A large table full of turkey, dressing, yams, mashed potatoes, scalloped corn, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, fresh rolls and pies in varieties ranging from pumpkin to chocolate cream.
Gathered with friends and family around the holiday table, eating and laughing until your stomach is swollen and your sides hurt with the merriment of it all, until at last, you can take no more and must retire to the living room to fall asleep in front of a football game on television.
Your Thanksgiving tradition may vary somewhat from mine, but some semblance of this tradition is the first thing that most of us think of when we think of Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, however, not everyone is so blessed as to be able to expect this type of Thanksgiving celebration.
According to the website of Toledo’s Cherry Street Mission there are approximately 147,000 people in Ohio who are homeless this year. For many of those people, the thought of a Thanksgiving feast with loved ones is but a dream; an unattainable fantasy.
You may think that there are not any homeless people in Bowling Green and it’s not your fault that you might think so.
As a nation we are trained to look through, beyond and around the homeless. We all tend to look at them without seeing them. That is because if we actually see them and take an interest in them then we have to ask ourselves some tough questions such as: why are men, women and children left to live in the streets without adequate food and shelter in America, which has been called the most prosperous nation ever in the history of the world?
Well this Thanksgiving I challenge all my readers to help do something about it.
Greg Litzenberg, a former University student, has been collecting contact information from people who may be interested in helping to start new homeless shelter here in Bowling Green.
Litzenberg said that practically everyone he has approached has been supportive of the idea of a homeless shelter in Bowling Green, but that many people would rather just sign a petition than to actually get involved by giving out their contact information.
Others have tried before to open a homeless shelter in Bowling Green, but the problem is a BG town ordinance.
“There’s an ordinance in Bowling Green where only three people with different last names can live in a two or three bedroom house,” Litzenberg said pointing out that off-campus student housing is specifically zoned to exempt them from this ordinance.
This is one reason why attempts to start a homeless shelter in Bowling Green have failed in the past.
Other bigger cities have similar ordinances, which are why many homeless shelters tend to cater to homeless families who all have the same last name so that this rule is not an issue.
“One of the first things I wanted to do is to try to raise awareness about the [homelessness] issue,” Litzenberg said. His goal is to have contact information from 1,000 people who are interested in working toward this goal of a homeless shelter in Bowling Green.
Litzenberg has started a Facebook page where interested people can stay informed on how the process is going and receive updates about what they can do to help out with the effort.
Litzenberg also said anyone interested in helping out can call him personally at 419-290-2074.
For me, I don’t understand why anyone would be opposed to a homeless shelter being started in Bowling Green, but from my understanding certain organizations have been less than receptive to past attempts to start one.
I tried to reach the Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce for a comment about whether or not they would support (or have supported in the past) such an effort but was unable to reach anyone for comment.
So as we go into this Thanksgiving break, and we go to dinner with our loved ones, I ask everyone to keep in mind that giving thanks for all of our blessings should not be done on auto-pilot.
We need to truly think about things like having a safe, secure place to live and enough food to keep our stomachs full and our bodies healthy, and remember they are not birthrights that are owed to us.
And while we give thanks we should consider that being truly thankful sometimes requires more than words. It sometimes requires us to give back what, and where, we can to those less fortunate.
Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” and so this Thanksgiving, let’s not just say how thankful we are but do what we need to do to prove it to the world around us.
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