Skip to main content

Libby Fernandez: NOT a Friend of Homeless People

written by Tom Armstrong

Not a Friend.
Loaf & Fish Director Libby Fernandez was profiled in an issue of the Sacramento Business Journal. In the piece she was quoted telling homeless-averse business people what they want to hear. The first and third paragraphs in the profile follow [emphases mine]:
"Loaves and Fishes is the heart of downtown," Sister Libby Fernandez said. "It's a welcoming place for the very poor and homeless, and gives them a place to be during the day. We serve an average of 650 poor and homeless people each day, and if they weren't here, they would be at other places downtown.
... "When people who are homeless are here they can use our restrooms, our showers, wash up, get their clothes cleaned." she said. They can use our telephones, sit in our part and just be, without disturbing other people and other businesses. They can socialize here, and get services and help here."
In his book Managing the Underclass in American Society(1), John Irvin wrote about how the REAL effort in many metropolises is not to help the poor or homeless, but to coral them, to run them around in circles, to waste their time and to keep them out of public view. Police -- prompted by politicians who are prompted by business people -- in metropolises where such a polity, called "Warehousing the Rabble," is extant -- endlessly roust the homeless and otherwise keep 'em out of "nice neighborhoods." Does that sound like Sacramento? Yes.

And you know it's true: Homeless people in Sacramento get ticketed and arrested for conduct and actions that conventional citizens, doing the same activities, would never be bothered about by the police. There are laws on the books that exclusively or near-exclusively are there targeting the homeless to reduce them to the status of docile cows.

Libby, with her quotes in the Biz Journal, proves her fealty to the Warehousing the Rabble philosophy and the business community, in stark opposition to suffering homeless people. She is certainly no friend of the homeless. It's all a charade. She shows that she does not support the right of homeless folk to be treated the same as conventional Sacramento citizens.

Make no mistake, Libby is well known for delivering radically differing messages to suit the different audiences she addresses. It's called duplicity and Libby is shameless at it. To the business world, she's dutiful at keeping the stinky homeless away from the gentile public. To donors and volunteers, she is Mother Teresa, aiding the wretched. To the homeless, she pretends to be a champion of the poor. And to other groups, like the employees at Loaves & Fishes, the Jesuit volunteers, and the L&F Board of Directors, she has yet other masks to hide behind.

A change at the top at Loaves & Fishes is way, way, way overdue. It is time, too, to end the duplicity and for new management at Loaves & Fishes to embrace a new policy: one of compassion and genuine interest in helping homeless people find meaning in their lives and pathways to happiness in apartments of their own.
---------------------------------
(1)  Full title: The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society.



Comments

RCMSacramento said…
It's such a hard thing to figure out a solution to homelessness. I work for a non-profit and it's our goal to provide value for our volunteers, so we send them to Loaves and Fishes and we have never had a problem with them. Hopefully the city gets its act together in the next few years. You can see our website at http://teamgiving.org/volunteer-sacramento/.

Popular posts from this blog

Sex, Lies and Exegesis

Definition: exegesis [ek-si-jee-sis]: critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, especially of the Bible. Painting by He Qi , a prominent artist from China who focuses on Christian themes. This piece is inspired by The Song of Solomon. In his May 21 column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up a hornets’ nest. His column wasn’t really a column, it was a quiz, titled “ Religion and Sex Quiz .” The questions and what he provided as the answers were provocative, to say the least. We would later learn, in his follow-up, a post to the Times online in the afternoon of the same day, “ Reader Comments on my Religion Quiz ,” that the information that was used to create the quiz came with the help of Bible scholars, “including Jennifer Knust, whose book inspired [the quiz], and … Mark Jordan of Harvard Divinity School.” Kristof doesn’t name Knust’s book, but a quick googling reveals that it must certainly be Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s...

In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day

Calvin [a "green hat" in Unfriendly Park] makes the argument for continued incompetent management. Hobbes represents me — only, in real life, I don't have that good a coat . In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day In one respect — and only one — that I can think of, Loaves & Fishes is NOT hypocritical: The management hates the way America is run and wants to turn it into a backward communist country . Consistent with that, Loaves & Fishes’ management runs its facility like a backward communist country. The People’s Republic of Loaves & Fishes. A seemingly minor thing happened on New Year’s Day. A couple of people smoked a joint in Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park and one of the park directors, or both of them, determined, at about 10am, that, in retribution, they would punish all the homeless there by closing the park for the day. This is something the managers of the park do all the ...

Loaves & Fishes implicates Buddhism and Jack Kornfield in its June Donations Plea.

The Sukhothai Traimit Golden Buddha was found in a clay-and-plaster overlaid buddha statue in 1959, after laying in wait for 500 years. It's huge and heavy: just under 10 feet tall and weighs 5 1/2 tons. At the beginning of their June newsletter , Loaves and Fishes relates a story, taken from the beginning of renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's 2008 book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology . The first part and first chapter in Kornfield's book is "Part I: Who are you really?" and chapter 1 is called "Nobility: Our Original Goodness," which ought to serve as a clue to what the beginning of the book is about, not that that sentiment isn't strewn through-out the chapter, section and book such that what Kornfield is telling us should be crystal clear. Somehow, the not-ready-for-primetime management at Loaves & Fishes have managed to use Kornfield's wise and kindly words in a way that mangles th...