Bill attacks homeless for being houseless

In the movie “Nomadland,” the character of Fern, played by Frances McDormand, lives in a modified van. Somewhat early in the film Fern is approached in a store by a girl she once taught in school.

The girl sheepishly says to her, “My mom says that you’re homeless, is that true?”

Fern answers, “No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”

Exactly. It’s not the same thing.

But “homeless” is what we call anyone who doesn’t reside within a fourwalled structure made of wood or bricks and outfitted with plumbing, electrical wiring and some form of heating and cooling system.

The very existence of such people bothers us. Some of us, anyway.

The homeless certainly seem to bother the Republican majority on the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee. So much so that they seem willing to make being houseless a crime.

The committee passed Senate Bill 1413, an assault on homeless encampments, on a party-line vote. The bill would force counties, cities and towns to remove a reported encampment, allowing those living there 24 hours to collect their stuff and leave.

If they don’t, their property can be confiscated and kept for 14 days and destroyed if not retrieved. And, according to bill’s amended fact sheet, it “specifies that persons living at an encampment are guilty of criminal trespassing or drug offenses as outlined.”

We all know by now there are lots of reasons some people don’t reside in houses. Mental health issues. Drug dependency issues. Economic issues. Cities and states making an actual attempt to diminish homelessness used a holistic approach. They create crisis teams to access the population. They seek to find help for those who need it for mental health or drug issues. They seek to find places to live and job opportunities for those who might best be served that way. The legislative approach here was simply punitive.

The sponsor of the bill to remove such individuals from where they’re camped, Republican Sen. Justine Wadsack, said, “People are reporting that there are trespassers. There are these tent encampments showing up on their private property and nobody’s able to do anything about it. They all want to pass the buck and kick the can down the road. So this will give the municipalities the authority to start dealing with this.”

She also said that “unhoused people are not our neighbors.”

Actually, they are. And shouldn’t legislators be looking for ways to deal with the disaffected that don’t demonize individuals simply for not living

like the rest of us?

They’re not rodents. They’re not insects. They’re not an infestation of any kind. They’re people.

When my mother was a girl during the Great Depression, she lived with her immigrant parents and sister in a tiny house adjacent to the steel mill where my grandfather worked. They had no hot water and used an outhouse, but it was more than many families had.

Their home was near railroad tracks that serviced the factory, and in those days, men who were out of work and out of luck hopped freight trains in search of something, anything, better. Hobos, they called them.

Occasionally, one of these homeless, out-of-work individuals would knock on my grandparents’ door asking for food or money. It frightened my mother and her sister.

My grandmother told them they should not be afraid, however. She said that among the vagabonds there were angels sent from heaven by God to test our humanity.

“And because we don’t know which ones are humans and which ones are angels,” she said, “we must treat them all like angels.”

My mother believed this.

I believe it.