Posted on 09/10/2024 6:09:44 AM PDT by Twotone
When will Portland learn?
There’s a movement afoot in Portland to provide free food to the homeless from front yard refrigerators. Willamette Week thinks it’s a great way “to Be a Better Neighbor”. I don’t.
It’s a misguided feel-good effort at charity by naïve social justice warriors that perpetuates their presence while not resolving the situation on the ground. And of course the homeless services complex never shrinks because the client base never diminishes.
A while ago I went to a free lunch for the homeless in an underground Portland parking garage. Tables spread out across the center of the garage displayed a bounty of meal options put together by multiple volunteers, from sandwiches and lasagna to potato chips and hot ethic dishes. Homeless people streamed in, wearily assembled in slow-moving lines, grabbed hold of what they wanted and found a spot on the concrete floor to sit and eat.
It wasn’t uplifting. It was depressing.
Nobody was there to help the struggling people get their lives back on track, to inquire about the welfare of their children, to make them aware of accessible pathways towards lasting change.
The fridges are little more than an incentive for too many of the homeless to stay in a downward spiral of addiction and helplessness.
” The concept is simple,” says Willamette Week. ” Find a fridge, hook it up to a power source, put it in your front yard, and stock it with free food.”
There’s even an outfit, PDX Free Fridge, that will give you advice on how to start a free fridge effort and publicize it.
There’s a saying of uncertain providence, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”. The free food tribe are giving the homeless a fish.
It’s a classic case of when helping the homeless doesn’t really help, but reinforces a culture of helplessness.
It reminded me of when I saw a group of fresh-faced, eager suburban teenage girls handing out sandwiches from the trunk of their car to homeless people at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. That might have eased their consciences, but how, exactly, did that drive change?
A woman who directed a social service agency in the Portland area that served low-income families once told me the whole free food approach was “antiquated”, a long-ago discredited tactic.
And, of course, all of this ignores the fact your neighbors may be less than supportive of cluttering up front yards with old refrigerators that serve as magnets for the homeless under the guise of compassion. I guess that doesn’t matter when you’re on the side of goodness.
We have several “free libraries” in our little town. They are set up at the parks. You can take a book or leave a book. Pretty neat. They have not been vandalized or emptied because dumb people ignore books.
That’s a great idea. Then, when they are done eating, they can take a dump in your bushes.
Keeping up the spirit of front yard fridges and free libraries, the state of Massachusetts could repurpose the front yard bathtub shrines that state is known for to provide the homeless a means to take a bath in the yard of a house.
Maybe someone should tell them that by putting their fridges outside they’re adding heat directly to the environment and melting the polar ice cap.
The Left has this crazy idea from ancient Greece that being a pauper makes you some kind of special person that needs special treatment. Then they turn around and vilify all the law-abiding.
RE: Free lending libraries on curbsides - I lived next door to one of these and it was very popular. I often added good books to the mix. I even purchased some from secondhand shops. Then someone decided to use the little “book nook” to discard over large books that were outdated - like the batting statisics for MLB in 2002! Some books were advanced medical books for nursing or medical doctors, etc. It was very irritating as they took up a lot of space and no one in their right minds would look in there for such books.
Little Free Lending libraries are actually a nice concept, but there are always people who abuse them.
Sound like a good way to get your own homeless encampment right in your own front yard!
Like feeding rats thinking you’ll placate them and they won’t stick around....
There is one in my daughter’s neighborhood in San Francisco - people keep putting canned food in there.
Wonder why all those homeless keep hanging around..
Or someone will end up dead, locked inside the fridge.
The writer is correct and an additional problem is that overtime it becomes a health hazard as people’s focus and the newness wears off, those shiny clean fridges, the attention to detail on the food and the temperatures, etc., fades.
Professional restaurants run by pros whose livelihood depends on it, farmers, and food handlers of all types occasionally get sloppy or incompetent and see serious problems, think about random people in all sorts of personal states, running random amateur operations out of their garages and front yards, and the people they are interacting with and who will probably start helping them and even taking over sometimes are people who live and defecate on the streets without bathrooms and laundry, front yards and sidewalk eating and food handling with dogs, ants, bugs, mice, weather, food fights, and stoners puking, something that seems so simple today can become sort of nasty over time as the filth and decay grows, along with the natural loss of constant attention that the idea started with.
True- hopefully some kid doesn’t climb inside and shut the door
The best help I had ever seen for the job seeking homeless, aside from the 60/70s Jesus freaks who would run store front evangelizing centers to help bring them to, or rekindle, or remind them of their faith and inner strength, is a center in the late 1980s that would give them showers and phone numbers for job seeking and would take messages from the callbacks that the homeless guy could answer, giving him the appearance of a regular job seeker, something else they need is a place to shower and wash clothes until they get some money from that new job.
And then there's the winter-time version:
Build a man a fire, and you warm him for a night.
Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised that hasn’t happened here, though people here may “clean up” the problems before I see them. This is an unusual little town filled with a lot of good people.
And the bums will cut the power cord and steal the extension cord to recycle for $1 at the scrap yard for a hit of meth.
That is a sad fact that those that advocate forced equity conveniently ignore.
The more closely we come to true equity the smaller your share becomes.
Bingo. For that very reason, it's illegal in many places to have an unsecured refrigerator outside with the doors still attached.
Or it wasn't your food but food some other homeless person put in there... or it wasn't food that they put in there...
...like part of their fece or snot collection.
...or in your refrigerator.
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