Hunting For Good Will

The bustle of the holiday season sometimes keeps us from forgetting what is truly important. But thankfully, in the last few months the latest public debate on homelessness is once again compelling us to address this important societal dilemma.

I remember one early evening, an elderly homeless woman was dropped off at our PATH Homeless Center by taxi. Sadly, she was in a rickety wheel chair, and had been discharged from a local hospital. Although our intake center was closed for the day, with tears in her eyes she persistently banged on the glass door shouting that she had no other place to go.

Even though we were full, our staff couldn’t turn her away. Her hunt for safe shelter was successful. Unfortunately, thousands of other homeless Angelinos are not so lucky.

Back in 1985, a county task force published a study that revealed there were 25,000 homeless people in the region. Today, there are 91,000 people on our streets. In the past twenty years, the number of homeless has exploded.

For many of us on the frontlines of fighting homelessness, we are asking: will the recent public attention on homeless “dumping” and the horrors of Skid Row create a wave of public sentiment to solve homelessness? Or will this current public interest rapidly disappear, because some new national or local crisis will take its place?

We know, by experience, that a lot of media attention on a social crisis doesn’t guarantee long term solutions. Remember Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami?

What we need here in Los Angeles County, where we unfortunately possess the largest homeless population in the country, is a strong dose of community will in order to seriously reduce the number of people living on our streets. The old saying, “Where there is a will, there is a way,” is appropriate today.

I sometimes think our communities are like Will Hunting, the genius janitor at MIT played by Matt Damon in the movie, Good Will Hunting. It is the story of this young working-class kid who is smarter than the professors but is resigned to the fact that his fate in life is to be a janitor or bricklayer.

He chooses the road to self-destruction when those who care about him seek to steer him toward understanding his gifts. His childhood friend in the movie, played by Ben Affleck, tells him, “You’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket. It would be an insult to us if you’re still around here in twenty years.”

I look at our community today and see a similar scenario. “We are filled with genius educators, entrepreneurial businesspeople, creative problem solvers, hard working social service providers. And yet, despite the giftedness that our community possesses we seem stuck on a path of self-destruction in responding to homelessness.

We can’t seem to understand that we have the power within ourselves to overcome this societal blight. We are sitting on a winning lottery ticket that could pave the way for clean streets with no homelessness.

It would be an insult if homelessness was still an issue in twenty years.