Spilling Ink

By Elizabeth Canfield

I was surprised to read that the US Housing and Urban Development Department sends out teams of workers each January to count the homeless people in our country. The funding for the homeless is dependent upon the numbers tallied then. This year the count was done in mid-March, which doesn’t help much; the weather in Wyoming in March is not often much better than it is in January.
Casper’s teams found very few people sleeping under bridges and in parks, which is understandable. They felt that the ones who weren’t in shelters were likely sleeping in cars, or on friend’s floors and couldn’t be counted. Statewide, homeless shelters, food kitchens and other agencies counted their numbers to establish Wyoming’s needs.
Brandon Espinosa, program director of Lifestyle Transitional Housing, said that Casper’s homeless include families, even some people with stable jobs. He has seen a number of people left homeless by one medical crisis or the loss of a job, as well as many people who live daily with the fear of such things happening.
I can’t think of anything worse than being homeless in a Wyoming winter, although I remember hearing that, in the early days here, when there were the big cow outfits, most of the working cowboys would be turned loose when winter came, to fend for themselves, “riding the grubline” all winter…
The US Census Bureau estimates that came out a week ago show Crook County to be the 6th fastest-growing county in the state, with an increase of 3.4 per cent over last year. The calculation of growth between 2000 and 2007 is 6.7 per cent. Much of the increase was attributed to areas closest to Campbell County, with workers coming over to live in Crook County, although the entire county shows some growth.
You can see this right here in our area. It seems to me to be a good thing. Many of the people coming in are fine, contributing members of our community activities.
I wonder if we have individuals or families on the verge of homelessness. This is a tragedy that shouldn’t be happening in a country like ours. It happened in the 1930s, when events came together to literally shatter our economy, urban and rural. Through the years since then we have always been assured by the government that it can never happen again – that there are safeguards in place to prevent it.
Little by little, many inequities have crept up on us. And no matter which candidate becomes president, he or she alone will not be able to remedy the ills that beset us. The citizens will need to come together, to work at compromise and commonsense, as well as demanding that our affairs get straightened out. We are becoming as divided and alienated from each other, politically, as are the factions in the old, old countries in Europe and Asia. Africa too.
We truly are better – and smarter – than that.

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