The highlight of the week for me is hanging out on Tuesday night downtown with those who carve a life out of very difficult situations with dignity and honor. The sidewalks around the library and the post office downtown are the among the most gracious neighborhoods in San Diego. There is friendship and laughter and kindness and sharing and protection, and skill in dealing with difficult people who come by, whether to a Padres game or chemically altered from self-medication.

Why then do city officials insist on criminalizing my friends merely because they are poor? I have written about the wonderful, orderly tent cities that had emerged downtown over the past five months. The neighborhood abided by the codes they had been given -- don't set up tents too early; down in the morning and moving on by 6 am. They cleaned up the area better than a Boy Scout troup going over a camp site.

So why did the police go through and ticket persons, violating the verbal agreement that had been made two weeks ago? Why is it that people are ticketed for having bodies and requiring space to lie down? What sort of meanness is there in this city that causes such behavior? Did anyone talk with them before hand? Why do we grant the state absolute hegemonic control of coercive authority in such cases to allow this? Was this a response to the police executing Nacho on the street a few days earlier, in which witnesses of the event lived in this area? Was it attempt to disperse those who now became a threat? Sally was not there last night -- where did she go? Do they recognize that the tents provided protection, not only from the elements, but for women on the streets from sexual violence?

Of course, the deeper irony is that this maneuver came within a week of the release of a paper on a trend within the United States to criminalize the poor: "Homes not Handcuffs: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities." Check it out at www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/crimreport_2009.pdf. You will find that San Diego is one of the nastier places. As I wrote years ago, it is no problem being poor-- as one finds in Mid-City, the poor are needed to provide cheap labor for the profits of the various service industries in town. We provide food for those whose hours are cut, or whose housing is so expensive thate they don't have resources for food and housing. These folk are fine for the city, for they can melt into the apartments to pay high levels of rent to white owners who live in North County.

No, the real "criminality" is being visible while being poor. Perhaps we should get the new "invisibility fabric" to put in the tents. As long as no one "saw" them, the city officials would not have to ticket them. Like a one-year old, city officials operate according to the "out of sight, out of mind" principle.

We need friends local friends who can take the time and effort to work through the bureaucracy. This was a decision made by a specific person some place within the city government. This person, who has no personal connections to those who live there because they spend their time hanging out at press conferences or among other persons who live parasitically off the dole of the city so that they don't have to get real jobs -- very difficult to find in this economy-- is now protected by his/her anonymity (I wonder what the odds are that it is a white, middle aged, male who made the decision?). We need to find this person and have them walk with us, to talk to London, to Tenessee, to Michael, to Jerome, to Ron, to the young persons, to those in Rachels, to Shirley, to Sally, and then see if they want to live with their decisions. We need to find out if the person is a Christian, and inform his/her pastor and congregation to see if they know what sort of witness they are doing. It would take work, effort, perseverance, but we have to let all see the humanity of each other, the moral weaknesses (sin) and the dignity (the image of God) that comes with such decisions. We need to take the police out of the position of mediation and bring people together, face to face. Fall will be here; the tents provided protection from the elements, as well as rich drunks who come from the gaslamp and poor drunks who come from east village liquor stores.