Through the Looking Glass Friday Round-Up

This week, I was called upon to defend the practice of giving tents to homeless people. Frustrated by the sudden proliferation of tents in a downtown park, a local business group hurled accusations that Street Angels* was to blame. If people have tents, they won’t accept offers of shelter or housing, they said. Street Angels is enabling homelessness, they said. I understand their frustration – the tents messing up the beautiful downtown and all – but the logic evades me. People are homeless because they have nowhere to go. So, they are stuck outside. In late fall, in Wisconsin, with the clothes on their backs. If a tent is what they need to get to the next day, I’m giving them a tent. That’s what I’ve learned from my four years working with Street Angels. Homelessness is about human beings suffering at this very moment.

Half a loaf can be hard to swallow. People who’ve set their eyes on a nice big whole loaf of French bread, fresh from the oven, who then get handed a half a loaf of last week’s whole wheat that is just starting to dry out might initially feel cheated but then, not at that moment and maybe not until months later, they realize that the half a loaf kept them going. This is a metaphor that has a lot of use in the world of advocacy and public policy, dry as it may be.

It’s always great to watch two men debate abortion. Even greater to have a debate moderator ask our two Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates whether they would allow women to cross state lines to obtain an abortion. Are there more words? No.

I finished the 500th postcard this afternoon. I don’t like knocking on doors to get out the vote. The thought of making calls or sending 10,000 texts makes me ill. But writing postcards can be done at my desk with my tiny lamp casting a sweet glow, a candle burning on top of the bookcase, late fall sneaking in through the barely open window. Postcards are lovely and now they’re done – each with the same message. “Hi! Thank you for being a voter. Your friends and family may need your reminder to vote. Please ask them to vote in the Tues. Nov. 8th election. Thank you!”

I am writing a story about a woman and her dog. The story is set in Michigan and I want to submit it to a Michigan writing contest. The glitch is that one of the scoring criteria focuses on how well the characters are developed and so I’m wondering how to make the dog in the story a deeper, more complex entity than your average dog might be. Should he have ‘internals?’ Should I give him a backstory? Should I write from the dog’s POV? Should I put the story in a file folder and worry about it later? Yes.

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*Street Angels is a Milwaukee nonprofit that conducts street outreach 3x/week to unsheltered (street) homeless, providing hot meals, survival supplies, connection to resources, and hope. Street Angels currently sees 160-200 individuals each outreach night.

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Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash