Tent City Seeks Justice

A young man squints against the camera flash.  His long dark hair falls on shoulders hunched beneath an orange jail suit.  He looks uneasy…. His uneasiness is not that of an embarrassing moment or an uncomfortable situation; it is the deep uncertainty that comes when the world falls out from under you.  He flinches against the mug shot.

The next day his face appears on the front page of the local newspaper under the headline: “Rape suspect lived in Watershed.  Man appears to have stayed in underground hole.”  In the following days, the newspaper prints sensational photos of his underground “bunker”, photos of his belongings strewn about by the police, and short clips – taken out of context – from his private journal.

The article directly above his reads, “Olympia Council tells Tent City to disperse.”

***

A young woman pulls a trash bag, heavy with the weight of two days’ garbage, out of a can and ties the ends.  She moves quickly, collecting heaping ashtrays and wiping surfaces in a single motion.

Kandace, 19 years old, is a resident of Camp Quixote, Olympia’s new tent city founded by the Poor People’s Union (PPU).  Kandace joined the Union two weeks before Camp Quixote was founded.

“It’s about brainstorming solutions together for poor people to survive in today’s economically challenged world,” she says of the Union, “…about helping people who don’t have other options to have an option.  Including myself.”

***

David Lukas Lynch, age 23, was accused of raping an 11 year old girl.

The rape occurred on February 5^th.  The attacker entered the girl’s home and raped her at knife point while her family slept.

Police found David the next day, huddled in a church parking lot.  They asked him if he hurt anyone the night before, and he said, “Yes, I think so.”  They arrested him and searched his camp, finding a hunting knife and a journal in which David mentioned his desire to quit “child hunting”.

The Olympian reported later that David was behaving “irrationally” and was so “out of control” that he had to be placed in four point restraints and put on suicide watch.  The judge presiding over his case ordered a mental health evaluation to determine if he was capable of standing trial.

***

Kandace grew up in foster care and was left to survive on her own at 18, when she aged out of the program.  After bouncing between shelters, camps, and friends’ couches, Kandace discovered the PPU and the plans for a new tent city, which she described as “a doorway to something new, a way to be productive.”

Camp Quixote was erected by the PPU on February 1^st.  The encampment served as a means for the homeless to establish their right to exist.  Having already been squeezed out of the parks, the homeless were frustrated when the City passed an ordinance banning panhandling and sidewalk sitting last November.  Camp Quixote was built the day the new ordinance went into effect.

Asked about her opinion of the ordinance, Kandace commented that “the safest place for [homeless women] to be is on the sidewalks where there is light and people around.”

The encampment was initially sited on a vacant City-owned lot at the corner of State and Columbia streets, in the heart of downtown Olympia.  Its location made it highly visible.  Cars driving by frequently honked their horns in a show of support for the camp residents.  Local businesses donated food, and Evergreen students thronged to the site in a show of mass solidarity.

Camp residents checked in regularly with neighboring businesses to make sure they had no complaints.  They set up security patrols, and organized volunteers to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

When an elderly, senile woman who had been thrown out of the Salvation Army showed up at the camp, residents took her under wing and made sure she had a good tent and food to eat.

***

David Lynch’s underground camp was impressive.  About the size of a fifth-wheel trailer and built with plywood, it even sported a window, and was well hidden from public view.

Sensing a hot story, the Olympian published lavish photos of the camp, calling it an “underground lair” in one “breaking news” update on their website.  Readers commented on the Olympian’s website:

“Put him back in the bunker and cover up the hole. Its a good place for someone who rapes an 11 year old.”

“This guy is transient because he is lazy. He is a predator because he is wired wrong.”

“I hope [he] gets repeatedly raped in prison until he has to wear diapers for the rest of his miserable life.”

“Put him in with the rest of the houseless in prison.”

When contacted for a sensational tidbit by the daily Olympian, David’s ex-girlfriend replied, “I want people to understand that he is a brilliant man and a complex thinker and a poet… [David] doesn’t have a bad heart.”

***

The City of Olympia was unimpressed with the accomplishments of Camp Quixote.  Angry about City property being taken over by the homeless, City Manager Steve Hall told the Olympian that “It seems like a terrible way to start a conversation… it seems like a poke in the eye.”

