Bless Your Heart
Another shit-for-brains deterrent popped up in 2020 regarding our wanderer brethren, in which business owners and neighborhoods took it upon themselves to permanently cement in place boulders and rocks outside their storefronts, or along the walls of freeway underpasses, to prevent unhoused folks from setting up camp.
Outrageous.
That month, during the height of California’s heat wave, a bunch of boulders were set up along the tunnel walls under an I-10 underpass connecting Los Angeles neighborhoods Reynier Village and the Culver City Arts District, a kind of vigilante neighborhood watch initiative not authorized by local city measures. After public backlash and resistance from homeless advocates pointing out the heartlessness of preventing folks from erecting tents in the tunnel, an overhang refuge during the hottest weekend of the year, an organizer of the boulder intervention claimed it was done in the name of protecting their children from having to witness the plight of the homeless, that the tunnel had become a ‘choke point’ of sorts.
This despite the fact only three known homeless denizens regularly populated the tunnel, and from most reports, were civil and not disruptive to the community, save for the apparent blight of pitched tents on someone’s commute to dropping their kids off at school.
I witnessed many businesses cementing in rocks outside their door stoops and sidewalks across the LA basin that year. It’s mostly illegal, without city permissions, and poses a hazard to pedestrians. They were a lawsuit liability waiting to happen. It was just another not in my backyard end run.
If you want to do something about your local unhoused, help find them shelter. Don’t deny them access to shelter otherwise unused, other than ingress or egress.
I regularly encountered the unhoused outside my front porch, at the residence where I lived for most of the pandemic. There was a camp of at least a dozen unhoused folks in a local canal wash just off a freeway exit a couple blocks from my place. I didn’t bitch to the city council about the propriety of our neighborhood and the potential effects on young unwashed minds. I brought canned goods and clothes when I could, masked up, socially distanced. I was never going to try and push them elsewhere.
Neither should you.
Trash and public urination and unseemly sights come with that territory.
Don’t like it?
Do something civic about it, rather than passing the buck to someone else.
It’s good if your kids see the world for what it is, rather than them coming to believe your whitewashed illusions of it.
Perhaps they’ll grow up to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem.
I must’ve received a dozen bless your hearts one day in that month, as I raged through a Facebook thread roundly trouncing folks supporting such draconian measures. By the way, folks, we’re perfectly aware bless your heart, your scathing fallback when getting cornered, actually means fuck you. Your half-baked, passive aggressive platitude did little to lessen your bitterness. Just go ahead and tell me to eat a bag of dicks. It’s much clearer and puts hair on your cajones. Man up. Or woman up, as in all fairness, it did seem to be mostly women who were using the phrase.
Perhaps instead of firmly countering those cold souls with readily sourced statistics concerning the continued disparities between communities and the unhoused, I should’ve said…well, maybe I should keep this narrative in its rated hard R vein, rather than going all the way Double X.
But as far as future segments go…no promises.
*Compiled from September 17, 2020