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58 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
situation that there would not be anything for him to do. He trudged to a soup
kitchen, to the public library, to a corner where people were gathered around a
dumpster, passing a vodka bottle. Maybe he went out into the weed patch,
where lots of vines are growing, to smoke some grass. He went somewhere and
did something to numb himself from the assault of poverty and homelessness.
And as he wandered he would have to know, to hear, and to experience being
unwanted.
In fact, by the year 1990 in the United States, homelessness was accepted as
an issue that did not relate to housing. Homelessness is considered a public
safety issue. When you have a lot of homeless people you need a lot of police.
And when you need a lot of police, you need a bigger budget to build more jails.
We have just quadrupled the size of the city detention center in downtown Atlanta,
which almost exclusively holds poor people.
We have a place in Atlanta called the vagrant-free zone. You get rid of the
vagrants there because they’re bad for business, and white people won’t come to
downtown Atlanta when there are aggressive panhandlers, especially beggars of
color. Housing and hunger are understood in this country to be public safety issues.
Rather than house the homeless, we build more jails and prisons and hire
more police. Rather than feed the hungry, we take food stamps away. That
means death for poor people. It means prisons. It means the loss of hope and the
development of despair that lead to drugs and alcohol and mental illness and
crippling disease. And we have accepted this hell, this injustice.
Please be hungry for justice and angry at injustice!
When we leave the world of the homeless and the hungry and come back
to our world, to our place, to the university, to the Open Door Community, to
the church, to the civic organization, to the sorority or the fraternity, we need to
find resources for hope and vision in our lives and relationships. We can in community,
in life together, develop an ethic and a walk in life that makes us thankful
and joyful people. We can live out the image of God in dance and celebration
as we reach out to one another.
Let me give you a wonderful example. You probably know Harriet Tubman,
a woman, a slave, who struggled, fought, demanded, and got freedom. She got
out of it; she beat the system; she got free. And at the moment when she was
free, and she had to choose the course her freedom would take, she turned her
back on Ohio (the place of freedom) and returned to the South to free other
slaves. Nineteen times she came South, and nineteen times she came out of the
South.
We are forced and pushed in this society to get a college education, to get a
job, and to make a lot of money. We are pushed when we achieve freedom to
use it for our own betterment. Harriet Tubman says, “Wait! I didn’t pull myself
up by my own bootstraps. I was lifted up by voices of the ancestors. They created
in me a hunger for justice and an anger toward injustice! I must go south