NIMBY vs. DTA

Not only Worcester, which is of course the Heart of Massachusetts, but the Bay State itself has been such a surprise to me in so many different ways.?Most of my expectations were based on a certain understanding of American history, not so much on the place where the American fight for freedom began, as on what came before, the Holy Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Puritan experiment that was already coming unraveled by the time of Jonathan Winthrop but which left a deep Calvinist imprint on the generations to follow.?Being a mackerel snapper myself, though with strong lutefisk associations, I was wondering if I would be welcome.?But then someone sought to allay my fears by reminding me of a few things such as the Kennedy family and the unscientifically asserted fact that the greater Boston area (including Worcester) may have more Catholics per square mile than anywhere else in the USA.?Probably true according to my unscientific observations and prejudices.?But another friend cautioned me, “Don’t be surprised if people ask you where you’re from (since you’re obviously not from here), or that they might just come right out and say, “You’re not from here, are you?”?

As a matter of fact, neither of those things have happened to me, though another odd thing did.?Both at the parish church I joined, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, on High Street, and at the Catholic Worker ‘Mustardseed’ House where I began volunteering, I was mistaken for any number of Catholic priests who are in fact dead, in no way, let me just add, attempting to impersonate a priest myself.?And I would also get, “So, you’re a priest, right?”?Wrong!?If people heard me singing the praises of Puerto Rico, they have indeed asked me about that, which leads t where else I’ve lived, but no one has inquired bluntly about my place(s) of origin, and certainly no one has questioned my right to be here in any way.?And anyway, asking folks randomly on the streets of Worcester, ‘Where are you from?’ just might get you a set of answers pointing to all points on the globe.

Though Medicare certainly helps--as it should help everyone in my view—connecting with health care and other key social services has been a snap for me, absolute newcomer to Massachusetts.??I was remarking about this to a manager for the Community Progress Council who is a descendant of the Adamses of Braintree, Mass., and herself a real live Puritan if they have those anymore, or at least a Congregationalist of the UCC, who said to me so modestly, “Well, we were always taught to ‘help whomever you can, however you can’.”?I like that, a simple philosophy that just about sums up Massachusetts and, for that matter, Social Democracy for me.

How grating on the ears it is then to hear a contrary view expressed in public, particularly when it is expressed on a public sidewalk that is part of my regular Sunday morning foot route from The HUB to Saint Paul’s.?It was in front of a local luxury hotel, located between the HUB and the Common, that I saw two either senior or soon-to-be senior citizens dressed like 10-year-old boys only with well-developed paunches riling each other up because of Worcester Planning Board’s decision last week to convert the Quality Inn on Oriol Street to housing for currently homeless residents.?Other towns in Central Mass. are following suit.?Our new Governor, Moira Healy, and the great Mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, are behind these kinds of initiatives.??“Yeah, look at what they think they’re doin’, the idiots!” Our two sidewalk geniuses said for all to hear, including both the homeless and the non-homeless on the Worcester Common, but a short distance away. “Yeah, they fix places like that up, and then move the homeless in!”?Code Word ‘NIMBY’—Not in my back yard!?I would like to think that those two men, presumably guests at said luxury hotel, though not dressed the part, are not from Worcester, or Massachusetts at all.?Connecticut perhaps.?They were speaking of ‘the homeless’ as though they were some kind of static, though unsavory commodity, like ‘the great unwashed’ of the Victoria era, or ‘white trash,’ or ‘bug people,’ no hope of improvement, no hope of moving on to a better life, just a drain on society, ‘useless eaters’ as they used to say in the good old Third Reich.

That is not the way the Commonwealth of Massachusetts treats people or talks to them through its public policies and institutions.?Here is an example of how we treat people.?We do what??‘We help whomever we can, however we can.’?For example, and this is a big and important example, we do not have in our state a ‘Department of Public Welfare’ or a ‘Department of Human Resources,’ reminiscent to me not only of what used to be called the ‘Personnel Department,’ back when the personal life and personhood were affirmed more than today, but also of that resourcing through recycling of human beings which was the theme of the classic film, Soylent Green.?No, here we have a ‘Department of Transitional Assistance.’ The Worcester DTA office has to be one of he strangest ever examples of urban repurposed architecture and is worth having a look. The state obviously did not splurge on this structure, but it is interesting.

Transitional carries a lot of weight in this concept, and most of that weight is in the form of hope.?If you are in need of food assistance because you cannot feed yourself on the resources you currently have, it may and should be a comfort to you to know and to remember that, when you take out that white and blue card to pay your grocery bill, and when you see those letters, ‘DTA,’ and remember what they mean, ‘Department of Transitional Assistance,’ this is not forever. ?The day will come when you will be able to give assistance, help, to others, just as you are receiving that help now because you need it.?And there is no shame in that.

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That’s the way treat people.?That’s the way we do it in the common-wealth of Massachusetts!

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That’s the way we do it in Worcester, in the Heart of Massachusetts!

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?Guy Christopher Carter