I used to listen to talk radio. Conservative talk radio, to be more specific. I haven’t really been a listener in a while. At some point I began to realize that the polarizing stance of the conservative voice was just too, well, polarizing.
(The issue of conservative vs. liberal politics is big and difficult and not something I about to get into here. To quote Little Steven, “I ain’t no Democrat and I ain’t no Republican.” I am a “Biblical activist”, if I can steal Marva Dawn’s phrase.)
Back to my story, conservative radio—I tuned in briefly this week on my drive home one day and caught just a bit of Michael Medved’s show. I have, at times, agreed very much with Medved and I generally think him an intelligent man, though I find myself disagreeing with him more and more these days. Case in point, I was very disappointed in what I heard this time.
Michael was talking about the problem of homelessness and he ranted and raved about it. He spoke of the homeless in Hawaii, shamelessly taking advantage of the public beaches as a cheap and scenic alternative to actual homes. (At one point he said something like, “Many of them have plenty of money, they just don’t want to pay rent.”) He talked about the way in which the homeless ruin our public parks by sleeping there—why should they be allow to destroy everyone else’s enjoyment of an otherwise picturesque piece of land, just because they don’t have anywhere to live? He talked about how, in his opinion, most homeless people are either on drugs or just lazy.
Nice.
He called them (and this is an actual quote) “drifting pieces of garbage.” I’ll tell you what’s garbage: the attitude that any of us is an intrinsically better human being, incapable of the mistakes that others make.
Homelessness is a problem, but its chief negative effect is not the loss of aesthetics for those of us with homes and jobs. These are people we’re talking about, not bad decorations!
Listening to Medved, I was struck by a common theme embedded in our society of luxury: when we encounter societal problems we tend to think of them as “out there” rather than “in here”. What I mean is, we blame everyone else (the homeless, the druggies, the politicians, the movie makers, the rappers, the wacko conservatives, whoever…) rather than looking deeply at ourselves and asking the only question that really matters: “What constructive thing can I do to better society, honor God and love my fellow man?”
Apparently it is infinitely more fun to just bash everyone else. I think that’s garbage.
There’s so many ways to understate a problem, especially when we really don’t know anything about it. For your readers who are looking to learn how to see a problem like this one from a new perspective, they really should check out Larry James’ blog at http://larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/
Larry is a minister and activist in downtown Dallas. I’m only an occasional reader of his blog, but the times I’ve been there, I’ve been reminded of just how little I know about real problems, and that I know much less about the solutions to these problems.
left by Trey on 12.12.2006 at 2:07 pm