Neither the City Manager nor the Olympian noted the fact that 120 people, mostly members of the PPU, showed up at a November public hearing to express their opposition to the proposed sidewalk ordinance.

After one week at the downtown location, Camp Quixote residents were served with eviction notices from the City.

On Thursday, February 8^th, the Board of the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, sensing the urgency of Camp Quixote’s situation, voted to offer the camp sanctuary on church grounds.  Camp Quixote accepted the offer, and the Rev. Art Vaeni contacted the Olympia City Manager to inform him that the camp would be moving to church property the following day.

But the City of Olympia apparently wasn’t satisfied to see the camp move of its own accord.  Several dozen armed police officers surrounded and barricaded Camp Quixote in the pre-dawn hours of Friday, February 9^th.  They threatened that, if the camp was not moved immediately, the residents would be arrested and their belongings seized.

Camp Quixote residents rushed about in the rain to gather their belongings and load them into vehicles supplied by local volunteers, including a truck belonging to T.J. Johnson.  T.J. is the only City Council member who has spoken in favor of the encampment.

The tent city is alive and well today, standing on property belonging to the Unitarian Universalist church.  The church has offered to let Camp Quixote stay for 90 days.  It is likely that another church will step up and offer to host when this 90 day period expires.

But the City of Olympia remains opposed to the existence of the tent city, setting itself at odds with local faith communities, and the Unitarian church faces fines if it fails to comply with the expensive and complicated process of applying for a special use permit.

***

On the morning of February 21^st, the following headline appeared in the Olympian: “DNA tests clear rape suspect.”

David Lynch is innocent.  He did not commit the crime.  Yet he was declared guilty in the court of public opinion.  He was sentenced to several weeks locked in the Olympian stocks and pillory, with his life and home splayed out for the world to see and scorn.

Christ once said, “What you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”  If David’s story has one lesson to share, it is that we as a society have failed to end the practice of crucifying our Lord.

The problem isn’t that the cops made a mistake, nor is it that the media was out of line.  They made the same assumptions that any reasonable person would make.  They found a young, disheveled, confused, mentally ill man who lived in a hole very near to the victim’s home.  He possessed hunting knives.  He mentioned “child hunting” in his journal.  He was homeless.  Almost anyone would have found him to be suspicious.

The problem that must be faced, however, is that there was no concrete evidence of David’s guilt.  In fact, the little girl who was attacked described her attacker as brown skinned, with short dark hair, a pointed goatee and mustache, and wearing glasses.  David is pale, with long shoulder length hair and a clean-shaven face.  He did not fit the victim’s description of the attacker.  David was merely mentally ill and in the wrong neighborhood.

So the problem was not that anyone was out of line… The problem is that sometimes being reasonable can have dramatic and harmful consequences.  It was normal, reasonable people whose assumptions led them to burn young women to death for the practice of “witchcraft”.  It was normal, reasonable people who endorsed and participated in the Jim Crow system.  It was normal, reasonable people who crucified Jesus.  And today it is normal, reasonable people who believe that the mentally ill and the homeless are a danger to society.

The truth is that reasonable people are a far greater threat to the homeless than the homeless are to society.  And because of this, the homeless are vulnerable when they camp alone.  They are not safe from us.

This is why Olympia needs a tent city.  So that the homeless can be safe.  But there is also a greater need that can be met by Camp Quixote… our very desperate need to find the way to a better life.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.”  The homeless do not have many of the worldly comforts that the rest of us enjoy.  But God’s Kingdom isn’t about worldly comforts.  It is about what we do and who we are.  The residents at Camp Quixote take care of one another.  The same cannot be said of the rest of our society.  All too often we are driven to complacency by our comforts… while our neighbors suffer.  All too often we step over the needs of others as we strive to achieve the “American Dream”.  All too often we allow our thirst for power and for security to send us into war.

Maybe if we start paying attention to the poor, if we start noticing the way they share their most basic resources like food and blankets, maybe we just might discover what it means to be “blessed”, or holy.  And maybe we’ll think twice before we persecute the next David Lynch.

