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98 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
gloves, the skin’s going to break out in sores, and don’t you send ’em back to
me.” We benefit from homelessness! That’s why we have homelessness in
this land.
And there’s a third social benefit from the horror of homelessness: middleclass
people have a large investment in poverty. What would happen to all the
jobs that middle-class people have if all of a sudden we got rid of homelessness
Why, to get rid of poverty in the United States would be as bad for the middle
class as a Second Coming of Jesus would be for preachers just before the offering.
We sense that our comfortable middle-class existence and our secure jobs
are safe only because the thousands of unemployed homeless do not compete
with us for our work. Thus, we do not struggle to end poverty, unemployment,
and homelessness. We need to know that we, you and I, benefit from poverty
and homelessness.
With social benefits as the first cause of homelessness, let us now look at a
second factor which causes homelessness. In this nation, we lack the political
will to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Hunger has nothing to do with
agricultural production. There’s no shortage of food. Hunger has to do with the
fact that our political system will not distribute the food so that everyone has
enough to be healthy. The reason there are not enough homes doesn’t have anything
to do with the material resources to build houses. We have plenty of hammers;
we have plenty of nails; we have plenty of shingles; we have plenty of men
and women crying, “Give me some good work to do!” We lack the political will,
and the political agenda must be, “Let’s do what we can do. Let’s house the
homeless. Let’s feed the hungry. There’s no reason not to.”
The third and final reason that we have homeless people is that we are
scared. We are people who are really inhibited. We do not hate the homeless; we
fear them. Hate is just weak love; when you hate somebody, you love in a negative
way. But the opposite of love is fear. Further, we live in a system and in a
city that teaches us not to be satisfied with our daily bread. We pray for daily
bread, but we are gripped by hunger-full accumulation, and the need to have
more and more turns strangers into our enemies. We fear the poor because they
come to us and ask for our daily bread—those crumbs that we no longer desire.
But we do not have the love for strangers that provides the courage to give, so
we push them away. We build vagrant-free zones. We build prisons. We build
death holes. We are scared, and we’re so scared we take money from the bowels
of our children to build bombs that will burn and kill anyone who would want
that which we cannot use. Fear drives us to abandon the poor and to let our sisters
and brothers die homeless on the streets.
Now let us look at some responses to the problems of homelessness. First of
all let me remind you that we are coming now to the bicentennial of the
American Constitution. We don’t want to follow Warren Burger down to Disneyland
and whoop and holler and sell plastic and cheap copies of the Consti-