PANHANDLING IS EVERYWHERE, INCLUDING WASHINGTON DC

…Charles Gladden, 8 years working in the Dirksen Senate Building.

The elected officials in Washington DC are oblivious to their own surroundings.

I continue to find it so sad while living here in Silicon Valley, one of the most successful areas in the nation for decades, yet we continue to see homeless men and women panhandling at many of our busy traffic intersections.

Unfortunately, this sad phenomena is not solely a Silicon Valley issue, but is also a big problem in major cities and in the streets around our nation’s Capital.

But this time, it’s not just on the corners in near-by Georgetown or on the Washington DC Mall.

It was highlighted recently that a man by the name of Charles Gladden, who works at the Senate cafeteria, sweeping floors, mopping bathrooms, cleaning dishes, composting leftovers, and transporting laundry.  Mr. Gladden is a 63 year homeless man.

This individual who works around some of the nation’s most powerful people for the last 8 years, he has been dealing with braving all the local elements of the cold, rain, sleet and snow when he’s not at work.  He has also been required to make the best use of the local food pantries and free health clinics.

Obviously, those elected officials that he is working around have no clue about the hardships that Mr. Gladden must deal with every day.  And Mr. Gladden is a perfect example of the fact that our government, is the single largest creator of low-wage jobs in the country.  That is because it doesn’t require companies it does business with to pay what is considered as a living wage.

Mr. Gladden, like many low-income people, suffers from chronic illnesses and he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes over a decade ago.  His biggest challenge today is finding a safe place to store his insulin.  “I tried to live in a shelter, but guys kept stealing my medication because they think they can get high off of it. ”

Gladden’s diabetes has made it difficult to work on his feet for so many hours a day. He shuffles a bit today when he walks because he had to have three toes amputated. The missed work due to hospital stays has obviously been devastating.  In the months since he was last discharged from the hospital, he’s also had trouble coming up with the co-pay for his insulin.

So, just as we here, see those with their cardboard signs on the corners, sometimes he panhandles in DC on the weekends.  He also does this when he’s laid off for weeks because the Senate is in recess.

But Mr. Gladden is totally correct when he says, “Our lawmakers don’t realize what’s going on right beneath their feet.  They don’t have a clue.”

Today he gives much of his meager paycheck to his three daughters and their grandchildren, who also struggle to find steady housing and employment in the area.  “I want to provide for them,” he says of his family, “not be a burden to them.”

So, the reality is that he spends most of his non-working time in the McPherson Square Metro Light-Rail Station.  The irony is, the station is only about 2000 feet from the president’s White House.

When he was asked about the president and what Obama had done by using an executive order requiring new government contract bids to pay at least $10.10 an hour.  Gladden said that was nice, but it was still less than what Gladden currently earns.

Gladden thinks President Obama, and the senators he sees every day, could do a whole lot more for the nation’s homeless and the vets.

He then said that perhaps they will do more, once they read about him and learned what his life was like.

Then he said, “But first, they need to know.”

Touché

Copyright G.Ater  2015