Bee Opinionated: Stabbings in Red Bluff, apathy in Sac. The homeless get nothing but pain
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Hi and hello! Happy Sunday from The Bee Editorial Board — it’s Robin Epley here again to drop some knowledge.
I recently visited Red Bluff, the seat of Tehama County and home to Red Bluff Round-Up, the largest three-day rodeo in the country. It’s also one of America’s most dangerous cities, only safer than 3 percent of all U.S. cities and towns, according to neighborhoodscout.com, with a 1 in 102 chance of becoming a victim of a violent crime, nearly twice the rate of the state at large.
I made the trip after learning about a homeless woman who was stabbed 41 times, allegedly by two teens living in a neighborhood near her campsite. In a column this week, I detailed the sprawling forces that shaped this violent attack and how it perfectly encapsulates the vitriolic rhetoric that dominates the conversation around homelessness in California.
The way we speak and describe “the homeless” often otherizes them until they are no longer viewed as human beings with the same right to shelter, food and, ultimately, our care. The way state and local governments discriminate against the more than 161,000 people who live here unhoused has perpetuated hatred and persecution.
California already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion and several more protected classes — I believe people should not be discriminated based on their housing status, either.
Sacramento’s ongoing struggle to establish any sort of cooperation between county and city efforts to address homelessness is proof of our own ambivalence to their suffering, exemplified by the city’s recent ban on blocking sidewalks and the county’s ban on living near the river.
But, as Columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote last week, it’s impossible to ban the homeless from living along the American River:
“Moving folks around accomplishes nothing, as our officials are surely all too aware. And without having anywhere to send them, all the Sacramento City Council and the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors really did this week was express the hope that when they open their eyes again, those living on our streets won’t be there anymore.”
For The Love Of The Job
Melinda delivered some powerful work on the scourge of homelessness last week, authoring a second column about a Sacramento-area nurses who chooses to tend to the unhoused. The headline still haunts me: ‘When I say I work with homeless, the first word I hear is ‘why’?’
“It’s a normal human reaction to say, ‘That could not be me, or anyone I love,’” Henneberger wrote, “because to admit that yes, it could, might be unnerving. Which is why, even when I was diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago, people not very subtly wanted to know what I had done to unleash that malignancy, so that they could tell themselves that they were safe from it. But maybe we can at least agree that it’s a noble thing that Edward, with his bad legs and his obdurate pride, is adamant that Nora should not burn any gas coming to him, because he’s not really homeless just yet.”
Opinion of the Week
“Without a plan to achieve that level of deployment, it’s our climate goals that look like fantasy.” — Op-ed writers Alex Jackson and V. John White on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office calling a State Assembly proposal to invest in expanding the state’s clean power supplies “fantasy and fairy dust.”
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Say hello to a stranger today; they might be in need of a friend,
Robin Epley
