Florida Social Justice Network
Florida Social Justice Network - a community involved in social justice advocacy
Bluto & Popeye
As a child, I remember going to my Grandmothers in Elrama, Pennsylvania, a poor company coal mining village, only 14 miles away from downtown Pittsburgh, yet nearly totally isolated by mountains and rivers from the rest of greater Pittsburgh. I lived in Peters Township, the highest per capita income community in our county, 250 yards away from the bus stop that took me to the trolley to downtown for 60 cents. I considered myself a city person, I went to the symphony and the theatres downtown, hung out around Pitt and the Carnegie Library. I felt perfectly at ease walking the city streets, which were typically teaming with people day and night. When I would be watching television at my grandmothers and KDKA-TV would be reporting on events taking place in the ‘big city’, listening to the comments from my family members from Elrama, it was as if the things that were happening in the city were foreign. It was as if there existed two parallel universes nearly on top of each other, which either disdained the other, or denied that the other was really there.
In Elrama there was the ElCo Company Store; it was an amazing place (or at least I thought so at the time), it had high ceilings and hardwood floors. Most of the people who shopped their had ‘a charge’, meaning you go to the cash register to check out, and if you said ‘charge it’, there was no plastic tendered, Stella, the clerk, would just write the amount of your purchase on a tall yellow card that was kept in an open metal drawer beside the register and you would pay your bill when you got paid by the mine or mill. They had an amazing selection of penny candies, things like Bit-O-Honey, Mary Jane’s, Orange Slices, Candy Cigarettes, Penny Fish, and Coconut Bacon. They also had small toys, like Wheelo’s, rolls of paper caps, and the like. I remember one toy that came to mind after reading this morning’s Orlando Sentinel and this weeks Orlando Weekly newspaper, this toy had several little steel balls, inside a 3 inch round enclosed clear plastic dish, with holes that you were to try and manipulate the balls into. The background was a smiling Popeye face when you held it one way and looked at it, yet when you tilted it a different way, the image you saw was a unshaven thug, who kind of looked a little bit like Bluto (Popeye’s cartoon nemesis).
As I read both papers today, I realized that we live in a city where so many people are picking up these papers, and either seeing Brutus or Popeye, depending upon their perspective or orientation, but too few people are looking and thinking how cool it is that Brutus and Popeye are symbiotically sharing the same space.
There was an editorial in this morning’s (7/26/08) Orlando Sentinel entitled “A Partnership”. With a byline of “City, Counties can’t leave businesses on hook to fund homeless cause”. This is the text of the editorial:
An all-star group of Central Florida political and business leaders has come together to deal with this area's homeless crisis. Please, let's not waste their valuable time.
Having their involvement on a regional commission is imperative. But good folks such as Disney President Meg Crofton and Darden CEO Clarence Otis may as well play hooky from meetings that call for establishing programs that could end up penniless.
The regional effort is supposed to be a private-public partnership; yet it looks as if businesses are doing all the heavy lifting.
They have been asked for $300,000 to pay for staff and other administrative costs. Most of that money has been raised. But it's looking iffy whether Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties and the City of Orlando are going to be able to cobble together the $3 million requested for start-up costs.
Osceola, looking at a 10.3 percent budget decrease, is strapped for cash. So are the other communities. The plan calls for an allocation of $3 million, no matter how it's divvied up.
That money will go to all sorts of essential services -- prevention, housing, health. The key word is prevention. There are reams of supportive data that say if communities spend money on the front end, they'll save much more later.
We understand that all communities are performing budget triage. We also understand that while everybody gets excited over projects such as Innovation Way and the Orlando Events Center, finding emergency shelter for a mom and her two kids doesn't engage our leaders quite as much.
Homeless people have never been a strong voting bloc.
But it's worth noting that families with children are the fastest-growing homeless population in the nation, and that women and children account for about 40 percent of this area's homeless people.
So if saving millions of dollars down the road doesn't motivate this region's leaders, how about a moral imperative?
They can start by admitting this is a regional problem. A recent project, "Homeless Connect" day in Sanford -- allowing access to services such as getting an ID card -- was moved after complaints from the business community. In Osceola, County Manager Michael Freilinger says that funding homeless projects is a federal issue, not a local one.
