By Janet C. Phelan
It is beginning to rain in Palisades Park. The sky is the color of despair. Inclement weather notwithstanding, approximately 140 homeless are gathered for the Wednesday afternoon picnic hosted by Paul Grymkowski. Huddled under the trees to escape the rain, no one appears to be leaving. Soon, Grymkowski and his crew will be serving a cooked pasta and meat dish, along with a fresh salad, fruit, bagels and punch.
The previous evening, the Santa Monica City Council voted nearly unilaterally to approve an ordinance making it illegal to provide food in public areas, such as parks and sidewalks. Councilman Kevin McKeown was the sole dissenting vote. According to a local high school student who requested not to be identified, news of this ordinance has traveled as far as India, where she had recently visited. She related the expressions of shock and disbelief half a world away concerning Santa Monica’s attempts to make eating even more problematic for the poor.
This perception was echoed by Grymkowski, a local businessman and Topanga Canyon resident who has been hosting the picnics for four years. “Many of these people are unemployable, or there are just no jobs for someone living on the street. The services have been cut back. What really amazes me is that with so many other issues to address in running a city, the city of Santa Monica is putting enormous time, energy and money into trying to stop good-hearted people from helping the homeless.”
City Attorney Marsha Moutrie, whose office drafted the ordinance, declined to speak on the record concerning the matter. When pressed for a statement, she admitted, “It is theoretically possible that there will be arrests” for those providing food to homeless people.
“Who can hope to attain anything great if he does not possess sufficient strength and force of will to be able to inflict great suffering... But not to succumb to a feeling of distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and listens to the shriek of the sufferer — that is great, that is true greatness.”
Grymkowski is hanging tough. He intends to continue his picnics and insists that the ordinance does not apply to him.
“I am having a picnic for my family and friends,” he said. “If the city shuts down my picnic, they will have to do the same to every other picnic in Santa Monica.” He added he is prepared for battle if the city attempts to end the Wednesday and Thursday events. Pointedly, he commented that, “The city is prepared to fund costly legal action to prevent the picnics, whereas those funds could be used to support additional food and shelter programs.”
Jersey Lewis, a homeless resident of Santa Monica, sums up the situation in this manner: “We are fighting for our survival as human beings.”
Frederich Nietzsche, the philosopher whose work provided the underpinnings for Hitler’s Third Reich, wrote in “Will to Power”: “From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task it will be to rear a master race, the future ‘masters of the earth.’ The time is coming when politics will have a different meaning.”
Several weeks ago, Santa Monica Mayor Bloom, who voted for the ordinance, hosted a meeting for “Bring L.A. Home” in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. He stated that the call had come from President Bush to end homelessness in the United States in 10 years. With the federal government now withholding the funds for Section 8 housing in the cities and county of Los Angeles, and city government voting for a measure that will only serve to increase hunger among the homeless, one wonders if it is homelessness that is under attack or the homeless themselves. (Janet C. Phelan is a university graduate and a freelance writer who has been published in many publications over the years, including the Los Angeles Times. She has been homeless in Santa Monica for a year).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 2, 2004. Read the original PDF.