Gotta Do Something

So Atlanta is having issues with homeless panhandlers, issues that seem to be playing out along economic as well as racial lines, and with black businesspeople in support? One might of course recall a pejorative for the black accomodationists that was common 35 or so years back. Since my nickname is "Uncle," I'll pass. The late Tip O'Neill made the same point with style when he said of people that they had forgotten where they came from.

One of the things I recall about working downtown was the speed with which one became a connoisseur of homelessness, learning to distinguish those we used simply to call "bums" from people who really do have little or no choice in their life on the street. One feature of the latter is that their thanks for help were genuine. Drop something in the lap of the professional bum and your generosity was telegraphed to a hundred others. Help someone in actual need and that was usually as far as it went.

I was quietly outraged then--and still am-- by the nightly picture of a woman and two small children huddling in an underused doorway of a certain well-known Boston financial establishment. It was getting well on into November, and apparently the old door leaked a little warmth. They were there for a couple of weeks, then were gone: I hoped to winter quarters someone found for them. I feared that the owner of this particular business, notorious for micromanagement in his own interest, had them moved on to someplace colder.

What fueled my outrage was knowing whose business this was, whose fragment of heat loss was helping this family survive the Boston cold. I had twice worked for places subsidiary to this man and his principal firm. He was then personally worth more than one billion dollars, probably a good deal more today. With his own money, the influence he wields, and the organisation he leads, this is someone who could end Boston homelessness in an afternoon, and national homelessness in months.

Instead, he collects Asian porcelain and museum curators. Apparently, he prefers that hobby as a legacy. So be it. That is an old impulse, after all, once called "fiddling while Rome burns."

Atlanta, Boston, and many other American cities can curtail, if not entirely end, homelessness. but they can't do it by moving panhandlers away from conventioners. They can only do it by curtailing the pandemic, of selfishness and greed, that has fueled homelessness in the first place. In Atlanta, as everywhere else, pigs may fly first.