Sometimes into life a little unpleasantness must creep.

Wednesday, October 13, 1999

Sometimes into life a little unpleasantness must creep. You know, pesky things like illegal aliens, drug problems, homeless issues and high dropout rates. Read the cop reports – we have illegal aliens, we have crack houses and methamphetamine laboratories. If the police have busted one, you can bet there are several more they don’t know about. Like the iceberg, the ones that we see are a minority.

While the police can fight drugs and the INS can work on the illegal alien issue, it’s up to the citizens of Austin and the social agencies here to address the issue of homelessness. Tuesday was a good start.

More than 20 people gathered in the Austin HRA offices to compare notes and alert others to the state of the city. These people weren’t talking projections or possible scenarios, they were talking reality.

To work on a problem, however, one must first acknowledge it is a problem.

That’s the next hurdle Tuesday’s consortium faces. All of them, mostly social workers of one type or another, know there’s a problem because they’re constantly running into it. The rest of us aren’t forced to face it on a daily basis.

The first problem these concerned citizens face is one of perception and definition.

Homelessness? "Bah humbug," would be the average reply if people actually used such language – when was the last time anyone saw a beggar on the streets of Austin?

Homelessness isn’t only people living on the street in cardboard boxes, it’s people who don’t have a stable place to call home, whether it’s owned or rented. It’s the young kid who didn’t want to live at home anymore – or couldn’t – who crashes on the couches of different friends every night. It’s the family who lives at the Sterling for weeks. It’s the guy who ends up sleeping in his car because he can’t find accommodation. Not all those people are as obvious as an unkempt bag lady on the street.

It’s a worry for some of those who know the homeless situation is escalating, because they know without support from the community, they won’t be able to affect much change. One Austin change-agent hopeful, who would like to remain nameless, likened the situation to the fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

As you well know, by the end of the story, two con artists have the Emperor strutting down the street without a stitch on, simply because no one dared point out the obvious. Why?

Because they were told only the enlightened (or some similar term) could see the fabulous fabrics adorning the Emperor’s body. So, despite the fact that more than the crown jewels were obvious to all, it took a child to point out the fact that the Emperor was in fact, not wearing any clothes.

Certainly an unpleasant discovery for the vain ruler in the story, but one would hope he and his advisors then learned to acknowledge the obvious before letting a situation get too out of control.

Sometimes Austin’s rulers don’t like to admit the obvious either.

As long as the problem isn’t acknowledged, identified, laid bare in all its unholy ugliness, then no one has to think about it, answer questions, possibly anger some powerful person or come up with expensive and painful solutions.

It would be nice to bury one’s head in the sand and figure everything must be peachy, but solutions are only found by people who work on a problem, rather than ignore it.

Jana Peterson’s column appears Wednesdays