Compassionate Conservatism: Homeless Edition

Gatordem attended a meeting amongst churches and social activists on what to do about St. Petersburg's homeless situation. An unnamed Republican attended the event. He talked about how he is compassionate about the plight of the homeless. He is just against a church's plan to get them off the streets.

The conversation started out civilly enough. Our Republican friend announced that he had all the compassion in the world for folks who found themselves suddenly homeless. He related how he had once taken in a young man who needed help and assisted him to get back to self sufficiency. We all agreed that the main problem was one of affordable housing.

Then the conversation started taking divergent views. While saying he had yet to make up his mind about the church's plans, our friend reported a list of problems as to why the church should not be allowed to move forward with its plans. Mostly, while some of these issues were true enough, the bulk of his argument was all about NIMBY. The homeless advocate admitted that they intended to "cherry pick" the subset of tent city residents to move onto the church property. There was a screening process in place to choose only homeless folks who had a good chance of becoming self sufficient during the limited time frame envisioned in the church's plans. Neighborhood doubters were asked if they wished to participate in the screening process. They were "too busy".

The conversation really started to deteriorate when a dear friend of mine spoke up. My friend, a world renowned photographer barely got two words out of his mouth before he was personally attacked by our Republican friend. My photographer friend was cut off by the Republican who dismissed him as embracing every "liberal" cause which came down the pike. My friend protested that his antagonist knew very little about him and that it was premature to make that sort of judgement about him.

Our Republican friend became adamant and started shaking his finger very close to our photographers face. He vowed that he would "do everything within my power" to defeat any elected official who voted in support of the churches plans. He made a similar threat about any neighborhood association officials who did likewise.

Gatordem also reported that residents who were against the church keeping homeless on their grounds were invited to help with the screeening process of picking candidates most able to maintain a residence. These people all said they were too busy to get involved. That really is the problem. People want the homeless off their streets, but can't their themselves away from the television long enough to even attend a meeting. These people should act shocked that their are homeless people in St. Petersburg. It's not like they tried to change the situation.

Since the gang at Sticks of Fire enjoys having blunt assessments about homelessness; perhaps they like to host a forum on the issue. They have the time to host Sticks of Fire Night at the Jobsite theatre. I'm sure Tommy Duncan and Bill Sharpe would love this idea. In fact, contact Sticks about this and tell them I sent you.

Write in the suject:

Sticks of Fire Should Host Homeless Forum

Body:

I was deeply moved by Rachel Moran's post on homelessness. Until I read her; I never realized homeless people have handsome canine features. She would be fantastic to host a forum on the plight of the homeless.

Since Sticks can host candidate debates and other tacky self-promotional crap they should have no problem pulling a homeless forum off.

I have showed people the infamous Rachel beat up the homeless on videotape post and Tim Fasano's defense of that post. The response I get from people is they think Rachel and Tim or insane. Fasano actually compared Rachel to Shakespeare. I treat these Tampa bloggers like their bizarre because they act in that manner. The weird thing is that they are socially accepted and defended by the cult of local Tampa bloggers for making bigoted remarks, but have a problem when people call them on that. This is something I thought a lot about with my recent posts about AutoAdmit. It's not cencership to be against people putting a young woman's class schedule online. It certainly isn'tcencership to try to stop a woman from going through with plans to have a friend assault homeless people on-camera. It's common sense. Something a lot of people who use the internet don't have enough of.

Now go contact Sticks of Fire.