Letter to Register-Guard re homeless shelter movement

Poor is the new black. Just as whites once fought to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, now the middle class tries to exclude the poor. We see this in neighborhood opposition to any form of organized homeless shelter – while they complain about the mess created by uncontrolled homeless camping. 

Over the last few years the tide had begun to turn in Eugene, with city and county governments providing unused land free to new nonprofits setting up well-run, low-cost homeless shelter – Opportunity Village Eugene, Community Supported Shelters, Nightingale Health Sanctuary. 

NHS is just getting their two legal “rest stop” camps started, but OVE, with Opportunity Village, and CSS with their three rest stop camps, have established a good track record. Their simple shelters, built with donations and volunteer labor, work. They’ve taken over 90 people off the streets, and still growing. 

People who oppose this movement need to understand that their choice is between well-managed shelter and messy unorganized camps. The homeless and their advocates, working together, are putting a lot of energy into creating shelter. We need neighborhood support.

In Defense of Food

“In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan is one of the best books I’ve read on diet. Written in a conversational tone, it’s an easy read and seems like quite sensible advice. 

His main message is summed up by a banner on the cover: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. 

By “food” he means stuff that our grandparents would recognize as food, as opposed to “food products” that have swamped our diet in the last half century, invented by corporations, with long lists of ingredients that we don’t know.  

Much of our diet, he writes, is between-meals snacking, a lot of it consumed in cars while driving, consisting of food products, driving up our calorie intake. These snacks are mainly based on cheap, government-subsidized grains. 

Pollan explains the serious limitations of diet research to date and doesn’t subscribe to any of the popular diet theories. But he says all of the nutrition experts he has talked to, regardless of their theories – low-fat, low-carb, whatever – agree on one thing: we need to eat more plants. Even meat, he says, would be better for us if the animals have been fed plants instead of grain. And they should not be given antibiotics, which is breeding resistant germs. 

He says we need to focus on the benefits of eating whole foods instead of individual nutrients in foods, and that culture – how and when we eat – may be as important as what we eat. We need to spend more time on it and eat with other people.

On not being a recording

It's critical at any age, but especially as we grow older, to expose ourselves to new information, ideas, influences, experiences. Otherwise we become recordings, thinking, saying and doing the same things over and over, living by habit.

I suggest reading nonfiction, preferably on subjects you don't already habitually think about.

"He who is not busy being born is busy dying." -- Bob Dylan