Eating from Aesop’s Table

I’ve been thinking about my favorite Aesop’s fable. My favorite Aesop’s fable, just so you’ll all know, is the one that has the North Wind and the Sun arguing about which of them is the most powerful, and they agree to test their powers by seeing who can first get a jacket, or cloak, off a man on a road. The North Wind, for all his blowing, just succeeds in getting the man to grip the cloak tighter, while the Sun gently warms it off of him.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the Steelers in the Super Bowl. I’m not talking about Super Bowl XL, the one where they just beat the Seahawks, 21-10. I’m talking about Super Bowl XXX, ten years ago, when the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys.

Not being a fan of football, I had no use for that information on the day in January 1996 when the game was played. But because I have to walk about among the normal humans, and because I sometimes have to pass for one of them, I stored the factoid in my brain, in the abbreviated format “Pittsburgh = Losers, XXX.”

So two months later when I was writing an April Fool’s story about how all the homeless in Seattle had finally got the hint that they were unwelcome here and were using their famous mobility to go elsewhere, I naturally made Pittsburgh their fictitious destination. Naturally, I thought the choice was hilarious, in part because homelessness and Super Bowls and homeless people and Super Bowl losers all have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

How wrong I was! I should, in fact, have sent all our homeless to Detroit, because those people might have known what to do with them.

Faced with the urge to sweep its streets of homeless people like so many other cities have done when hosting Super Bowls, Detroit did something finer. It threw Super Bowl parties for them, where they could get together out of the cold and watch the game while eating the same kind of junk food everybody else in the country considers essential to the experience, and making the same kinds of collective noises, etc.

Even though I totally don’t get football, I totally understand and appreciate the normal human need to gather for food and to make celebratory and other collective noises. The normal humans really go in for that sort of thing. It’s called “community,” or some such thing, and it’s highly valued. The surprise for a lot of people is (hold on to your hats!) homeless people value it too.

So Detroit’s Super Bowl parties were a resounding success. Not only did they save their city a lot of expense by not having to pay a lot of cops overtime to herd people around against their will, but they introduced a lot of people to social services and got folks in the door to sign up for programs that they hadn’t even heard of before. Aesop would have said, “I told you so.” Aesop, an African slave who lived over 25 centuries ago, could out-wise the average 21st century city council member, anywhere.

Everyone can learn from Detroit’s experience. The missions, for example, just might learn to provide the meal first and invite people to the sermon afterward (I believe Jesus himself did it in that order.) Cities and towns that don’t want people to panhandle could try to provide attractive alternatives, involving assorted cheese dips and opportunities for loud hooting. Chronic homelessness is not a well-defined term.

That last item doesn’t have anything to do with the Aesop’s fable, probably, but it’s something I want people to learn, so I tossed it in anyway.

The real inspiration for that April Fool’s article ten years ago was the razing of homeless encampments in the Jungle along Beacon Hill -- a stupid act of unnecessary witless force. Let’s all learn that witless force is as impractical as it is too costly.