A Lecture for the Hicks

When I first began expressing my frustration with how SF was handling the homeless, I got some interesting feedback. This letter was from a young woman named Rahula Janowski, a Food Not Bombs activist. Her letter and my response were both published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser on July 29, 1998. This kind of feedback supported my growing suspicion that the radical left in the city was an obstacle to a solution to homelessness.

Food Not Bombs Lectures the Hicks: An Exchange
Dear Rob Anderson,

In San Francisco, public housing is being torn down, traditional affordable neighborhoods are being gentrified by the telecommuting yuppies, and General Assistance is being cut so low that recipients can’t afford to spend more than two weeks per month in vermin infested SRO hotels, even if they spend their money only on rent. In light of this situation it is ridiculous and cruel to assert, as you did in the 7/18 AVA, that only a minority of homeless people are homeless due to trouble finding affordable housing. To further assert that the solution to homelessness is to “insist nobody has the right to live on the street or in public spaces” shows a profound lack of understanding of the homeless situation.

Contrary to your claim, Food Not Bombs does not “reinforce the status quo by feeding the homeless while not pushing for a genuine solution.” (Your misconception is understandable if your source of information really is the Matier and Ross column in the SF Chronicle.)

Food Not Bombs feeds the homeless and other hungry people because everyone has the right to eat regardless of their social or economic status. Food Not Bombs protests the pushing of homeless people out of public space not because we think they belong on the streets but because this band aid approach of “out of sight, out of mind” merely scapegoats poor homeless folk without even beginning to address the real problem, which is our inequitable economic system, a system which requires the existence of “haves” and “have nots.”

We don’t offer any pat, easy solutions to the homeless problem, such as “the homeless must be taken into custody and sorted out according to their particular problems.” (EGAD!) Instead Food Not Bombs calls for a radical overhaul of the system, a reassessment of priorities, and a world where human needs take precedence over greed and militarism.

We make these statements by sharing food in extremely public spaces so folks like you can’t ignore the steadily increasing numbers of hungry people. We work toward these goals by working in coalition with a wide array of social justice groups and organizations. We practice what we preach by using non-hierarchical, collective decision making processes. We have no “honchos,” Keith McHenry or otherwise.

You’ve obviously mistaken Food Not Bombs for a charity group. Perhaps you could expand your understanding of reality for the urban poor if you come down to the city for some first hand experience, and you could expand your understanding of Food Not Bombs by engaging in dialogue with us, rather than getting your information form an irreputable[sic] rag like the SF Chronicle. Sheesh!
Rahula Janowski
San Francisco

Rob Responds: Since I was writing for the AVA, which is published in Boonville, Janowski apparently assumed I was a hick from the sticks writing about big city problems I knew nothing about. In fact, at the time I was a student at S.F. State and only spent my summers working at the AVA in Boonville. I live near the Panhandle, close by the Haight-Ashbury, where a lot of homeless people live.

The biggest misconception about homelessness, fostered by groups like Food Not Bombs and the Biotic Baking Brigade, is that it’s just about housing, that the increasingly tight and expensive housing market in the city has resulted in thousands of people finding themselves out on the streets. This is partly true, since housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years, and, not surprisingly, the most vulnerable are the working poor and people on welfare. The conversion of SRO hotels into tourist hotels has also contributed to the decline in the supply of low-cost housing for these folks. Of course General Assistance---around $300 a month in S.F.---isn’t enough to live on, even if one is able to find housing.

But anyone not blinded by ideology knows that housing is not the only---or perhaps even the primary---problem most of the homeless have. Many of the most visible homeless obviously have serious emotional and/or substance abuse problems. Of course poor people with drug problems shouldn’t be deprived of shelter. After all, many substance abusers can afford to live in the city’s increasingly gentrified neighborhoods.

But by persisting in their tidy, traditional leftist analysis of homelessness, the radical left---and their co-dependents in the city’s Democratic Party---make it more difficult for the city to face the messier reality of overlapping social problems----the housing crunch interacting with mental health and substance abuse, with all three seemingly manifest in individual homeless people.

In any event, by neglecting to launch a serious political campaign to get the city to invest in adequate shelter, outreach, and drug counseling for the homeless, the city’s left has betrayed both the homeless themselves and the city’s neighborhoods. Instead, the left has fought a mostly defensive battle in opposing the city’s policy of using the police to push the homeless hither and yon.

