People have a hard time equating the Occupy movement with the tent city for the homeless that Occupy Madison has become. Denizens of Madison, particularly residents of the various neighborhoods where the Occupy encampment has moved, have adopted a not-in-my-backyard approach to the issue. On the other hand, the movement has picked up allies everywhere it has gone. Everyone wants to know why these people are still on the street.
Today the projected temperature was in the 20s. Last night, it was supposed to get down into the low teens. Around four o’clock P.M., there were snow flurries. Cold, dry, sparse flakes of snow fell from the overcast heavens onto a modest clump of county land on the north side of Madison. Two old brick buildings stand on the property. The larger of the two was built to quarantine people sick with tuberculosis. The smaller was built to house their nurses. A long hill slopes down from these buildings to the residencies on North Port Drive, separating the sick from the well.
The sanatorium has been converted into the Dane County Human Services building. The nurses’ housing facility stands empty. As of this weekend, the hill that used to bridge the worlds of the infected and the healthy is home to the group we still doggedly call Occupy Madison.
We don’t know what else to call them. They certainly are unrecognizable from the bottom of the hill, where well-to-do North Port neighbors peek out of their windows and wonder to each other. If they’re Occupy, where are their signs? Where is their message? Where are the starry-eyed, stubbly, dreadlocked idealists that were on the news last year? These tents look wrong. The stubble looks wrong. These people look like bums. And if they’re Occupy, what are they doing in North Port?
From the Human Services building, the gathered tents looks like a different, even more exasperating kind of problem. The county officials and social workers housed therein gaze down sadly at the encampment. It’s not that the homeless are trespassing (they are). It’s not that they’re disruptive (they aren’t). It’s that they won’t go away. The homeless people of Occupy Madison won’t go away. They won’t go into the shelters, they won’t leave town, and they just won’t stop being homeless.
The view from inside the encampment is the most bleak of the three. There are 28 homeless people in tents on the hill of the old sanatorium. Saying that they’re there by choice is a faulty premise for many diverse reasons. Fortune drove them to homelessness. Circumstance has kept them there. That is all we really need to know. Compounding the problem, the Occupiers on the hill have no legal place to go. Those doorways you’ve seen people sleeping in? Those parks? An officer can slap those people with $400 tickets. Every inch of land is owned by somebody and nobody wants a bunch of bums in their backyard.
Monday evening three worlds collided at a special listening session in the Human Services Building. Residents (stand-up men with trimmed mustaches, sharp-eyed women with elegantly styled hair; all white, all good-hearted, no doubt), government officials (the upbeat County Supervisor, the glowering alderwoman, Madison City Police, representatives from the mayor and county executive and the Parks Department), and the homeless people with their advocates (looking beaten down and vulnerable, yet defiant), were all in attendance. The officials were there to find out how to react to their unwitting guests and to gauge the temperature and tolerance in the community. The constituents were there for information, but also to share the experiences they had with the occupation. The Occupiers were there to introduce themselves, justify their situation, plead for the mercy of dignity and ask for kindness and friendship.
It was cold and lightly snowing when we left the meeting. And there don’t seem to be any solutions forthcoming. The county officials rushed off to vote on the 2013 budget. The residents got into their cars and drove home. And the homeless folks of Occupy Madison trudged slowly over the brittle grass, past the ghostly old nurses’ dorm and down the hill to their tents, with nowhere else to go.
The solutions that Occupy Madison needs lie outside the system. We need support in developing democratic and sustainable communities for those who have fallen through the cracks, not bed bug-infested shelters. Give a man a dirty cot and he’ll stay disenfranchised. Give a man a community and he can raise himself and those around him up. That’s how Occupy Madison is still political.
Noah is a sophomore majoring in history of science and community and non-profit leadership. Send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com
