Homelessness News Article

This article was very bittersweet for me. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing through the top stories on Yahoo. One of the articles that I scrolled past, was about a ninety year-old man named Mr. Abbott, who had been arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for feeding the homeless. I didn't read the article- just seeing the title made me upset. "What wrong could this man possibly be doing for him to get arrested?" I asked myself.

 Ironically, when I googled homelessness article, another article from the NY Times was the first result. The article also talked about Mr. Abbott, and gave me a more in depth explanation of what's happening to homeless men and women all over the country. What I read was sickening. Recently, throughout our country, like Fort Lauderdale for instance, series of laws have been passed that have basically criminalized being homeless and even helping the homeless.

"The latest one, passed last month, made food distribution in public places difficult by requiring toilets, written consent from property owners and feeding sites located 500 feet away from each other."

This is the reason that Mr. Abbott was arrested. What?

Although it made me extremely happy to read about a 90 year-old man going out of his way to help so many people, it made me extremely upset to find out that all over our country, homeless people, who probably have the hardest lives of all, are even being criminalized just for being homeless. We should be helping them and treating them as humans.