“Reprehensible! Debasing! An affront to human dignity!”  The outcry has been vociferous and swift in response to  the City of Abbotsford’s dump of chicken manure on a popular gathering place for the homeless. While news outlets and blogs have registered the public’s outrage against the city’s tactics, I haven’t seen much analysis asking the deeper question of what  lurks underneath the city’s campaign to want to drive away the homeless from their midst in the first place.

Pastor Christoph Reiners of Peace Lutheran Church–who was asked by city officials to stop feeding Abbotsford’s homeless–touches on an answer when he names the discomfort of city officials and citizenry to admit that their idyllic community includes those who are homeless and those who suffer from drug addiction like any other city in North America.

Steve Kimes who pastors Anawim Christian Community, a church of the homeless and mentally ill in Portland, not only names our our discomfort with the poor, especially with those who wear their poverty publicly–such as the homeless or beggars–but digs deeper and proposes that we actually punish the poor for making us feel bad.

The main reason we punish the poor is because–for many of our society [they perceive that] the poor punish them. First of all, the poor make our society look bad, as if our society has done something wrong by having the poor. “Of course,” many think, “our society is well-functioning. So the poor don’t need to be there.” But there they are, the blight on our economic statistics…In our intuitive moral systems….those who make us feel uncomfortable or guilty should be punished for imposing those feelings on us.