Tell that to the thousands living on the edge in Osceola. A recent review of bed-tax revenues found 2,500 motel rooms where people were not paying bed tax anymore because they had been in the rooms for more than 180 days.
They are on the verge of joining Central Florida's homeless population, estimated at 9,000.
They need help. A lot of approaches can do just that. We know of one that won't:
Trying to deal with the homeless crisis on the cheap.
It is certainly laudable that the Mayors and area corporate executives have chosen to dedicate their time serving on a commission dedicated to ‘the area’s homeless crisis’. The problem is, as Mayor Dyer’s testimony at the recent Vagabond Church of God & Orlando Food Not Bombs vs. The City of Orlando trial showed, they are only seeing ‘Bluto’. They choose to see the people their overburdened system and its official service providers are capable of helping and deny the existence of or demonize the rest and those who are called to serve them. They refuse to see ‘Popeye’! And they surely can’t grasp that different people can look at the same game and initially see two different things, before they realize that there are two different faces and that is perfectly OK that they are both in the game.
The editorial notes that their first order of business is to raise $300,000 for staff and administrative costs, as part of a total of $3,000,000 in start up costs. Stating that the Disney & Darden members on the commission might as well play hooky from the meetings, if they call for establishing programs that could end up penniless.
The goal should not be to establish a bureaucracy, led by a not-for-profit industry professional with a $150,000 plus compensation package, whose goal becomes fund-raising for the bureaucracies own survival. The goal should be to make the public aware of the terrible human tragedy that is homelessness. To make us aware that a number of the people who are serving us and entertaining us at Disney and Darden are not housed.
The focus needs to be on the poor and the homeless themselves; giving them faces and personhood. Osceola County Manager’s Mike Freilinger’s statement that ‘funding homeless projects is a federal issue, not a local one,‘ makes it sound like he is debating who is responsible for mosquito control and for paying the exterminator. Poverty is NOT a family value! The chief executive of the county should be trying to figure out, at minimum, how to reach out to those 2500 families in the motels; they are his constituency as much as the people in the gated golf course communities, the renters in the apartment complexes, and the cattle ranchers.
But as the editorial writer noted cynically, but honestly, ‘Homeless people, have never been a strong voting block.’ Sojourner’s Vote Out Poverty campaign is reaching out to register everyone to Vote Out Poverty. We are also asking our elected officials to sign our pledge, which says they “will pledge to make overcoming poverty a central issue during (there) time in public office.” We want them to understand that we can see both faces in the game and how they deal with poverty will be one of our central issues in determining how we cast our votes.
In Elrama there was the ElCo Company Store; it was an amazing place (or at least I thought so at the time), it had high ceilings and hardwood floors. Most of the people who shopped their had ‘a charge’, meaning you go to the cash register to check out, and if you said ‘charge it’, there was no plastic tendered, Stella, the clerk, would just write the amount of your purchase on a tall yellow card that was kept in an open metal drawer beside the register and you would pay your bill when you got paid by the mine or mill. They had an amazing selection of penny candies, things like Bit-O-Honey, Mary Jane’s, Orange Slices, Candy Cigarettes, Penny Fish, and Coconut Bacon. They also had small toys, like Wheelo’s, rolls of paper caps, and the like. I remember one toy that came to mind after reading this morning’s Orlando Sentinel and this weeks Orlando Weekly newspaper, this toy had several little steel balls, inside a 3 inch round enclosed clear plastic dish, with holes that you were to try and manipulate the balls into. The background was a smiling Popeye face when you held it one way and looked at it, yet when you tilted it a different way, the image you saw was a unshaven thug, who kind of looked a little bit like Bluto (Popeye’s cartoon nemesis).
As I read both papers today, I realized that we live in a city where so many people are picking up these papers, and either seeing Brutus or Popeye, depending upon their perspective or orientation, but too few people are looking and thinking how cool it is that Brutus and Popeye are symbiotically sharing the same space.
There was an editorial in this morning’s (7/26/08) Orlando Sentinel entitled “A Partnership”. With a byline of “City, Counties can’t leave businesses on hook to fund homeless cause”. This is the text of the editorial:
An all-star group of Central Florida political and business leaders has come together to deal with this area's homeless crisis. Please, let's not waste their valuable time.
