This week, my church hosts a roving shelter. For a week about fifty people sleep in the gym and eat their meals in the cafeteria. Next week they'll do the same at a different place. The following week, a different church or school. Nicole and I have spent several evenings distributing towells and toiletries, bagging popcorn for the night's movie (Crash, interestingly enough), making lasagna, chatting.
Nearly everyone I've talked with has a job. Cass Community Services picks them up from their temporary homes each morning and takes them to jobs that don't pay enough to save up a deposit and first month's rent. (CCS and cooperating churches, I suppose, are in effect subsidizing the employers. A familiar, all-too-common arrangement.) The mythology of homelessness still revolves--in addition to stories of mental illness--around stories of laziness, joblessness, shiftlessness. But the stories of the underclass are also stories of industry, stories of corporate decision-making, stories of lean operating budgets, stories of how wealth is distributed, stories of American capitalism.
But stories of laziness are more compelling, more interesting, more worthy of outrage, and more firmly (permanently) cemented in our national consciousness. That line from last night's poetry reading keeps echoing: "too right wing to do the right thing."
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