Coming face to face with the homeless in our community

Each year, my parish takes part in a wonderful program in Contra Costa County that houses homeless families at local churches. For two weeks, families pitch tents in our church gymnasium, where they spend their nights. Members of the church community take turns preparing meals and offering spiritual and material sustenance. At the end of the two weeks, the families pack up their tents and sleeping bags and move on to another local church. The program starts in October and often runs until the summer.

I took part in the program at Christ the King in Pleasant Hill this year, hauling 15 enchiladas that my wife baked to the final night of the families' stay, where I and others shared with them a Mexican-themed meal (there were no shortage of people going for seconds). I had the privilege of helping to serve the families and children, who despite their poor circumstances, smiled broadly and expressed a degree of gratitude that I found touching.

As rewarding as the experience was, it was also troubling, and difficult, to see so many children without a permanent place to call home. This just wasn't right. Every child in our country should lay down to sleep at night in a warm bed, not in sleeping bags in church gym, or worse. As the richest society in the world, we can and must do better than this.

 As I talked to the program director while eating dinner, I saw a portrait of the homeless in our community that flew in the face of preconceptions I've often had over the years. In many cases, these are hard-working parents who either have jobs or want them, and yet they simply don't have the resources to put a roof over their head. While it's easy to associate the homeless with mental illness or substance abuse, many are simply victims of the cruel lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area. It's not uncommon, the program director told me, for two parents to have jobs but be relegated to living out of their cars because their incomes simply can't pay for the sky-high rents in the area. These are people who work hard, play by the rules, and yet are left to live on our streets because of one bad break, or a lack of a safety net when they lose their home to no fault of their own.

As we talked, I couldn't help but become angry thinking about how easily this problem could be solved if only we committed to building sufficient affordable housing in our communities. But as I learned in my years as a journalist, "affordable housing" is an ugly term for many local leaders and residents who associate it with crime, blight and lowered property values. The fight for affordable housing appears to be no match for the power of NIMBYism and self-interest.

It's a shame that those who so vigorously fight any attempt to bring affordable or low-income housing into their communities don't see first-hand the results of their actions: families living in cars, or in tents in church gymnasiums. I wonder if they experienced what I experienced during the Winter Nights program, might they have a change of heart?

Maybe, maybe not. As I've seen with so many social issues lately, people tend to form their facts around what they already believe, rather than the other way around. And the sad truth is that in so many arenas, from gun violence to immigration to climate change, ideology has trumped compassion and pragmatism.

Then again, there's no better way to instigate action than to put a human face on a problem. And if the reality of children sleeping in tents because we're afraid that creating more housing will inconvenience our quality of life isn't enough to wake people up, I'm not sure what will.

Twenty years after Columbine, we all need to look in the mirror

“It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. ... Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.”

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy went on national television to implore every American to act to finally end the scourge of racial discrimination and segregation that infected American society. The words he spoke then echo just as loudly today and speak just as forcefully to the scourge of gun violence that has been allowed to grow into a national stain and take countless lives.

And those words also provide cause for some soul-searching by all of us on this day marking the 20th anniversary of the Columbine massacre that ushered in the "mass shooting" era and generation.

Kennedy's words 56 years ago weren't just a belated call to action for political leaders in Washington, D.C. and in Southern capitols. It was a call to action for every American -- including implicitly himself -- who had long looked the other way to the evils of racial discrimination and segregation. The reference in his speech to "above all, in all our daily lives" made clear that it was foremost the responsibility of every American to combat this epidemic and be part of the change. His admonition that "those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence" was a powerful statement that inaction amounted to complicity in this evil that steadily ate away at the fabric of the nation.

It was a call to action he reinforced later in the speech when he said the problem of racial discrimination "must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country." Today, the same can and should be said about the problem of gun violence and, indeed, all forms of emotional and physical violence that impact our youth and other vulnerable members of society.

When the Columbine massacre occurred, it shook the nation to its core because it represented an unprecedented escalation of mass violence into the halls of our schools. Nearly two decades later, these mass shootings are met with brief bursts of outrage (as well as "thoughts and prayers") but little shock, because we've all become accustomed to them, and to even expect them.

For those of who remember Columbine, it's hard to fathom how and why such a horrific event ever could have become routine in our society. What if, as a nation, we all had said "Enough!" and "Never Again!" on April 20, 1999, in the same way that the students of Parkland, Florida, and throughout the country, are doing today? What if instead of simply pinning the blame on the NRA, mental illness, bullying, poor parenting, a violent culture or do-nothing politicians in Washington, we had all engaged in actions in our daily lives to confront the gun culture, pass common-sense legislation, provide better security and mental health counseling services for our schools, and created a more nurturing, caring society?

Would the results have been similar to what happened in Australia after a 1996 mass shooting there that killed 35. That country took bold action, and it has had NOT ONE mass shooting since. In the United States, on the other hand, 226,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in the 20 years since Columbine, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.

This country chose to do mostly nothing, or even worse, we made it even easier for our children to be slaughtered on the streets and in movie theaters and schools. We allowed the national assault-rifle ban (a ban that data show conclusively decreased mass slaughters in the country) to expire. We allowed the NRA to gain even more influence over our politicians and our society, and to pass scores of laws that made it even easier for dangerous people to get their hands on weapons of mass violence. And following the outrage that accompanied each mass shooting, we went back as quickly as possible to business as usual.

I recall a Facebook post after Donald Trump's inauguration urging people to join "the resistance" by donating to advocacy groups fighting his dangerous agenda, whether it was pro-choice, environmental or immigrant-rights groups. Amid the flurry of organizations people suggested, I saw not one that advocated for common-sense gun safety laws. How quickly we forget the latest massacre.

Many of us, including myself, are inspired by the brave leadership teenagers throughout this country are now showing in confronting this epidemic head-on. It's tempting to wonder how history might have changed had the survivors of Columbine done the same 20 years ago, but that would be grossly unfair. They were kids who had experienced a form of grief and trauma most of us could only imagine. It wasn't their job to lead a social and political movement; they had every reason to believe we adults would do that.

We failed them. And as we look back on what happened 20 years ago, we should not only feel grief for the lives lost that day -- we should feel shame for our role in allowing this epidemic to grow and fester to this day.