The City That Outlawed Free Food

[kpete]

Michelle Chen on February 2, 2015 - 12:25 PM ET

Homeless advocate Arnold Abbott, 90, serves food to the homeless with the help of volunteers on November 5, 2014, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Governing public space often boils down to basic social discipline. Some cities try to reduce littering by removing trash cans—thus limiting people’s options for tossing garbage in public. And some cities now apply this rationale to homelessness: by passing laws that bar homeless people from public places. Fort Lauderdale has taken this social engineering to its logical extreme by restricting “food distribution,” effectively giving those who help the homeless no place to feed them—because all that free food only encourages public displays of hunger.

But Fort Lauderdale’s Food Not Bombs activists say the real crime is a ban on acts of public generosity. The punk-inspired grassroots group just bit back with a lawsuit fighting for their right to engage in weekly demonstrations to promote peace and social welfare, and to illustrate this communal ethos by distributing morsels to bystanders in need. They assert that their modest gesture in Stranahan Park is an exercise in free expression.

Fort Lauderdale’s ordinance restricting food distribution in public was passed last October in an effort to, according to city officials, manage use of the park, deter behavior that “enables” homelessness and to “ensure food safety and health”—evidently by keeping free food safely out of the hands of the hungry.

But the city made international headlines by nabbing an activist with a local organization, fittingly called Love thy Neighbor, as they distributed meals. The 90-year-old humanitarian Arnold Abbott proclaimed at the time, “you cannot sweep the homeless under a rug…. There is no rug large enough for that.”




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http://www.thenation.com/blog/196689/city-outlawed-free-food#

[blkmusclmachine]

1. ,

,

[Newest Reality]

2. This is one of those

iconic situations that puts a spotlight on the very ugly face behind the sparkly facade that is America now.

As the numbers of homeless people grow, we watch the response and the reaction to helping them. The current flavor of media reproach and miserly rhetoric about the least amongst us sends chills down my spine because I can't help wondering where that might go over time if it is not called out and reckoned with.

I am not being sensationalistic when I refer to scapegoating and its drastic effects on scores of people in the past. It has a Fascist flavor to it and a denigrating, dehumanizing form of propaganda. It relies on picking out a group of the weakest or least represented people and casting them in a distractingly negative aura and then escalating the jingles and jargon until they are considered a threat. From that point on, atrocities are committed and justified as the herd sings along.

We see this concerning race, sexual orientation, and, in this case economic standing and a standard the reeks of "untouchables" and cast outs.

It should not be allowed to get too far, as we have seen this trail of tears before and there are people who's mentality seems to require scapegoats both as a way to avoid their own projections and pitfalls, as well as a distraction from the corporations as the real welfare Queens and the criminals with immunity on Wall St. Scapegoats are useful when you need people to look the other way.

[BrotherIvan]

3. Every "Christian" should go and take notes

Your pastors and your Republican leaders are NOT doing what your God told you to do. These people are.

[sheshe2]

4. KnR~

Thanks kpete.

[PumpkinAle]

5. You must be some kind of

autocratic, unfeeling, egotistical, conceited git to come up with laws like that.

Info on this story.........Homeless Hate Laws at

http://homelesshatelaws.blogspot.com/

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

6. We wouldn't want to enable the homeless now, would we?

like Texas, there's something wrong with Florida.

[gregcrawford]

7. Fort Lauderdale authorities defile every principle of common human decency

and those that support their efforts are scum.