Torch Column: Reverendly Yours

03 January 2017

Reverendly Yours (Rev. Tom Goldsmith)

It’s New Year’s Day today and I contemplate the scary possibilities of a new year, a new president, and a new social gestalt for minorities facing deportation by the millions. There are also millions of Muslims who might need to register as posing a danger to our country. The safety net, which keeps millions of people of all races barely alive with medical care and supplemental income, will be shredded. We in liberal communities will be challenged in meeting the desperate needs of those who will be abandoned by government, including the elderly whose social security income and Medicare insurance will surely be diminished. We’re facing a raw social Darwinism where survival itself will meet unprecedented tests. We in liberal communities will also be challenged to keep despair and depression from invading our sanity.

Many of us surely feel that good progressive leadership is the right tonic for our country, our earth, and our future. Put Bernie in the White House and with the help of a progressive Congress, we can move forward in creating a more humane and caring society. And yet the right solutions are elusive for everyone; it’s not that easy. As a microcosm for understanding the complexities of social issues, we need go no further than our own homeless crisis in Salt Lake City. I sometimes try to imagine that if I had unlimited monies and endless power, I could magically resolve the homeless problem. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know where to begin. There is no solution.
Homelessness results from economic losses, poor education, mental illness, joblessness, and a host of random causes from medical issues to drug addictions.

We could build ten Fourth Street Clinics, twenty new shelters, and pay the salaries of the greatest social workers in the world to supply resources, and never remotely touch the problem of homelessness. Regardless if the mayor is Donald Trump or Karl Marx, or anybody in between, the root issues of homelessness lay beyond any tinkering with the social system.

The current approach taken by our city, however, seems to make matters worse. If The road Home currently shelters 1100 people, and the plan is to build four new shelters in two years accommodating a total of 600, and then tear down The Road Home, somebody is not doing the math. Especially since homelessness will likely increase during the new administration, the mayor’s plan lacks not only logic but compassion.

By removing the shelter and the homeless population away from the city’s prime real estate awaiting development, we are just as guilty as the infamous one percent for advancing financial gain ahead of human concern. Homelessness is a tremendous inconvenience for development, business, and tourism. But how do we sleep at night; how do we live with ourselves, if we treat homelessness simply as a blight that needs to be purged. I am the first to admit that I don’t come close to a solution. But I can measure the direction of compassion, and we are clearly heading in the wrong direction. TRG