“Southern Hospitality” and “Iowa Nice” could compete for the “biggest BS” award about strangers’ intent. Older people in Des Moines like to talk big on community, I hear no end to South/West/North/East Side Pride. People rep their high schools into their 50s, never letting go of communities that maybe once brought people together. High school truly never ends in Des Moines as the same groups of people continue to spread negativity through these circles.
At least with Southern Hospitality if you’re fluent in church talk and euphemisms like the famous, “Bless your hearts,” you can work out when someone does not like you or not. Passing judgment on someone in the South is an everyday occurrence.
A community everyone in Des Moines comes face to face with on a daily basis is our unhoused population. Panhandlers can be found on every major street holding signs with anything on them, from a regular “please help” to more outrageous ones like, “Not homeless, just need weed money.”
Maybe that kind of plea is funny on the surface. However, with the new ordinances keeping panhandlers out of downtown, both serious and funny signs have been being pushed out.
When passing a panhandler, is your gut reaction, “But what if they buy alcohol with my $2 of nickels and dimes I give them?”
If you don’t have the money don’t give. But when giving someone a gift in any other situation, you don’t police what the receivers do with the gesture. Stop being controlling and weird about it.
There was a woman with leprosy that would alternate between the SE 14th Walmart panhandling intersection and Army Post. I spoke with her a dozen or so times.
Our last interaction was one sided as I watched a car ahead of me toss a jumbo styrofoam soda at her—soaking her clothes and face. I wondered if cola could ruin the tubing leading to her ever-present oxygen tank.
I see the struggle and watch as unhoused individuals have slowly started to disappear, so they are not arrested for loitering in front of multimillion dollar buildings with pass codes to keep them out.
It is now basically illegal to be homeless in Des Moines. Not on paper, but effectively.
The city of Des Moines has attacked the whole unhoused community—reducing the time that unhoused individuals can stay in areas they have been congregating in for years.
Not being able to stay downtown means these people are losing their access to the hospital programs that keep them alive. They lose access to any mental health services and medication they may need after missing appointments.
They lose access to the shelter we have for them when they are bussed away from our downtown area. They lose connection to each other, which means that an already vulnerable group may be ten times more vulnerable when singled out. There is safety in numbers.
The next time you hear a man in a fancy suit complain about the man with a cup asking for enough change to get a hot dog at the QuickTrip: speak up. Tell him that that is not very “Iowa Nice.”
At least in Florida when they bus out the unhoused, they aren’t in near freezing weather and can kick it on the beach and fish for their food. I do not even give tap water to my cat, I could not imagine being cold and unhoused in Des Moines. The Des Moines River is so contaminated with nitrates it is a wonder the fish don’t need yearly mammograms.
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