By Dwayne Eutsey
About 10 years ago, I worked briefly in a small homeless shelter in Frederick, Maryland.
I remember thinking one evening as I looked out from the staff room to where our residents watched TV in the lounge that the televised images they saw must have seemed as alien to them as transmissions from Mars.
It was the late ‘90s, so the dot-com bubble was still inflating many Americans’ perceptions of endless prosperity while heralding a new faith in cut-throat corporatism. Popular shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Survivor reflected these prevailing sensibilities while the persistently high homeless rate at the time barely made a footnote in the national narrative relentlessly promoted on TV sets around the country.
As I saw our homeless residents in the shelter’s lounge that evening watching commercials for shiny new luxury cars and SUVs, I wondered how they must have felt seeing the elusive promises of consumer bliss beamed into their impoverished reality night after night.
After watching an unsettling episode of Frontline recently, I think I may have an idea. Called “Close to Home”, the show “chronicles the recession’s impact on one unlikely American neighborhood -- New York’s Upper East Side.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/closetohome/
Unlike most of the people featured in this show, I come from a poor, working-class background and can appreciate some criticisms viewers have expressed about the upscale people featured on the program. “If times are so hard for them,” many viewers have asked, “do they really need the expensive haircuts and massages some of them still charge to their overburdened credit cards?”
Relevant question, but overall, seeing how the worst recession in 63 years has shaken even the most affluent members of our society underscored for me just how unstable the economic situation is for all of us today. In particular the story of the not-so-affluent carpenter featured in the program was heart-wrenching. Not only did his business go under, but his wife died three days before the bank foreclosed their home and dumped all their belongings on the curb.
The episode in general left me feeling like the homeless residents I saw in Frederick 10 years ago may have felt: not so alone and yet, paradoxically, all alone at the same time.
We’re not alone in that so many of us are struggling simply to stay afloat these days. And yet so many of us, like the carpenter, are also left all alone in fending for ourselves as we begin to slip under. The show left me wondering who follows Christ’s injunction to care for these, the so-called least among us—our brothers and sisters?
Fortunately, one of the answers to that question in our community is the Talbot Interfaith Shelter (TIS). This faith-based service ministry unites several local religious communities in providing temporary shelter to single men, single women, and families who lack adequate housing during the coldest months of the year. It also provides dinner, breakfast, and bagged lunches to all shelter guests.
http://www.talbotinterfaithshelter.org/Home.html
Last year over a three-month period, faith communities participating in TIS opened their houses of worship to a family of four, two single women (one with a baby), and about seven or eight single men. According to Lisa Menditch, who serves on the coalition’s Board of Directors, TIS is currently looking for a commercial place with a sprinkler system to rent so that the shelter can have even more guests this season.
“We have a couple of options on the table so something will appear. I have faith,” Menditch wrote me in a recent email. “For those of us short on that faith, we have a back up plan.”
Beginning in December, Temple B’nai Israel will partner with Emmanuel Lutheran and Presbyterian Church of Easton through January 3 to house guests. From January 3-12 TIS will move to Shore Harvest Presbyterian and Fairview Church of the Brethren. Other faith communities are also willing to serve as hosts but have not yet been assigned a week.
As the winter months begin to set in, readers of this column can help TIS by attending a ping-pong tournament later this month to raise money for it. Sponsored by Third Haven Friends Meeting (the Quakers), the Easton Volunteer Fire Department, and the Downtown Table Tennis Club, the tournament will take place in the Easton Firehouse on November 21.
According to Pete Howell, one of the organizers, the tournament desperately needs people to loan ping-pong tables and volunteers with pickup trucks to deliver them to the fire hall on the 20th and to return them on the 22nd. They also need volunteers to officiate, register competitors, and otherwise help out at the tournament.
Anyone who can help may contact Pete at piratepete@goeaston.net or 410-924-5752.
As the Frontline episode and our own daily experience so amply illustrates: these are very tough times for so many of us. But through coming together in community efforts like TIS, none of us has to endure this cold season alone.
Study: Half of All US
Study: Half of All US Children Will Get Food Stamps
A new study has concluded that nearly half of all US children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood. Researchers say the fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher. The lead author of the study, Mark Rank, said, “This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children.” Children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty. In 2008, over 28 million Americans received food stamps in an average month. About half of the recipients were under the age of sixteen.