More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.
They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.
Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t provide any further sources about the incident, so we have to trust the author to not have omitted any inconvenient facts in order to sell a story. Which, after seeing the details on the previous one, I’m not willing to do.
The devil is unfortunately always in the details, so I don’t feel comfortable making a judgment in this case. I do think it’s important to help people get back on their feet, and I appreciate these pastors’ willingness to help, but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t put an excessive burden on the community as a whole by creating safety hazards for other people.
Great start! Before continuing the rest of your sentence, please back up two commas and ask the question “where did our society fail in supporting this person to cause them to fall?” But the devil’s after that second comma, because
A community in a society concerned about supporting these people from the beginning, not just trying to fix the most visible symptom, would not see the presence of a fellow human being as a ‘safety hazard’ or ‘burden’ but would rightly see it as a failure of their society to take care of the vulnerable.
That’s a good question, and I won’t pretend I know the answer because it’s likely multi-faceted, but it likely already starts in childhood, with parents neglecting and/or mistreating their children, causing them to grow up anxious and socially maladjusted. Children who were loved and cared for and properly socialized rarely end up struggling too much as adults, because they have strong bonds within their community. If they happen to fall on hard times (like losing a job or getting injured or severely ill), they have a network of friends to fall back on, which makes the recovery process much easier.
But without any of these, things can quickly spiral out of control. You lose your job, start drinking out of loneliness and frustration, get behind on rent, lose your apartment, or get involved with drugs and so on. However, I’m not really sure how throwing more money at people like that would help fix this. It might help them keep their apartment and avoid becoming homeless, but it probably won’t make them stop drinking. It just hides the problem instead of addressing it.
Now I’m fully aware that the current model of just letting them slide into homelessness and despair until they become a public nuisance, or worse, a criminal, and then putting them in jail doesn’t really work all that well, although I have heard many stories of people for whom this was the wakeup moment they needed to start taking responsibility for themselves and turn their lives around. However, that still seems to be a tiny percentage.
Perhaps if more effort was being made to prevent all this, it could save a few more lives, but we already have things like CPS to address childhood abuse, it’s just that crazy parents will do their damndest to avoid having them get involved. Social workers might also help, but that requires these people to be willing to accept help, which many are not. But one thing I’m pretty certain about, and that’s if you give irresponsible people more money, they’re not just magically going to become responsible. They’re just going to fritter it away on drugs and booze and then come back asking for more money.