Editor’s Note: the following is a partial transcript of this week’s edition of the Columbus Connection.
There’s been a lot of gossip and speculation about the Cynthia Hansen murder on March 11. Some have whispered that the ephemeral “they” say the killer is a homeless man who Mrs. Hansen occasionally helped. Law enforcement has never confirmed or denied this, but reportedly that particular person has been exonerated.
The unfortunate thing is that this has brought a lot of attention to our growing homeless problem.
When I was a kid, we had the occasional “bum” as they were called back then, but truly homeless people in southeastern North Carolina were rare. Times change ever so dramatically now, and it’s become commonplace for us to see homeless people even in communities like Whiteville and Chadbourn. It’s no longer a matter of knowing where to look – they can be seen on almost any main street, and quite a few residential streets, folks with nowhere to go and nowhere to stay.
Some are victims of circumstance, while others are volunteers; drugs and alcohol often play a role. Some are deinstitutionalized mental patients. Some are truly folks who are just down on their luck, and if we’re honest, most of us are just a few paychecks away from not being able to keep a roof over our heads.
I personally have a major problem with using the term homeless to describe folks who have no permanent home, but are able to stay with friends or family and even keep a job. The setting is often not ideal, but they are not homeless. Someone sleeping in their car or an abandoned building is homeless.
The problem is growing, and growing fast. There are small colonies or encampments in downtown Whiteville as well as behind CVS, Walmart and Tractor Supply. Daisy Brooks and Facts of Life church has a large number of folks who have nowhere else to go when the weather turns bitterly cold or dangerous. We cannot praise her and her congregation enough for their efforts to put feet on their witness in trying to help these folks, despite the fact that the greedy will indeed push the needy out of the way when they hear the word assistance. Some would run over their own grandmas, but that’s neither here nor there. Societal leeches are a topic for another day.
While the economy is slowly improving, it has been and continues to be volatile. Jobs are out there, but many don’t pay what people need to survive. Rent has become impossible for many, due to market forces as the continued development in our neighboring counties creeps in here, costs for landlords continue to rise, and landlords sometimes need to increase rent to ensure that they too are making a living after covering their costs.
What can we do about the economy? That’s an entirely different subject as well.
What is pressing, however, is that we have a growing population of people with no home, no address and very little hope.
The solution is not just to ship them out of town and make them someone else’s problem. The concept of a homeless shelter in Columbus has been tossed around several times, but it was quickly destroyed either by government or private individuals fearing lawsuits, crime, more drug use, and all the other things associated, rightly or wrongly, with homelessness.
I am not sure what we can do, honestly. There’s no magic wand. There’s no pot of money to pour over the homeless problem and make everyone comfortable and safe.
But neither can we continue to ignore the lost folks wandering our streets, resting in doorways and on public benches, their entire worlds carried in trashbags.
Homelessness can lead to other problems – vandalism, aggressive panhandling, theft, sanitation, and yes occasionally violent crime – but it’s not something to be dealt with at the point of a gun, like drug activity or gangs. Nor can we as a community allow our human desire to help others get in the way of protecting the rest of the community, since some homeless people are indeed criminals.
I hate being the person to use this dreadful phrase, but somebody has to do something. And I am not entirely sure who that somebody is, since so many have actively prevented those who care from trying to help.
I don’t have a solution. I wish I did. There are a whole lot of heads to chop off this hydra before we can defeat this monster and move on to the next one.
In the meantime, all we can do is pray and try to help those who are truly less fortunate, while keeping an eye out for those who have ill intent.
