Posted on 06/20/2010 6:03:58 PM PDT by South40
Ocean Beach has always had a thing for bumper stickers. “Coexist” is a popular one. “Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Mind” is another. And there’s this classic in counterculture bravado: “U.S. Out of O.B.”
Now, a new sticker is raising eyebrows and tempers along the community’s main commercial drag, Newport Avenue, causing some to wonder what’s happening to the scruffy town’s legendary “live and let live” vibe.
“Welcome to Ocean Beach,” the sticker reads. “Please Don’t Feed Our Bums.”
A homeless controversy in O.B.? Yes, and it started, of all places, in a head shop.
That would be The Black, which has been around for 40 years and sells much more than “tobacco” paraphernalia these days. Ken Anderson, an employee there, got together with a friend a few weeks ago and came up with the idea for the stickers, which he had printed and now sells in the store.
Anderson said he’s fed up with what he characterizes as a new strain of transient — young, able-bodied, rude and aggressive. These are panhandlers, he said, who travel in groups with pit bulls and knives on their belts and don’t ask for spare change so much as demand it.
“They have no respect for O.B. or for the people who live here,” said Anderson, 42, a 19-year resident.
He talked of friends who have been held up by machete-wielding street people, of merchants whose awning-covered doorways have been turned into trash cans and toilets. He said transients call him “a sellout” for having a job.
“The homeless guys who have been here a long time know us and we know them and they do their best not to bother people,” Anderson said. “These young kids aren’t like that. They don’t want to work. They just want to coast.”
Transients known as “travelers” move from city to city in groups, and for them homelessness is more of a lifestyle than a circumstance, said David Surwilo, the San Diego Police Department’s community relations officer in Ocean Beach. Some have credit cards and cell phones, he said.
“People in Ocean Beach are getting frustrated,” he said. “The sticker is their way of saying, ‘Let’s stop these people from parasiting off the community.’ ”
Anderson calls the $2.50 sticker a spoof, “our version of the cardboard sign some of the homeless like to hold up on street corners when they beg for money.” It has a silhouette in the center of a hobo walking a dog and is patterned after a sign in Mammoth Lakes that asks residents not to feed bears.
“It’s not politically correct,” Anderson said. “I knew some people might get upset about it.”
One of those people is Frank Gormlie, a community activist and journalist who runs the “OB Rag” blog. To him, the stickers are a disappointing continuation of “an underground campaign” against the homeless that began months ago.
“I just think they send the wrong message and put the lie to Ocean Beach’s reputation as a place of laid-back tolerance,” he said. “The stickers carry a message of hate.”
Gormlie asked Anderson to stop selling the stickers. Instead, Anderson got more printed. He also has diversified — selling “Please Don’t Feed Our Bums” hats and T-shirts for $16 each.
Through his blog, Gormlie is encouraging a boycott of The Black. He’s offering an “OB Rag” T-shirt to the person who removes the most don’t-feed-bums stickers from public signs around town and sends him the pieces. He’s talking about circulating an anti-sticker petition.
“I grew up in O.B,” said Gormlie, 62, who doesn’t live there now but has spent 30 of the past 40 years as a resident. “Merchants have always complained about the young homeless. This attempt to dehumanize them is wrong and doesn’t solve anything.”
Reaction from other businesses along Newport Avenue is divided.
At South Coast Longboards, where the sticker is displayed in the front window, employee Mike Sanders said he agrees with Anderson.
“I don’t give the kids money because they just use it to get loaded,” he said. “I encourage other people not to give, too. It just contributes to the problem.”
Across the street at the Newport Farms liquor store, manager Sal Sinawi has one of the stickers but doesn’t plan to display it. The young transients are aggressive, he said, and they’ll cuss you out if you don’t give them money. “But they’re still human. It’s OK to feed dogs but not humans? You can’t just ignore them.”
Ignoring the homeless is hard, especially when they gather in large numbers along the wall at the foot of Newport. On a recent weekday morning, one of them was shown the sticker.
“Please don’t feed our bums,” he read out loud. He chuckled. “Give me some money and I’ll feed myself.”
I lived in Ocean Beach 17 years ago...much has changed, I see. I loved it there.
That would take a tax revolt to make such a promise.
Perfect for Rush on Monday.
Mrs. 40 and I used to go to the Farmer’s Market every Wednesday. We go no more because we grew tired of wading through the bums panhandling and/or lounging on the sidewalks. The city has a real problem.
CALIFORNIA
Not clear on the concept, are we?
Ya just can’t go anywhere nice anymore.
I am so sorry to hear that. It used to be that the homeless in OB were the most harmless in SD. Old potheads.
Is that old wind bag still on the air ?
Is Rush going to be filling in for the guest host on Monday?
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My socialist droogs, we must expand government for the children's sake.
In most urban places around the world, there is a “beggar’s balance”. It varies somewhat from place to place and means several things.
To start with, there is a scale of beggars. Different places have different types of beggars. Some tend to be young, some old, some more peaceful and colorful, others just unpleasant. Some have resident populations, others transient populations.
Then there is a scale of the local people and how they behave around beggars. On one extreme are those who will invite them into their home and church, on the other are people either deeply afraid of them or with abiding hatred of them.
Government usually tries to find the balance of how it treats them, but often ends up just being fickle, trying to be nice one moment, and to drive them out the next. Usually the police are the middlemen in this.
The homeless poor do have some across the board needs, such as water, food and clothing, shelter from inclement weather, and often help for chemical abuse and psychological problems.
But they also have special needs based on who they are. This breaks them into classes, that have more or less sympathy from the public.
The most popular group are homeless families caught in an economic downturn. They are very responsive to assistance, and will usually not remain homeless for long.
The next most popular group are underage runaways. Often they have escaped from abusive families, and are frightened of the police, who will return them to their abusers. Such children get their best help from sympathetic churches, where they will get several adults to look after their interests.
The middling group are older teenagers and young adults who have dropped out of society for a litany of reasons. They are strangely sympathetic if you talk to them, as they abhor government, and have a strong sense of freedom and liberty. They don’t want to be part of “the system”, and would probably be happiest as homesteaders and settlers. And for its part, “the system” does not appreciate this at all and tries very hard to integrate them by hook or by crook.
Less sympathetic are middle aged and older “confirmed homeless”, who have a high incidence of mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse. There is no way they are going to change. However, in Seattle, a successful experiment determined that by putting confirmed alcoholics in a cheap hotel for free, and just leaving them alone, hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved by their needing less emergency services.
The least sympathetic are violent and criminal transient homeless. These are everything from gangsters to Terrible Williamson criminal family, to what have you. They are just in town long enough to steal and rob, then they leave.
There’s only one type of person I help in OB and that is 2 veterans, one a double amputee. They’re really nice guys but they need to relocate.
This wacko grabbed me once on Geary Sreeet in San Francisco. “Spare change?” he asked.
“No.”
He jumped up and put his hand on my arm. “Gimme money!” he said.
My wife caught my wrist just in time to stop the punch. “Don’t,” she said. “This is San Francisco. It’s not worth going to jail for.” I unclenched my fists, shrugged him off, and walked away. He followed us down the block, screaming obscenities.
If my wife hadn’t been there, I’d’ve one to jail and he’d’ve gone to the emergency room with a collapsed trachea.
Next time, I shoot.
These are not homeless but street people, the type found in most cities in the U.S.
They come from different states to relocate. They Will Not work and just sit around and push people for money.
Most are ablebody, can speak as an educated person, but won’t work and think society owes them.
The title may confuse our British friends, across the pond...
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