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AS WE APPROACH THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF ARMITAGE

Issue #21, September 1995

Nearly three years have passed since the beginning of the Armitage protest, when Rick and I made our media debut in Eugene. There we were, in full color on the front page of the "City/Region" section of the Register-Guard. The story was entitled "Armitage campers must leave site", and the photo showed me looking like death-warmed-over with a beer in my hand (it was still morning) next to Rick who was holding a cigarette and looking about to pounce on David Wilde who was explaining our "options".

Since that time we have given dozens of interviews to reporters on our homeless situation, from the car camp or wherever they happened to find us at the time. We always tried our best to use this exposure as an opportunity to educate the public as to the truth about why people are homeless, in the hope of bringing about some positive change in the public's attitudes. But now, looking back over those three years, I am led to wonder just how much of a positive impact we've really made this way. And in my present frame of mind (I'm PMS'ing again) I'm inclined to be somewhat cynical.

Of course I always knew, in the back of my mind, that it wasn't enough to let ourselves be photographed and interviewed in our "native habitats" of Armitage and the car camp. It wasn't enough merely to present the spectacle of suffering, because the majority of the people in the TV-viewing audience would still have their own preconceived views as to why this suffering went on. It wasn't enough just to let them see how we were living or even to spout our own views of why we were living this way, for those quickie news bites. Most people were still going to interpret the things they saw and heard in the standard ways they'd been conditioned to interpret such things, and not much was likely to change this way.

The people watching a news story about us in one house might say, "Why don't they get up off their lazy butts and find a job? Or else move to some other state and get out of our hair?!"

And the people watching the same news story about us next door might say, "Those poor people who have no place to go! Why doesn't the government do more to help them?!"

While the people watching the same show in the house across the street might say, "We'd better build a stonger fence and put another lock on the door in case those animals turn up in our neighborhood next!"

These are three very typical reactions to the sight of homeless people: contempt, pity and fear. And the people who have learned each of these reactions are likely to always have the same reaction every time they see another news story about the homeless: the ones who felt contempt for us when we were at Armitage also felt contempt for us when we were at the car camp, etc. no matter what we said each time.

And we learned from all of this that we couldn't expect people to have the reactions we thought they should have, no matter how intelligently we presented our case. At least, not as long as we had to depend on network TV and the mainstream press to convey our views.

And I began to feel an increasing frustration that no effort was being made to dig deeper, to get at the reasons why two different people who live next door to each other could have such radically differing reactions to the same story. I wanted to know: what element in their education and childhood conditioning created their present attitudes? What erroneous theories about the poor were a lot of these people taught, deliberately or out of ignorance, by their parents and teachers?

I also came to suspect that the mainstream media people were not interested in digging that deep into the psyches of their audiences. That to a large extent, the standard media portrayals of us as poor bedraggled waifs with no place to wash and no way to get new clothes, were purposely done in such a way as to elicit only those same tired old predictable responses, to make sure that nothing would ever really change. After all, the news producers and reporters seemed to make a pretty comfortable living; they could always afford new clothes. They were making money even as they were interviewing us with those "sympathetic" expressions on their faces. They had reason to be happy with the status quo. Why should they want our homelessness to end, when we always provided such spicy news material with which they could entertain their bigoted audiences who kept their ratings up? Why should they want any radical changes in the society that made us homeless, when that same society also provided them with their well-paying jobs?

Now, some people might say I'm being overly-cynical and unfair; some of the news people really do seem to have some amount of heartfelt concern for us. Maybe so. But I doubt that columnist Don Bishoff would go to the lengths of giving up his fancy South Hills home to a homeless family for a year and going to live on the street himself, so he could find out for himself what it's like. (What interesting things he might write in his column then!) And I certainly don't think he would want any overall changes in society that might cause him to lose his job and that fancy house for good.

Then no doubt there are those who would say, "I told you so." Of course we couldn't expect to convey anything through the mainstream media that would bring about any real change. Maybe not, but we thought it was at least worth a shot, when we had nothing to lose and no other source of hope at the time. And we certainly gave it an all-out try, especially at Armitage--you hve to grant us that!

And then there are the people who are willing to listen and really learn from us beyond what those little news bites can tell them. These people's attitudes are also the products of childhood conditioning, but of a more positive kind: their upbringing and education actually taught them the value of having an open, inquiring mind. These are the people who inspire us with hope that we might, in time, make some real changes. But they are also, unfortunately, much more rare than the dime-a-dozen uneducated types who get their "information" about the homeless from Reader's Digest and think they know it all. Still, we continue to place our hopes in the good people who do come our way now and then, especially during Homelessness Awareness Week every November.

At least I am still alive and going strong, three years after Armitage. And I obviously haven't given up hope, as I am still cranking out this newsletter month after month after month. It's not read by nearly as many people as the Register-Guard is; I obviously can't afford to make that many copies. But I do what I can, and regardless what what I said earlier, my cynical moods are short-lived. My optimism remains strong, especially since I have met some of those good, open-minded people through this newsletter. It is largely because of them that I know it's worth it to continue these efforts.

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