These words were bandied about at Chapel Hill Town Hall on March 21.

Many fine, upstanding citizens forget that it is prejudicial to brand "others" and that the greed which caused global economic depression left some of us homeless and others of us extraordinarily wealthy. These new white-collar and blue-collar homeless men and women are most often decent, upstanding, church-going citizens of our wonderful community.

What is often more dangerous to our children is seeing the subtle influences of our own parents drinking too much alcohol at home, having a medicine cabinet full of OxyContin and flirting with the neighbors.

Of course you would not do any of that, but unfortunately, many fine families have their alcoholic, their drug user and their womanizer right at home. And your typical drug dealer is not some sleazy, unshaven man hiding in the shadows, it is more often someone who looks like your own child, often well trimmed and shaven, washed up and dressed to kill web-mastering on the Internet with drugs galore available to any child with their own credit card. Does your child have one?

At the end of the last U.S. presidency, the economy could no longer support the poor. Who then will? Yes, many of us donate money and volunteer time but does our heritage inform us to send them off away from our families? When a white or blue collar worker is told, you no longer work here, and when he must choose to feed his children or to buy medicines for his grandmother, his money will run out, and where will he live? Homeless people are citizens and responsible as we are. Lets not send him off to someone else's backyard.

How do my wife and I see it? We befriend, hire and share food. You can too.

The Chapel Hill agenda item was "Public Hearing: Interfaith Council Community House Mens Transitional Housing Facility, 1315 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Application For Special Use Permit."

At the meeting, the Inter Faith Council noted that they had arranged to split the cost for a mediation session with those new neighbors who objected to the presence of a housing facility near them and had agreed to pay $450 of their money to fund the mediation. The objectors stated that this was a set up because there was no way they could get $450 together to pay for their share of the mediation.

Now earlier in the evening the objectors stated they had more than 1,200 signatures against the approval of the shelter. Why couldn't 1,200 people raise $450, for mediation, 37.5 cents apiece. One objector shouted out that the mayor and council were ready to pander to the pressures of those exerting influences on them to approve the shelter. I found his statement provocative. It was an attempt to use the very influence he objected to in bringing pressure to go his way.

At Town Hall meetings time is of the essence in the practice of democracy. A block of time was erroneously given to objectors at the beginning of citizen comments. They went on and on. This eliminated comments by other community members.

These first speakers were not applicants, to be given an opening statement. They were citizen speakers and it was unfair to have the first block of time to one political group and have so many other citizens therefore leave the hall who could not stay up that late. Attention lags after so many words and so much time, just as the mayor put it so well in his opening comments.