I don’t think I’ve ever quoted a Pope, but this new guy isn’t your grandfather’s Pontiff. He might actually be a Christian. He was in Manhattan during his first papal visit to the U.S. and had this to say about the homeless, the dispossessed, the poor and the perpetually damp: "In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the 'rapid pace of change,' so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no 'right' to be there, no right to part of the city. They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity.” Indeed, Francis, indeed.
The talk in the bars and cafés or in the kitchen at house parties of our big village seems to always come back round to the people who sleep on the street or in parks, behind dumpsters or the narrow green swaths that girdle the big library downtown. There are complaints about aggressive mendicants and the raucous dispossessed drinking beer from paper bags and generally acting, well, happy.
There are happy hours for many street people when someone’s dinghy comes in, and there are smokes and one sort of elixir or another until late at night when sobriety decays and darkness falls. They are, it is said, bad for business, bad for our reputation as some sort of Shangri La, well above the clamor and madness of Los Angeles, which is primarily seen as a place to be escaped from. Salsipuedes. We really would like to see them all just go away. “Try Barstow,” we whisper to ourselves and each other. And, “Where do they think we are? Calcutta?" We see them drool and trip, rant and mumble. And we, of course, feel erect, well fed, linked in, loving the grid and the gadgets spawned that allow us all to be somewhere else while right here.