By Charles Springer
What is the American dream? Is it to live in comfort and have what you need for life — a steady job with security, and a home? Or is it living on the streets with talent, drive and the desire to work only to be held back by the very people who created this problem in the first place?
Everyday I wake up and face a day of work and school, like a lot of people do everyday, right? Well, doing school and work from the streets takes discipline and drive. It takes a commitment to self to better my life. And there are people like me all over the world as I found out when I went to China.
There are people who starve daily while laws are passed and enforced to appease the corporate world who claim the homeless drive away business. There are single families who will become homeless in L.A. and have their children taken from them because of developers taking their low income hotel and turning it into a condo.
And when the panhandling becomes aggressive because they are making it harder to practice the right of religious freedom by doing what the Bible says by feeding the hungry and less fortunate, they complain more.
Meanwhile, the Midnight Special book store has closed its doors on the Promenade, as has the General Store, because of high rent. Both were like the “last living cell” in a dying body that is the Third Street Promenade. I think that the corporate people don’t get the fact that MOST people don’t like to pay $50 for a tee shirt or $100 for a pair of jeans.
They refuse to see that people are starting to call the Promenade The Mall, and avoiding this place for more favorable and cheaper environments. And across from and next to Starbuck's the old UCLA Extension building is still for rent and office space is still available and the old Teasers Restaurant is still for rent.
I guess the homeless made the market prices go up and the huge amount of development has nothing to do with this. It’s funny that the homeless hold so much power in the reasons why people don’t rent here or want to come to the Promenade, yet some of us can’t even get a place to sleep or eat or a job in our chosen professions to get our lives put back together.
Yet, in other countries people offered help to complete strangers, setting up jobs and housing, showing compassion and understanding. And we’re not made to feel like criminals for it.
I guess it’s “Un-American” to help out people less fortunate and appease the corporations who constantly lay-off people so the CEO can keep his or her multi-million dollar paycheck and make it hard for small business people to survive in Santa Monica. I guess it’s “Un-American” to have religious freedom and practice your faith by feeding the homeless and protesting the imminent war.
I guess it’s “Un-American” to have a small business and not have to compete with mega-corporations who can easily afford the rent that their presence creates because their workers are FROM China and work for $5 a day.
I guess that next it will be “Un- American” to be American.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 17, 2003. Read the original PDF.