When Will Hands Across America Touch the Poor?

It is a cold winter morning in downtown Los Angeles, and I hold my coat close around me as I hurry down the street. Ahead of me on the sidewalk is a sleeping man who has squeezed his body into a narrow cardboard box for warmth. This has become a common sight, but I can’t--won’t--get used to it. I remember that sunny day last May when more than 5 million Americans held hands across the country to express their concern for people like him. What happened to the $32 million or so raised by that event? When will that chain of hands finally reach the homeless poor? How much longer will they have to wait?

The people who staged Hands Across America have said that they felt it necessary to pay off expenses--$17 million or so--before disbursing the remaining $15 million to the needy. They also have said that they want to exercise caution, to move slowly in order to ensure wise and equitable distribution. Recently, after a long delay, they announced that the entire amount would be disbursed in the next two to three months.

Caution is laudable, but it can be carried too far. The nation’s homeless need the money now, they needed it on the very day of the Hands event, they needed it every day of this cold winter.

I think of the Hands Across America offices in Century City, and the distance, emotional as well as physical, from there to Skid Row seems very great. I wonder if the people in those offices have any real conception of poverty, of what it’s like to wait, as the homeless poor spend so much time waiting, for food, for the county’s $247 relief check, for a place to sleep.

I have stood behind a counter in a soup kitchen serving food to people who have been waiting in line for hours to receive what may be their one meal of the day. I have seen women and small children, frightened young people, men whose pride kept them from looking me in the eye as they took “charity,� people whose courage shone in their smiles as they accepted their plates with a cheerful “God bless you.� I have seen the misery and the indignity of their waiting, and I wonder how Hands Across America can let them wait.

Four people have died waiting in Los Angeles so far this winter. If the money is at last distributed in the next two or three months, the worst season of the year for the poor will be over, and more may have died. There has been so much delay already; I wonder if the funds will even reach those who desperately need it by the anniversary of the event.

I wonder, too, about the people who participated so happily in Hands Across America. In Los Angeles the line snaked through some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods, opening many participants’ eyes to misery that they probably would never have seen otherwise. Many young people, encouraged by their favorite celebrity “names,� experienced the pleasure of giving, of reaching out. What has happened to the spirit that was expressed that day, the spirit of people who had been made aware of the needs of their fellow human beings and who wanted to help?

It would have been heartwarming if the public had been able to see the donations promptly distributed to the agencies that help the poor. The enthusiasm and the awareness generated by the event could have been encouraged to expand and grow. So much time has passed that the Hands event must now seem like a futile gesture.

Now Hands Across America is promoting a new fund-raising project. The public is being asked to buy certain food products whose manufacturers promise to donate money to help the homeless. I can’t help wondering exactly what the motives are. How can they ask for more money when they have not yet succeeded in distributing what they received from the public almost a year ago? Is this just more hype for corporate images, as it often seemed to be during the heyday of the Hands project last spring?

I am not the only one who wonders where the money went. The National Charities Information Bureau, a clearinghouse of information about charities and the money that they disburse, receives several phone calls a week from average people inquiring about Hands Across America. So the American public is waiting, too. Those who gave their money have a right to an accounting. Those who expressed their concern for the homeless have a right to see their kindness distributed as promised. All who gave so generously last year must demand an answer: What has happened to the money for which the poor have waited so long?