'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'

Said Benjamin Franklin (and you already know I love him recklessly), who preceded it with 'Poverty often deprives a man of spirit and virtue' and a semicolon, and tonight on the local NPR station KUOW a host had a brief interview with a Mercer Island pastor who wants to host a new Tent City at her church (and thought she was going to). The host asked Rev. Leslie Ann Knight, the United Methodist minister on whose church's property the encampment would be sited what she thought of the residents' protestations that such use of the church's property would force Mercer Islanders to look at portable toilets and showers. The reverend answered that those objections were not factually accurate, as the camp would be situated on the church grounds such that those facilities would not be visible from the street. She then went on with a bit of the humanitarian stuff one would anticipate and hope for, but I just want to climb under the covers into my pulpit for a minute here and attempt to digest the inhabitants' basis for resistance.

The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'

The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.

'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.

But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?

Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.

And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.

Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.

Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.

Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.

Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.

Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???