The ThinkProgress article can be found here. In 2013, Pensacola, Florida issued a law that “made it illegal to sleep ‘out-of-doors…adjacent to or inside a tent or sleeping bag, or atop and/or covered by materials such as a bedroll, cardboard, newspapers, or inside some form of temporary shelter.'” The city council pushed for this law in order to boost the aesthetic quality of the city–a.k.a, Pensacola was experiencing the same discomforting feeling that Santa Monica is recently experiencing. Essentially, the city council, through this law essentially wanted to force homeless individuals to leave their town given the harsh stereotype that homeless people are “an eyesore” upon a city.  The city’s mayor defined homelessness insensitively “as ‘camping,’ a benign term that minimizes the plight of people lacking reliable access to food and shelter”–because camping, connotatively can be at least described as one’s personal choice (rather than a societal issue). As the article describes, after intense backlash recently, given the coldness of this winter in even Florida this time of year, the mayor and the city council are working to repeal this law and are taking steps toward looking at the homelessness problem in their city. Sadly, it took a backlash of public outrage in order to instigate a degree of human decency, and given that the mayor needed to “reflect and pray” on the proposal to change the law in order to cease “banning blankets.”

Pensacola, Florida and Santa Monica, California, however, are only two of several cities and their councils that are looking to criminalize homelessness and looking desperately to find ways to ignore the societal problem and instead push it elsewhere to another city or back onto the shoulders of charity organizations. What disturbs me about this article is these people were elected to serve the people, which includes the homeless. These individuals have the power to actually induce effective change in their cities and yet they choose to be selfish.