Letter to the Editor 1.26.2025

Newark Advocate 1.26.2025
Jeff Gill

Letter to the Editor

There's a scene in "A Christmas Carol" from 1843 in London, that seems familiar to Charles Dickens in his telling.

Two visitors come to Scrooge & Marley's accounting offices. They are seeking contributions to assist the poor, and old Ebenezer famously asks if "the Union workhouses" (a form of public assistance in that time and place) or other forms of welfare were still available. When assured that they were, he ironically replies "Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course."

When asked to offer further help, Scrooge says "they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

You know the response: "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

And then: ""If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.""

If you don't know the book, though, you may not be aware the conversation continues in Dickens's telling. Scrooge continues, saying "Besides — excuse me — I don't know that."

"But you might know it," says the visitor, but Scrooge replies "It's not my business." He continues to press his rejection of being informed of the needs around him by saying "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's."

This is all foreshadowing of what is to come, after Scrooge's deceased partner Jacob Marley comes to tell another side of the story. The first ghost of Christmas would retort to Scrooge's indifference:

"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business."

We've just concluded in Licking County a six night opening of an Emergency Warming Center, the longest run of nights in a row we've seen since this effort began in January of 2019. An all volunteer effort of churches and community agencies working together to keep people from freezing who can't access, or for whatever reasons don't go to our emergency shelters, which are full in any case this winter, like so many in the past few years.

I keep hearing two things that frustrate me. One is that these are all people who are coming here from "somewhere else." It's ironic that friends and colleagues in Zanesville, Mount Vernon, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Valparaiso, Indiana all tell me they hear the same community concern: "the homeless are from somewhere else." Yet in conversation, my experience is that our guests are mostly from right here in Licking County. Not all, but most.

The other challenge is "if you people didn't offer these services, there wouldn't be people who are homeless on our streets." You can see how the complaints fit together, and fall apart if either is false. Both are incorrect.

What I'm sure of is this: more people would die if we didn't open on frigid, bitter nights. And I believe there is no such thing as surplus population. No, not one.