In spite of a professed culture on campus of inclusivity and social responsibility, a new student-driven petition is looking to cleanse Peoples Park of the homeless people that call the park their home.
How privileged IU students could actively seek to remove lower class people from a public park confounds the Editorial Board.
Thankfully, another group of IU students alongside the homeless advocacy group Food Not Bombs held a protest last Wednesday, standing in solidarity with the homeless of Peoples Park.
The goal of the protest was simple: to counter the narrative of violence, drug use and irresponsibility put upon the homeless.
IU junior Jonah Butler, who was involved in the protest, said both IU and Bloomington need to promote a “capitalist aesthetic” because “IU is selling Bloomington, as well as sustaining the economic and cultural hegemony of the University.”
The very petition proposed by IU Senior Jo DiBenedetto uses mainstream stereotypes to dehumanize the homeless, stating that the homeless “have decided to make this park their home, starting fights, doing drugs, setting one another’s belongings on fire and causing raucous 24/7,” and asked that the park be returned to its “original value.”
The Editorial Board would like to remind Mr. DiBenedetto that being homeless is not a choice that makes one a violent person but a symptom of our profoundly unequal economic system.
If someone wants to talk about Peoples Park’s “original value,” they should remember that a building once stood there that served as a meeting place for the Black Panthers. When the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the building, the Bloomington Police Department said they wouldn’t protect the building if it was rebuilt for its original purpose.
The plot’s owners sold it to the city on the sole condition that it always remain a public park that was available to all.
Also, Butler points out that the number of homeless in Bloomington rose when Indianapolis cleansed its population for the Super Bowl and that a similar process was beginning here. “The people leading the crusade against the homeless are by and large the business leaders of the community,” he said. “It’s a systemic issue. Reproduced by these tactics of homeless criminality.”
At the start of the protest, a homeless man had been cuffed and detained for touching the glass window of a store. Upon his release, he went into the center and asked to write something in a woman’s journal.
The man had written “Freedom and Liberty. Justice will set us free.” By the protest’s end, he had been detained a third time.
Out of all the homeless that spoke at the protest, one remark was repeated over again; a wonderful bit of shade thrown directly at IU students — “Don’t shut down Peoples Park. Shut down the bars.”
Butler laughed at the quip, saying “The right to property should really belong to those that are using it.”
So how can those that love Bloomington counter this anti-homeless message? We must stand in solidarity with the less fortunate.
If we act like the homeless are not a problem, then the police and others will not need to treat them like a problem.
The group that planned last week’s protest also plans to hold weekly gatherings at Peoples Park. Nullifying the popular logic surrounding homelessness will make a huge step in solving it.
