| May 20, 2005 Editor’s Desk by Aaron Selbig It’s been a sobering week here at Insurgent Headquarters. Four years ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the Anchorage Press entitled “Drunk Until Proven Sober”. It was about my experiences working at the Brown Jug liquor store on Fireweed Lane and how the depressing atmosphere of alcoholism there, combined with Brown Jug’s hardline corporate mentality, led employees to engage in systematic racial profiling of Alaska Natives. As soon as Natives walked into the store, I wrote, they were suspected of being either intoxicated or potential shoplifters. Often, Natives were refused service at Brown Jug for no reason whatsoever and, when they were guilty of walking in drunk, they were berated, insulted, and sometimes physically assaulted. The article drew a record number of angry letters to the Press, and was also poorly received by Brown Jug and its employees. A few days after publication, Ed O’Neill, president of Brown Jug, invited me to a weekend meeting that had been organized, he said, to discuss the article I’d written and possible ways that the company could avoid racial profiling. It turned out to be nothing but a witch hunt. I naively showed up at the “meeting” only to be yelled at, cursed at, and threatened with physical violence by Brown Jug’s head of security. The point I wanted to make in writing “Drunk Until Proven Sober” was not so much to single out Brown Jug (although it was certainly interpreted that way), but to call attention to the way we, as a community, view our fellow citizens (Native or not) who are chronically homeless, mentally ill, and/or addicted to alcohol and drugs. Is it right, I asked, to treat these troubled people with strict vigilance, in the hopes that our refusal to accept them will shock them into cleaning up? Or is it more effective to treat them with compassion and understanding, regardless of whether or not they will ever clean up? In this week’s edition of Insurgent49, Owen Cruise has written an article about the Community Service Patrol, whose unenviable job it is to police up downtown inebriates and transport them to a safe, dry place where they can sleep it off. The CSPs, a chronically under-appreciated and under-funded organization, have chosen the path of compassion for their fellow human beings. They don’t insult or berate their ‘clients’. They don’t treat them as animals. Like other local organizations such as Bean’s Cafe’ and the Brother Francis Shelter, the CSPs are primarily concerned with keeping street people alive. They take the view that, although Anchorage’s chronic homeless are perhaps irreparably plagued with addiction, they remain our brothers and sisters who need our help and deserve our respect. Also in this edition, Nova Stubbs has written about the wide disparity of American affluence, from her perch over an Anchorage alleyway littered with homeless people who have been cast aside by the system. Nova raises a question that troubles most ‘average folks’ too much to even think about: How did these people get this way? One answer is that they are simply too lazy or stupid to work and prefer a lifestyle of living off of free handouts. Another is that they are inevitable by-products of a hypocritical, socially stratified culture that casts off its troubled under-class with ease. According to signs posted in the windows of several downtown Anchorage businesses, giving spare change to the homeless only enables their alcoholism and encourages their panhandling. Does that mean that they deserve their miserable station in life? Do they deserve to go hungry? Do they deserve to die? Regards, Aaron Selbig Editor, Insurgent Media AK |
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http://www.anchoragepress.com/ archives/document7df3.html 'Drunk Until Proven Sober" - Anchorage Press version - column archive -
May 13, 2005 May 6, 2005 April 28, 2005 April 21, 2005 April 14, 2005 April 7, 2005 April 1, 2005 |
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Insurgent Media.
All rights reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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