhere from $500-$1000 a month in rent, he feels the
bitter injustice of this country’s rich-poor gap and feels
powerless to effect any real change.

Maybe he thinks that since he can’t do anything to help,
they should go away so he won’t feel so guilty.

Maybe he thinks the homeless are worthless, below him, or will
buy booze with any money they get anyway.

There are plenty of ways to convince oneself of reasons not to
give away one’s own dollars. We all have done it at some
point. What escapes me is why Knee would attempt to curb
other’s generosity by trying to portray the poor as
criminals.

Another thing that really bothers me is that Knee suggests
eliminating panhandling will actually help the poor. Consider this
scenario: Man with nothing is hungry. Man has no source of money
and police prevent him from asking people for nickels and dimes.
Man goes hungry. Gee, that’s so helpful.

Knee seems to have this idea that the homeless can go to
charities and magically hop back on the road to self-sufficiency.
Instead of giving a dollar to the hungry man in front of you, you
should drive on down to the Salvation Army and give the dollar to
them. This is unrealistic. While that dollar does little for the
Salvation Army, it makes a real difference in the life of that man
today, and he is a thousand times more grateful than the Salvation
Army would be because the Salvation Army is not hungry.

In addition to Knee’s assertion that not giving money to
the poor will make them richer, another of his ideas is that giving
more money in the form of tax breaks to the rich will also make the
poor richer. So it follows that withholding water from a fire will
help put it out.

Knee points to Reagan’s upper-bracket tax breaks of the
’80s as proof that this works, saying that “this tactic
resulted in charitable donations increasing by about 30
percent.” This statement is absolutely meaningless
considering that under Reagan, the gap between rich and poor
widened farther than it ever had been in our country’s
history.

Furthermore, where was that 30 percent increase?
“Charitable donations” include grants to universities
and disease-research foundations, which were most likely the prime
beneficiaries of that 30 percent increase (not charities for the
poor).

As Knee points out, the long-term solution to poverty is welfare
reform that includes job training. I agree and believe that even
more reform is needed. However, Knee suggests that by calling the
police on the homeless, that mentally ill an drug addicted people
can get help, then later in the article admits that there is an
“inadequate state-sponsored mental health care (and) drug and
alcohol addiction … system.

So, while we sit around waiting for this magical reform which
wouldn’t come about unless we had about three decades of
consecutive Democratic presidents and Congresses anyway, there is
something we can do. A few weeks ago I gave a guy on the street $3
in the middle of the day. I won’t miss it. I had $20 more in
my wallet. It wasn’t exactly the most generous thing I
possibly could have done by a long shot.

Later that evening I was in Westwood again and saw the same man,
this time with his brother. He was so happy to see me, told his
brother I was his personal angel, and gave me a big hug. I
wasn’t scared of him ““ he wasn’t a criminal or
some kind of freak. He was a poor human being.

Yesterday a friend of mine told me that the eyes of the woman
who sits at Le Conte and Broxton welled up with tears of gratitude
when he gave her a bag of about $10 of toiletries and food from
Rite-Aid.

Don’t kid yourself about welfare reform. In America, you
need money to get money.

Don’t give me this moral crap about how some people just
feel fine and dandy about taking “undeserved
money.”

You’re lucky you had parents who could give you
“undeserved money,” and I guarantee that if you
didn’t, and you had two young kids to support, you’d
take that $362 a month from the federal government you were
receiving, not the “average starting salary of a computer
programmer.”

It’s not a moral decision. Ask one of those homeless
people if they like begging for money. The poor lack money, not
pride.