This political negligence has in effect helped legitimize a status quo that results in more people dying on our streets every year.

Note the role Janowski thinks she and her delusional comrades are playing---making “statements” about “a radical overhaul of the system, a reassessment of priorities, and a world where human needs take precedence over greed and militarism.” That is, once we create a completely new social system, then we can think about dealing with homelessness in San Francisco. To these zealots, actually getting homeless people off the streets and saving lives is secondary to indicting our wicked capitalist system.

We now have the worst of all possible worlds: degraded neighborhoods, more death on our streets, and a city policy of the routine use of police against the homeless. Serious alternatives are pre-empted by a smug, exhibitionist “activism.”

Hence, there’s a strange consensus in liberal San Francisco that nothing serious can or should be done about homelessness. The mayor’s cop-out (“What can one little city do…?”) complements the far-left ideology of the pie-throwers and Food Not Bombs. The result: political paralysis. After all, what can one little wealthy, progressive, complacent city do about homelessness under militarism and capitalism?

Janowski in turn wrote another letter in response to something I wrote in December, 1998. I don’t have the AVA original to include what I wrote, but I’m sure it was along the same lines as the above response, along with a critique of pie-throwing at public figures as a form of protest.

Dear Rob,

Ideologue: a person occupied mainly with ideas; esp., an idle theorist (I had to look it up).

I’m afraid I can’t resist, I’m gonna take the bait and respond to your hit on me in the 12/23/98 AVA, although it’s a little intimidating to get into this “dialogue” with someone who make accusations of being an ideologue seem silly.

I never responded to your ed reply when the issue of homelessness and Food Not Bombs was on the table back in July because I figured arguing (I’m sorry, dialoguing) with you about Food Not Bombs was a waste of time. You seem to think the goal of FNB’s activities is to end homelessness. Not exactly, although of course we’d like to see everyone have a decent place to live, among other things. Food Not Bombs, as I see it, is primarily a protest group which instead of merely marching about with signs provides a direct service (free food) to those in need as a form of protest. Other Food Not Bombs volunteers may have other ideas; FNB is a pretty loose grouping of people who have a variety of ideologies and motivations. There are anarchists, socialists, communists, and probably even some “democrats” who work with FNB all over the country. But if our primary motivation was just to feed people, we’d probably find less controversial ways to do that. As it is, we use direct action to provide an example of mutual aid and compassion. And yes, we are interested in transforming the world, which is why, in addition to sharing free food in highly visible public spaces, we also work internally to address issues of privilege, violence, and oppression through using the non hierarchical decision making process that you seem to find so offensive.

As for the recent actions of the Biotic Baking Brigade, will pie throwing save the world? Probably not. Will it solve homelessness? Probably not. Will pie throwing ease the despair that so many powerless people feel? It already has. While ideologues other than myself lectured and ranted about the inappropriateness of throwing pie, thousands of people in San Francisco who have suffered from Willie Brown’s lack of compassion were having a good laugh at his expense. While that might not solve all the problems in SF, it’s still valuable. The pleasure I get from knowing that news of the BBB’s exploits has gone far and wide across the globe is not the pleasure of self aggrandizement, it’s pleasure that people all over are getting a good chuckle.

Anyway, my least favorite BBB action was “Operation Free Willie,” when Brown was pied. For sure it got a lot of publicity, but the best thing about that is that other BBB actions got publicity as a result. Actions like “Operation Safe Harvest,” when Robert Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto took a tofu crème pie in the face. The pieing of Renato Ruggiero, head of the World Trade Organization. Apple pie for Charles Hurwitz. Even more than egomaniacal politicians like Brown, these men hold immense power and are completely unaccountable to the world for the damage they do. They are also largely anonymous. When they get pied, it blows their cover. That’s why, in general, publicity about those pieings has been scant. These guys don’t want any scrutiny of their corporate practices. Brown is already an extremely public figure, he’s a proud man, the pie hurt his pride, and he wants vengeance. When Milton Friedman, economist, was pied, he reportedly said, “Well, these things happen sometimes.” Yup, they sure do. So does “trickle down economics” and genocide in Chile.

