[Mpls] 24 hour shelter approval

[gemgram]

It is OK to be emotional Margaret.  It shows you care.  It is criminal to 
force people into the cold in Minnesota whether day or night.  Anyone 
thinking different should spend four or five hours outside sometime when it 
is even ten below zero. This is not California or Florida, people die here 
or spend long days in misery.

The problem is the relegating of homeless people as being less than human by 
some. But then we make it criminal to treat a dog the way we have willingly 
treated humans in our City.  I guess it can be both criminal and a cardinal 
sin to be mentally ill or poor in our City.  Sad!

But thanks Gary Schiff and all for putting a little rationality into 
Minneapolis ordinances. Even fiscal conservatives should realize the 
incredible costs in tax dollars for keeping people sick and homeless.  In 
real dollars it costs MORE to keep people homeless and on the street than to 
adequately house them. It is very expensive to keep people half alive on the 
streets, rather than in housing.

Much of such housing and shelter already exists, we just do not want poor 
people using it. Fort Snelling is an example of it.  On Thanksgiving I 
thought of that when thinking of Snelling, and how the holiday was really 
about Native people feeding and offering homes to the hungry and homeless 
Europeans.  Probably a good idea would be to give the Fort Snelling 
buildings back to the Indian people and let them shelter the homeless. 
After all they have a history of it.  To bad the European population did not 
remember that on Thanksgiving, when 25% of Indian people were homeless in 
their own land on that holiday.

Ah well, I will stop rambling.  But thanks Margaret for those feelings and 
those emotions. It is good to know that in this great sea of humanity that 
is Minneapolis there are humans after all.

Jim Graham,
Ventura Village

>"Many a man has stood all his life, and in crowds, too, and yet never been 
>noticed more than a lamppost. Yes, less than that, for a lamppost must by 
>its nature hold up a lighted face."