When I was 14 years old a gay teacher in my high school was “outed” in an anonymous letter circulated among parents at the school.  The letter warned of a lesbian in our midst and the dangers she might pose to children in the school.  The teacher quit her job in a mixture of humiliation and fury – but not before a dozen other students and teachers came out of the closet in solidarity.

The courage on display at the time was my first experience of the gay rights movement – a direct, self-conscious, deeply personal string of actions that came with serious personal consequences for the people involved.

One senior at the school, a very large Mormon kid who played center on the football team and was known for being a “ditto-head” (a Rush Limbaugh fan), was a particularly vociferous opponent of everything homosexual.  But he was also a close friend of one of the lesbians who had come out.

Over the next few months the lesbian student lovingly supported her Mormon friend as he struggled with his political and religious views – and later that year they were seen skipping down the hall arm-in-arm in a typical display of teenage silliness.

At home in rural Thurston County (my school was a private institution in Tacoma) I began to notice the bigotry that surrounded me. Many of my friends and neighbors actually believed that their own brand of homophobia was rooted in love for gay people.  They deeply believed that homosexuality was a “behavior”, a “lifestyle”, and a “choice”.  According to this view, adherents of the “gay lifestyle” were terribly misguided and were endangering their own spiritual wellbeing.  It was therefore an act of compassion to correct people caught in the errors of “homosexual behavior” – and particularly important to support sodomy laws.

I have to emphasize the goodness of the people who hold these views.  It is not enough to say that they are normal, decent people.  They are some of the most generous and kind-hearted people I have known – without a hateful bone in them.  They are not the slightest bit troubled by homophobia because, given their understanding of the issue, homophobia is not in conflict with their values.

The issue of values makes challenging ignorance particularly difficult.  The well-intentioned nature of ignorance serves as a blinder preventing bigots from recognizing their own bigotry.  I clearly cannot be a bigot if I don’t hate.

This is the greatest challenge posed by bigotry.  Bull Connor, with his attack dogs and water cannons, might have been the ugliest face of racism.  But he was not the most common face of racism nor was he the strongest proponent of segregation.  That foul honor belonged to decent, polite Southern gentlemen – gentlemen who believed that kindness and gentleness were demanded in all personal interactions, including with the “hired help”.  These good men failed to comprehend the deep harm they had done.

Bigotry is less often rooted in hatred than in ignorance.  This is why a person can feel justified in “loving the sinner but hating the sin”.  It is why a common Southerner could support segregation while harboring personal feelings of warmth for the nanny of their children.  It is also why Council Member Julie Hankin was capable last Tuesday of comparing anti-homeless laws to the firm hand of a loving parent. The homophobe, the racist, and the classist would never admit to hatred – and they would be quite honest in their fervent denial.  But they also fail to understand the personal harm they cause through their actions.

In the last two decades researchers have shown conclusively that homelessness is neither a clinical problem nor a problem of personal choices or preferences.  Rental subsidies – with or without support services – are almost universally effective at curing homelessness.  Mary Beth Shinn writes, “…subsidized housing was very nearly both necessary and sufficient to stabilize formerly homeless families.”  Zlotnick, Robertson, and Lahiff found that entitlement income and housing subsidies were the most important factors for exiting homelessness and attaining housing stability among homeless adults.  Homelessness is an economic condition and its cure is found in economic interventions – in spite of any clinical challenges that a homeless person may face.

And the characteristics of homelessness are almost identical to those of poverty in general (it is notable that housing instability is almost universal among the poor).  The homeless are predominately young people, young families, and people with disabilities.  The young face a long struggle out of poverty and the disabled are locked into poverty.

Yet our civic leaders, public servants and business leaders alike, continue to view our homeless neighbors as people who make lifestyle choices.  They compare “camping” to children playing in traffic.  They wave around their clinical credentials (one Council member is a psychologist) while talking about “personal responsibility”.  And they seek to pass laws that criminalize the “behaviors” inherently tied to homelessness – sitting and sleeping in public.

Over the years of being swept out of the hidden corners – Woodland Trail, Grass Lakes, the Plum Street railroad tracks, the camps behind Mega Foods, the railroad tunnel, the St Martin’s College campus, the edges of the Capitol campus, and the wooded strips along the freeway on-ramps – the homeless have been funneled into downtown Olympia.

