My mom had an interesting habit. Every morning, she’d take the previous night’s leftover rice and dump it in a corner of our lawn for the neighborhood ducks.
And boy, the ducks loved her. After snapping up all the rice, they trotted around the door for an hour or so, hoping my mom would come out again. And they never forgot to — this is what got my dad upset — excrete all over our front porch.
Slowly, my sympathies shifted to my dad. Every morning, after hosing the poop stains off the porch, he came in and pleaded with my mom to stop feeding the ducks: “You’re only encouraging them to come more often!”
Once my mom halted the daily meals, the birds stopped loitering in our yard. They were able to scavenge food from elsewhere. After all, ducks are used to the wilderness.
My dad’s logic is often applied to homeless people. Increasingly, the needy are likened to ducks: “If you keep giving ‘em meals, they’ll keep coming. Let them fend for themselves.”
This logic — I use the word “logic” loosely — of demanding the poor to “toughen up” isn’t just held by some Ayn Rand followers fond of hating on panhandlers.
Take Florida, considered the “most dangerous state to be homeless” by countless media outlets. In Orlando, you can be thrown in jail if you give food to too many homeless individuals too often. This is no joke; volunteers were arrested in an Orlando park in 2011 for handing out meals to hungry folks.
Tampa one-upped O-Town with new laws prohibiting homeless people from sleeping or storing their stuff in public spaces. This comes at a time when existing homeless shelters are at full capacity.
Let’s put aside city ordinances and focus on something more basic. Since Adam and Eve, we’ve pretty much agreed that human beings depend on each other, for better or worse. Living in a society means we have each other’s backs in rough times.
Homeless people aren’t ducks. Actually, they’re not even much different from you and I — with just one unlucky stretch of unemployment in our future careers, we could join the homeless.
If you’ve ever had a chance to see the folks who sleep in downtown Gainesville, you’ll recognize that many of them suffer from chronic illnesses and substance abuse. For others, domestic violence has wrecked their lives.
Instead of building comprehensive rehab centers, government officials have opted to criminalize poverty.
But laws don’t come down from the heavens. After hearing last year about how some South Floridians complained about a group of nuns who publicly feed hungry folks, Miami residents became “afraid of the homeless” crowding on a sidewalk, according to the Miami Herald. It’s time we look inward. We can’t just blame politicians.
The homeless have become untouchables. This new caste system, the envy of my Hindu ancestors, is entirely our doing. Rarely do we, including myself, take a break to think about how unimaginably grueling conditions are where the poor folks are kept.
As the age-old saying goes, “A society is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”
Should we then not aid those brothers and sisters of ours who shuffle around in castaway corners and shadows not too far from us?
Zulkar Khan is a UF microbiology senior. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 1/14/2014 under the headline "Homeless people aren’t ducks"
