The King of Clubs site has been troublesome in the past - bars attract people like me who succumb to uncontrolled drinking, get into fights, use drugs, and so on. I am forever grateful for escaping from that life and I mention it in the context of the need for affordable housing and available supportive care for persons with HIV/AIDS.
I have an understandably dark memory of the early years of the AIDS epidemic - now pandemic - when so many persons of my acquaintance experiencing recovery from chemical dependency succumbed to AIDS and died in sometimes dreadful circumstances. Those of us who sought to be helpful - and there were and continue to be far too many people with small room for compassion in their lives - had to do what we could with limited resources and a hostile policy climate during the Reagan years. We knew horrific stories about official behavior in hospitals and nursing homes, experienced harsh treatment by scandalized relatives, and easily saw that many around us (and some of us as well) identified persons with HIS/AIDS as modern-day lepers to be shunned and written off as human vermin. Clare House shows how far we have come since those years and the opposition to Clare House shows just how cruel we're still capable of being. We are overdue at both municipal and metropolitan levels for serious public discussion about the placement of supportive housing. We need zoning and planning policies we can view with pride, not tawdry neighborhood battles and a flawed spacing ordinance that satisfies no one and avoids the scope of the issue. We need better definitions about what constitutes supportive housing - halfway houses for recovering felons, group homes for mentally deficient folks, and nursing homes for the very aged are simply not that similar and state licensing and regulation address that reality. We also need to respect the hard work and the motivations of those who mean to help our distressed neighbors. Tragedy, disease and death are not rare but inevitable and no aversive hyperbole can excuse civic responsibility. In short, get a grip! Fred Markus, Horn Terrace, Ward Ten, in the Lyndale Neighborhood _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
