or Toilet Paper and the
reducing of others to mere Its.
Getting the average citizens of Sacramento city and county
to have a more-positive sense of Homeless People is an important and laudable effort
that must be pursued. But how, and to what end, precisely?
In recent days, Loaves & Fishes has had a campaign going
to get citizens to buy toilet paper and to bring what they purchase to the
Loaves & Fishes Welcoming Center/Warehouse.
Below is text about the toilet-paper drive, written, I believe, by
Justin of L&F:
Toilet Paper Drive This Thursday
Access to clean fully
stocked restrooms is one of life's most basic necessities. Providing those
facilities is an essential part of Loaves & Fishes. We need your help to
keep everything stocked and rolling.
Help us collect for
those in need by donating a package of TP.
When: Thursday, August 31st, 7am-5pm
Where: Loaves & Fishes, 1351 North C Street, Sacramento, CA 95811
When: Thursday, August 31st, 7am-5pm
Where: Loaves & Fishes, 1351 North C Street, Sacramento, CA 95811
=======
A toilet-paper drive is a common something that Loaves &
Fishes has done. There was, likely, a drive of this kind every year in the Libby era. While it has
certain benefits in creating interaction between the charity and its donors,
the detriment of collecting toilet paper in this manner is overwhelming,
particularly so at the current time.
Homeless people have been in the news a lot in the past year or so, most frequently for pooping against the sides of buildings or
along the American River Parkway or in the proximity of where they’ve been “illegally”
camping.
The reason for the feces problem is simple: Bathrooms have not
been available. The bathrooms in Chavez Park that had been available for men
and women were razed in order to build all new facilities for the new
restaurant in the park that offers its restrooms for the use of customers,
only. It is ironic that Cesar Chavez, after whom the park was named, was a proponent
for poor folk, not for fancy restaurants.
Nonetheless, the Bee newspaper, in particular, has written badly-researched
articles and published ill-conceived Breton editorials that have brazenly attacked
homeless people for something they cannot avoid. All people need to piss and
poop on a schedule that their body commands. These things cannot be put off
indefinitely for want of a proper place to do one’s dirty bit of business.
But the problem is not simply a matter of nasty need; it is a
matter of how homeless people are perceived and then
treated.
If homeless people are put forward as “toilet-paper users” – if that
is how they are to be presented, as is the case with Loaves & Fishes’ pernicious toilet-paper drives – then homeless people are being dehumanized, presented as disgusting animals
and not as the unique, interesting, complex individual human beings that they are.
When I say that homeless people are being dehumanized, I ain’t
foolin’ around. Drs. Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske have collaborated on a
series of perhaps ten papers that document the dehumanization that occurs when
homeless people or other marginalized groups, such as alcoholics, are pushed
out of the flow of being perceived as mainstream human and become mere objects
that are perceived as disgusting. See the Harris and Fiske paper in Sage
Journal, titled “Dehumanizing
the Lowest of the Low,” and from there you can see References related to articles that further document the degradation of being homeless and dehumanized.
As to the matter of getting toilet paper properly, I think that what would be best is for Loaves & Fishes to simply pay for the common commodity out of whatever is the closest thing to a Fund for Common Expenses and abandon the malicious [or, if not "malicious," or "thoughtlessly conceived," then highly ill-advised] practice of having toilet-paper drives, altogether.
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