Listening to the Homeless in America
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- For Chefs, Rewards as Well as Challenges
- Atoning for Past Horrors
A Life Without a Home
Voices from the tents, shelters, cars, motels and couches of America.
To the Editor:
Re “A Life Without a Home” (Sunday Opinion, Feb. 25):
When was the last time you heard a politician, any politician, make a speech about solving homelessness?
When was the last time any of us, regardless of our ideological stance in this politically supercharged time, have had an impassioned discussion about homelessness?
When was the last time we as a country were willing to spend on our homeless even a fraction of the billions we commit to everything from sports and entertainment to defense?
How many times in each of our lives — how many times? — have we turned away from looking at or engaging in any way with a homeless person?
Centuries from now, historians, social scientists, anthropologists, theologians and scholars of every stripe will vainly struggle to understand how the richest, most advanced civilization in the history of the world did not come to the aid of its homeless.
This special Opinion section dedicated to the homeless gives them an identity, and reminds us that they have worth and hopes and dreams, too. It should be reprinted and required reading for every member of Congress, in every church, in every school, and in every home of those of us lucky enough to have one.