One less thing to feel guilty about

A little while back Daltongirl wrote an excellent post about homelessness in which she drew on her experiences as One Who Serves the Homeless Community. So if you want to read something eloquent and thought-provoking and faith-in-humanity-inspiring, go read that. If you don't, you can read my post about homelessness, which follows below.

Anchorage has homeless people. I think it would be a very bad thing to be homeless in Anchorage because of how cold it gets in the winter. A few people freeze to death every year.

(And before the Alaskans can grab their pitchforks, I'm sure they have homeless people freezing to death in Minneapolis and Boston and all those other places that are in fact colder than Alaska. I get that. So you can just settle. And this is my blog anyway. And I'm leaving. Neener.)

When mom and I drive into Anchorage in the mornings we go through the Seward Highway/Lake Otis Blvd intersection, and nearly every single time we see several people on the corners begging for money. One is an elderly Native Alaskan man who may believe he is holding up a cardboard sign, but there's actually nothing in his hands. Still he stands there as though holding up an invisible cardboard sign for us to read. I have no idea what it says. Other people have shopping cards, actual cardboard signs, and all the usual stuff.

Yesterday, though, a man at the intersection was waving around these huge stick-looking things and shouting at the passing cars. Turns out he was selling whale baleen. Which is a thing I never supposed I would see when I left the house this morning.

Mom told me that Anchorage recently passed a city ordinance that fines people who give money to panhandlers. She didn't know what the fine was. You can give them food, or you can buy their whale baleen, or you can tell them where the soup kitchen is, but you can't just hand them money.

So. Remember that when you come to visit.

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