Dawn Longval, president and founder of the Isaiah 61 Café in Laconia, has realized her dream of providing a helping hand to those who, through their own mistakes or through circumstances beyond their control, have found themselves without a home. “That is a need, because right now, prior to us, there was no place for people to go,” she said. “You have to be completely sober to go to the Belknap House or the Carey House. You have to carry that sobriety as long as you’re there, and that’s impossible for those struggling in it.”
The café serves two meals a day, five days a week, and the facility offers showers, bathrooms, and lockers for the homeless to store their belongings. Now, with planning board approval, Isaiah 61 offers overnight accommodations so those with addictions have a warm place to stay, rather than being outside in the cold. “We also try to assist with people getting rehab for drug addictions. We try to coordinate with different services around the city to get people to the next level,” Longval said.
Not everyone agrees with Longval’s bible-based approach to helping others. “Many people are opposed to it but afraid to admit it,” said planning board member Mike DellaVecchia, who had voted against the expansion of use. “You’re basically telling those people you can take all your money and spend it on alcohol and drugs because we’re gonna house you and we’re gonna feed you. So all your money, you can buy your party goods. It’s a disservice to those people. They’re not encouraging them to become sober.”
DellaVecchia’s position is one shared by many of today’s conservatives, who oppose handouts or what they call “free money” to address society’s problems. Seeing the problem without offering assistance is the view expressed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds in her GOP response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
“We’re now one year into his presidency, and instead of moving America forward it feels like President Biden and his party have sent us back in time to the late ’70s and early ’80s when runaway inflation was hammering families, a violent crime wave was crashing our cities, and the Soviet army was trying to redraw the world map,” Reynolds said.
In fact, Biden had addressed those very issues in his speech that called for action on his “human agenda” — lowering prescription drug costs, bolstering child care, fighting cancer and the opioid epidemic, and providing better mental health services and caring for veterans (notably recognizing the effects of the toxic “burn pits” that the VA has so far refused to cover).
Inflation is high largely because of supply chain problems and increased demand following the pandemic. Biden pledged to take action against that, including limiting energy and child care costs, strengthening domestic manufacturing, and taking measures against the price gouging that has occurred during the pandemic years. He also announced plans to open up strategic oil reserves to dampen the cost of petroleum in the wake of sanctions against Russian aggression. He pointed out that, by the end of the year, “the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office” and said he is “the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.” Last year, the economy grew by 5.7%, its strongest growth in 40 years.
Addressing crime, Biden made it clear he did not favor “defunding” the police but, rather, wanted to increase funding to give the police the training they need. The Department of Justice has “required body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers,” he pointed out.
As for “Soviet” aggression, it was former President Donald Trump’s cozying up to Vladimir Putin that helped to convince the Russian president that the United States and NATO would not put up any significant resistance to his expansionist dreams. Instead, Biden has strengthened the democratic alliance against authoritarianism.
It has been opposition by the national Republican Party and Trump allies that has held back progress on all these fronts, and Biden has called for Americans to unite and put aside partisan differences. The GOP response to the speech shows that they are not quite ready to do so.
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