THE JOURNAL & TOPICS NEWSPAPERS | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2008
Letter To Our Editor
We're A Kind Community, Right?
Editor, Journal:
"Be Prepared." "Do a Good Turn Daily." "On my honor I will do my best...to help other people at all times..." "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent."
These are not empty words to be recited once a week at troop meetings. These are concepts, skills and attitudes that young individuals in our community strive to make part of their daily lives with the help and guidance of the their families, their places of worship, their schools and their adult Boy Scout leaders who help them learn the skills needed to make these ideas become real and alive.
I have read and listened, with great interest, to the ongoing conversation about the possibility of bringing a PADS shelter to Park Ridge. Some people profess to sympathize with homeless individuals, but indicate that help needs to be provided somewhere else. Others, rightly I think, feel that the ministerial association should have done a better job of communicating with the neighbors of the proposed site as well as our community's government officials. Many of the comments seem to imply that there are no homeless individuals in Park Ridge today. Still others demonize the homeless blaming them for the circumstances they find themselves in and accusing them of being morally weak, mentally and physically deficient, and/or predators of our children.
I would suggest that the citizens of Park Ridge take a good look around them as they go about their daily activities. The homeless are in our public library, at Starbucks and Walgreens, at the Jewel, and yes, walking around the community on a daily basis. They may be sitting at a desk next to your child in their classroom at school. They live in the forest preserves that border Park Ridge. It is easy to ignore them, but they are there. They are real people with real problems and we as a community are in a position to help them.
Many of the comments that have been published are critical of homeless individuals and seek to blame them for their circumstances. This is hardly useful. It does not address the causes of homelessness, nor does it address the needs of the people who deserve our help. Implications that most homeless individuals are drunks, drug abusers or pedophiles, or perhaps all three, are unkind, amount to fear mongering, are of little value and are unsubstantiated, in my view. Observations that homeless people have physical and mental health concerns are breathtaking in their simplicity. I doubt that the writers have ever had to face the circumstances that give rise to the possibility of finding themselves homeless or they would not be so quick to judge their less fortunate neighbors.
Twice in my 50 years I have had to face down the prospect of having nowhere to live and too little food to eat. The first time was when I was ten years old. My father had passed away leaving my mother with a mortgage, car payments, three kids and no life insurance. In those days if a family chose to accept social security survivors' payments for children, adults were not supposed to work. Of course, the benefits were not enough to pay all of the bills. We lived on macaroni and cheese. My mother endured hateful comments from bank tellers and others who felt that it was wrong for her to accept government benefits for her children. I keep thinking that I am hearing the echoes of those unkind comments today. My mother worked very hard to keep our family together, fed and safe. It was an extremely difficult task. Thankfully, she was hard working, very intelligent and was surrounded by family members who were ready and able to help her.
In doing some research about homelessness I was struck by the fact that more than one individual indicated that the most difficult issue that they had to deal with was not hunger, or cold, or illness, but rather it was their perception that they were invisible to others. That people were not even willing to acknowledge their existence, much less offer them a kind word or lend a hand to help them address their problems. It is this total absence of even the most basic acts of good manners and kindness that hurts these individuals the most deeply. It is little wonder that they suffer physical and mental health symptoms that others seem to find so alarming and offensive. Can you imagine what it must be like to carry everything you own with you from place to place, day after day, desiring a warm place to sleep, adequate food to eat and perhaps, if you are lucky, a place to take a shower and clean your clothes so that people might not find you so offensive to their delicate dispositions that they act as if you don't even exist? What a sad commentary on our society.
In many ways our community is a wonderful place to live. I happen to think that is due, in large part, to the generosity and kindness of our citizens, especially our young people who are learning to be tomorrow's leaders. I hope that when all is said and done our community, including our houses of worship, our schools, our city government, our youth leadership groups and our ordinary citizens, including the neighbors of the proposed PADS site, will put its best face forward, welcome our neighbors and extend the kindness and helping hand that they need. What better lesson could we teach our young people?
Sharon Lawson, Park Ridge