A Knight Of The Word

“There are two hundred beds in this facility. With the new building, we should be able to double that. That will give us four hundred. Four hundred to service harmless women and children. There are twelve hundred school-age homeless children, Andrew. That’s children, not women. Twenty-four percent of all our homeless are under the age of eighteen. And that number is growing every day.

“Ours is a specific focus. We provide help to homeless women and children. Eighty percent of those women and children are homeless because of domestic violence. The problem of domestic violence is growing worldwide, but especially here, in the United States. The statistics regarding children who die violently are all out of proportion with the rest of the world. An American child is five times more likely to be killed before the age of eighteen than a child living in another industrialized nation. The rate of gun deaths and suicides among our children is more than twice that o$ other countries. We like to think of ourselves as progressive and enlightened, but you have to wonder. Homelessness is an alternative to dying, but not an especially attractive one. So it is difficult for me to dwell on accomplishments when the problem remains so acute.”

Wren nodded. “I’ve seen the statistics.”

“Good. Then let me give you an overview of our response as a nation to the problem of being homeless.” Simon Lawrence leaned back again in his chair. “In a time in which the homeless problem is growing by leaps and bounds worldwide— due, to varying extents, to increases in the population, job elimination, technological advances, disintegration of the family structure, violence, and the rising cult of housing — our response state by state and city by city has been an all-out effort to look the other way. Or, as an alternative, to try to relocate the problem to some other part of the country. We are engaged in a nationwide effort to crack down on the homeless by passing new ordinances designed to move these people to where we can’t see them. Stop them from panhandling, chat let them sleep in our parks and public places, conduct police sweeps to round them up, and get them the hell out of town that’s our solution. Is them a concerted effort to get at the root problems of homelessness, to find ways to rehabilitate and reform, to address the differences between types of homelessness so that those who need one kind of treatment versus another can get it? How many tax dollars are being spent to build shelters and provide showers and hot meals? What efforts are being made to explore the ways in which domestic violence contributes to the problem, especially where women and children are concerned?

He folded his arms across his chest. “We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It’s obscene.”

Wren nodded. “But you can’t change that, Simon, The problem is too indigenous to who we are, too much a part of how we live our lives.”

“Tell me about it. I feel like Dan Quixote, tilting at windmills.”

Simon shrugged. “It’s obviously hopeless, isn’t it? But you know something, Andrew? I refuse to give up. I really do. It doesn’t matter to me if I fail. It matters to me if I don’t try.” He thought about it a moment. “Too bad I’m not really the Wizard of Oz. If I were, I could just step behind the old curtain and pull a lever and change everything — just like that.”

Wren chuckled. “No, you couldn’t. The Wizard of Oz was a humbug, remember?”

Simon Lawrence laughed with him. “Unfortunately, I do. I think about it every time someone refers to me as the Wiz. Do me a favour, Andrew. Please refrain from using that hideous appellation in whatever article you end up writing, Call me Toto or something; maybe it will catch on.”