Having their involvement on a regional commission is imperative. But good folks such as Disney President Meg Crofton and Darden CEO Clarence Otis may as well play hooky from meetings that call for establishing programs that could end up penniless.
The regional effort is supposed to be a private-public partnership; yet it looks as if businesses are doing all the heavy lifting.
They have been asked for $300,000 to pay for staff and other administrative costs. Most of that money has been raised. But it's looking iffy whether Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties and the City of Orlando are going to be able to cobble together the $3 million requested for start-up costs.
Osceola, looking at a 10.3 percent budget decrease, is strapped for cash. So are the other communities. The plan calls for an allocation of $3 million, no matter how it's divvied up.
That money will go to all sorts of essential services -- prevention, housing, health. The key word is prevention. There are reams of supportive data that say if communities spend money on the front end, they'll save much more later.
We understand that all communities are performing budget triage. We also understand that while everybody gets excited over projects such as Innovation Way and the Orlando Events Center, finding emergency shelter for a mom and her two kids doesn't engage our leaders quite as much.
Homeless people have never been a strong voting bloc.
But it's worth noting that families with children are the fastest-growing homeless population in the nation, and that women and children account for about 40 percent of this area's homeless people.
So if saving millions of dollars down the road doesn't motivate this region's leaders, how about a moral imperative?
They can start by admitting this is a regional problem. A recent project, "Homeless Connect" day in Sanford -- allowing access to services such as getting an ID card -- was moved after complaints from the business community. In Osceola, County Manager Michael Freilinger says that funding homeless projects is a federal issue, not a local one.
Tell that to the thousands living on the edge in Osceola. A recent review of bed-tax revenues found 2,500 motel rooms where people were not paying bed tax anymore because they had been in the rooms for more than 180 days.
They are on the verge of joining Central Florida's homeless population, estimated at 9,000.
They need help. A lot of approaches can do just that. We know of one that won't:
Trying to deal with the homeless crisis on the cheap.
It is certainly laudable that the Mayors and area corporate executives have chosen to dedicate their time serving on a commission dedicated to ‘the area’s homeless crisis’. The problem is, as Mayor Dyer’s testimony at the recent Vagabond Church of God & Orlando Food Not Bombs vs. The City of Orlando trial showed, they are only seeing ‘Bluto’. They choose to see the people their overburdened system and its official service providers are capable of helping and deny the existence of or demonize the rest and those who are called to serve them. They refuse to see ‘Popeye’! And they surely can’t grasp that different people can look at the same game and initially see two different things, before they realize that there are two different faces and that is perfectly OK that they are both in the game.
The editorial notes that their first order of business is to raise $300,000 for staff and administrative costs, as part of a total of $3,000,000 in start up costs. Stating that the Disney & Darden members on the commission might as well play hooky from the meetings, if they call for establishing programs that could end up penniless.
The goal should not be to establish a bureaucracy, led by a not-for-profit industry professional with a $150,000 plus compensation package, whose goal becomes fund-raising for the bureaucracies own survival. The goal should be to make the public aware of the terrible human tragedy that is homelessness. To make us aware that a number of the people who are serving us and entertaining us at Disney and Darden are not housed.
The focus needs to be on the poor and the homeless themselves; giving them faces and personhood. Osceola County Manager’s Mike Freilinger’s statement that ‘funding homeless projects is a federal issue, not a local one,‘ makes it sound like he is debating who is responsible for mosquito control and for paying the exterminator. Poverty is NOT a family value! The chief executive of the county should be trying to figure out, at minimum, how to reach out to those 2500 families in the motels; they are his constituency as much as the people in the gated golf course communities, the renters in the apartment complexes, and the cattle ranchers.
But as the editorial writer noted cynically, but honestly, ‘Homeless people, have never been a strong voting block.’ Sojourner’s Vote Out Poverty campaign is reaching out to register everyone to Vote Out Poverty. We are also asking our elected officials to sign our pledge, which says they “will pledge to make overcoming poverty a central issue during (there) time in public office.” We want them to understand that we can see both faces in the game and how they deal with poverty will be one of our central issues in determining how we cast our votes.
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