The resulting public exposure pits them in conflict with pedestrians, shoppers, and business owners who (at best) attempt to avoid or ignore them and (at worst) taunt them with slurs or spit on them.  In spite of this treatment, downtown Olympia is the last refuge for people facing laws preventing their survival.

The homeless have been cornered by the law.  In order to survive they must sleep in places where it is illegal to sleep.  The homeless are routinely driven out of their hidden sanctuaries and forced to find new places to break the law.  Who can live without sleep?  Who can survive when the only answer to such a basic human need is “not here”?

Ignorance is far more difficult to confront than hatred.  Staging a counter-protest against Fred Phelps is obvious and usually lacks personal consequences.  But correcting a bigoted friend is messy and challenging.

In spite of the difficulty we cannot allow ignorance to go unchallenged.  There can be no compromise when it comes to the right to marry for love, to raise children, to visit a sick family member in the hospital, to inherit the wealth and the keepsakes of a deceased spouse, or to be productive in the workplace.

In the same way, for the same reasons, we must not allow a person to be made illegal.  We have a moral obligation to regard our neighbors as (in the language of Martin Buber) “Thou” rather than “It”. We cannot allow the law to turn people, by virtue of their very existence, into the objects of public condemnation.

I have on occasion had the rare experience of witnessing the transformation of a bigot.  Eleven years ago – as the community fought over a similar set of anti-homeless laws that we face today – I heard the story of a business leader who, struggling with the bitter and ugly conflict among neighbors, woke up late at night and faced himself in the bathroom mirror.  It was a brief moment of painful clarity – he saw in his own behavior something horrible, something he described as “despicable”.  The remorse that is experienced when realizing one’s own ignorance can be terrible.

I have felt the same remorse on more than one occasion.  When I was a small child I once retold a racist joke I had heard from a friend.  My father was in earshot, and his rebuke was the worst I had experienced.  In my youth I regularly and carelessly used the word “faggot” – a word that burned my insides as close friends came out of the closet.

This remorse is one of the most important emotions that I have experienced.  Ignorance is a hallmark of privilege – which I have in excess – and remorse is the only defense against it.  It is fresh and alive in me, keeping me vigilant against my own ignorance.

For the sake of those for whom we care – for those who are marginalized as well as for those who marginalize others – we have a responsibility to admonish, to provoke regret and repentance, and to transform.  Love in action is “a harsh and dreadful thing”, and we have a responsibility to wield our love as a weapon against ignorance.

This is a small town.  We all have friends whose ignorance harms the homeless.  Tell them so.  Love them into responsibility.  Stop them from supporting criminalization.

They are good people, and some day they will thank you.

By Meta Hogan

Over the last few months we’ve been dreaming about chickens (sometimes literally!). We collected some building supplies through Craigslist and from friends, and drew out probably a dozen floorplans for the coop. All we needed was a little nudge to move “from paper to pavement,” as they say.

That impetus came in the form of our new intern, Jeannette, who asked the very simple question “So, when are you going to do this chicken thing?”

Last weekend, Jeannette and I began measuring out our pile of reclaimed wood. We didn’t use any of the plans we’d drawn up – we decided to let the lumber determine the form.

Over the course of the week, our coop slowly materialized from the ground up. First a solid frame went up, made of beams recovered from some kids’ playhouse on the west side. Then a window from a dismantled trailer in Shelton appeared in the end wall. Then we spent two days carefully piecing together the nest boxes with leftover subflooring from our remodel and bits of 1×2.

The cool thing is that we have not so far spent any money on our chicken coop. But now we need to get siding and flooring and roofing for our coop, the final steps before acquiring the birds themselves.

So, to B&R lovers and chicken lovers alike: we’re looking for about $125 in materials to finish the coop (or, if you have a 4×8 sheets of plywood or siding material, or leftover 3-tab roof shingles, we’d take those too).

We really want to have chickens to show off at our May 5 seedling sale fundraiser. Help us get our chickens housed!