In your hit piece on me and the BBB, Rob, you quote a “city official” as saying the pie throwing is “an escalation in incivility.” That city official was Supervisor Amos Brown, who also said San Francisco, a city where over 155 people died on the streets in 1998, “does too much for the homeless.” This same man has also referred to homeless people as “trash.” Civility? The man doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

On a final note, I must say I think you went a bit over the top with your comment that “it will take a death before pie throwing is renounced.” Pies don’t kill people, Rob, people (and occasionally wild animals) kill people. Pies don’t cause social problems, they just provide a momentary humorous break for the people struggling to change the world for the better. If nothing else, the tone of the outcry after the pieing of Willie Brown illuminated the lack of perspective and the lack of humor so pervasive in this modern world.
So Long,
Rahula Janowski

Rob’s reply: I used “ideologue” in the sense of someone who allows abstract ideas to blind her to political realities. As Janowski concedes, it’s more important to her and her comrades at Food Not Bombs and the Biotic Baking Brigade to point up the wickedness of the system than to move the city toward an actual solution to homelessness. The corollary of this approach: no solution to homelessness is possible within the present social system. The protest is the main thing, and actually feeding and housing people are a secondary consideration.

I don’t find non-hierarchical decision-making, whatever that means, “offensive.” What I find objectionable is an approach that makes the decision-making process and protests ends in themselves. Janowski and FNB have it backwards: people should be fed as an end in itself, and the decision-making process should, in this instance, be a means to a solution to the problem of homelessness.

One would expect that FNB and the city’s left would be pressing for a solution to homelessness. Instead, like the Brown administration, groups like FNB---and the SF Bay Guardian, Frontlines, the unions, the Democratic Party, et al---proceed as if large-scale homelessness is a normal condition of life in the city, and we will just have to learn to live with it. Instead of using the city’s $145 million budget surplus to aggressively attack the problem, Mayor Brown’s priority is keeping the homeless out of the city parks, while pushing them into the neighborhoods, a policy that is both cruel to the homeless and politically problematic, since it annoys voters in the neighborhoods. Sooner or later, the people of San Francisco are going to realize that they don’t have to live like this, and they will demand a real solution to the problem.

A real solution would include dealing with each homeless person individually to address his or her specific problems. This will inevitably involve making psychiatric care, drug counseling, and shelter available to all in need. Such a policy will also require aggressive outreach, which will be expensive. I have a hunch, however, that taxpayers won’t mind paying for a humane solution to a serious, demoralizing problem that debases the quality of life in the city for conservatives, liberals, and leftists alike. Of course some leftists will object and call this approach fascism, the tacit assumption being that people have a right to live on the streets, as if homelessness was just another lifestyle choice. And the ACLU will no doubt defend the right of the homeless to shit on the city’s sidewalks. My approach, however, would quickly garner enough political support to effectively isolate the exhibitionists and ideologues of the far left.

I know that 155 people died on the streets of SF last year. The city has been averaging over 100 deaths among the homeless every year for years, a fact I’ve noted in the AVA several times in the last year. My approach would treat homelessness as the human emergency it clearly is. Janowski and her comrades offer the homeless nothing but occasional meals and political symbolism. Like the Brown administration, neither she, FNB, nor the Biotic Baking Brigade offer an alternative to the sordid and deadly status quo.

Pie-throwing is a politically sterile---even counter-productive---tactic. Instead of disseminating leftist political ideas to a wider public, pie-throwing makes the authorities look like they’re under siege and only encourages them to increase their security. No doubt the tactic provides diversion for the unreflective and political adolescents still working out their authority problems. But, as I pointed out in my column, the attack on Mayor Brown, along with making him a more sympathetic figure, scared and angered Brown and his security people, which resulted in Janowski’s broken clavicle and the mayor’s injured knee. And Al Decker, who pied Charles Hurwitz, acknowledged the danger of startling Hurwitz’s armed security by moving too quickly in getting his pie out. Like the stupid Earth First! Tactic of going into the woods during tree falling that resulted in David Chain's death, pieing bigshots and elected officials is a tragedy waiting to happen.

Even Supervisor Amos Brown can occasionally utter a simple truth: pieing is an escalation in incivility. Cultivating such incivility is a slippery slope that can only lead to more violence and social tension. Let the right discredit and isolate itself with violence in word and deed. The left should stand for more civility, not less.