Donate by clicking the “JustGive” link below, or email meta.hogan@gmail.com with material donations.

On Saturday, July 23, from 1-5 p.m., you are invited to our summer garden party fundraiser at Bread & Roses House of Hospitality, 1320 Eighth Ave. S.E., Olympia.

You can tour our gardens, the House of Hospitality and the Guesthouse, meet our guests and volunteers and savor a delicious Saturday community meal.

We hope to have some music for you to enjoy as well.

We look forward you seeing you and welcome your support for this vital effort to end homelessness in our community.

This year, our new advocacy program began providing the loving link between our shelter guests and mainstream service providers. Advocates offer companionship to our guests as they support and guide them through the social service system.

Elise Filka recently completed a three-month internship as one of these advocates. During her time as an advocate, Elsie helped three guests move to housing, one guest to access outpatient mental health services, and one guest to enter inpatient treatment for alcoholism.

Elise continues to volunteer at Bread & Roses for the summer. She shared these thoughts as she finished up the term.

My internship at Bread and Roses Women’s Shelter has, by far, been one of the most challenging and empowering educational experiences I’ve had. I went into this intern-ship wanting to be a part of a community that views advocacy as a radical act. I learned that the most radical thing in a community is the willing-ness to overcome personal insecurities and to really al-low yourself to grow, and then show the women that you are advocating for that they can do the same.

Most of the challenges I learned to overcome were the same ones the guests had to. It is an act of resistance to be able to break down the barriers in yourself, and once you can do that you can learn how to break down the physical barriers for achieving goals.

In the case of the women I advocated for, I learned that once we were able to recognize invisible barriers we could move on to the ―real‖ ones, like overcoming un-healthy dependency on a loved one in order to find subsidized housing.

Finding a place for myself within the community was also difficult. I played a different role for each of the women at the shelter. In some cases, I was more of a therapist or friend—listening and validating a traumatic experience was all that was needed. To others I was a resource for housing, or even a kind of caregiver.

An example of my ever-changing role as an advocate is a personal, anonymous story that I shared in a paper for class:

When I first met “Ann” I immediately fell for her sweetness and charm. Not only that, but listening to her story broke my heart. When she first came to Bread and Roses she was in pretty bad shape, although I was impressed by how self-sufficient she was. She knew of most of the resources that I knew about, and she made friends easily with the other guests and with the people she knows at the many other shelters that she has been at.

I think that one thing I have learned with Ann is to keep my emotional distance from the person I am advocating for, while still trying to understand and care about the emotional space that they live in. It is so easy to get caught up in the way that another person thinks and feels. Ann, like me, struggles with lack of confidence sometimes. She has told me that she feels like her case isn’t as important as other women in the house. At her worst, she told me that she could leave if I wanted her to, saying that she could live in her car again. Ann, like many other women at Bread and Roses, can sometimes think of herself as a victim and not as a person worthy and deserving of help. I think that recognizing this lack of confidence in her has been im-portant, and getting her to start caring for herself has made me realize how much I need to care for myself in order to help others.

I’ve also seen how chronic homelessness affects women emotionally and mentally and can be a serious barrier to moving forward. Coming to Bread and Roses can be difficult because you have to be a part of a community once again.

Depression and anxiety result from years living on the street without support, and over time women develop a deep sense of independence which can be extremely difficult to work with as an advocate, because of resistance and distrust of people in power.

I’ve learned so much about developing trust with women that I’m working with. In addition to that, I’ve had to learn that maintaining that trust can sometimes be an endless cycle.

Because I can see in the women this fear of trust, I’ve learned to recognize it in myself as well, and to learn to allow people to come into my life for help. For example, it has been extremely helpful to trust other advocates and volunteers’ knowledge of the community and resources, and because I allowed those relationships to be trustworthy. I’ve helped many women find resources themselves.

The most rewarding thing about interning at Bread and Roses is how rewarding it is to come to the shelter every morning and eat breakfast and know that you are an important part of something going on there. I love the openness of it, and the days when I can simply sit down for coffee with a guest and talk about big life questions. Being able to create these safe, inviting spaces for one another is part of what it means to be human, and working at Bread and Roses has taught me how important that really is.