Help for the homeless

No one can obey a law that forbids their existence. Do you agree?

Sunday night a tornado barely missed Cape Girardeau, and as usual the tornado warning message was: "Move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building."

For your neighbors trying to survive homelessness, there was no sturdy building. Cape has no shelter for homeless people -- not even in ice storms, subzero cold or tornadoes. None.

Imagine yourself in a tornado, wind ripping your flimsy tent, or under a park shelter without walls. Or crouching behind a dumpster, with the wind yanking away your breath and blasting the rain so hard that raindrops feel like rocks -- knowing you might die any moment.

Not only does the city provide no shelter, it also makes it illegal for people to sleep on any public land, including park shelters. Result: when police awaken somebody and force them to move off forbidden public property, they have nowhere to go except another forbidden public property.

So this city ordinance, combined with the city's lack of shelter, makes it illegal for homeless people to sleep. This means it is illegal to live. And no one can obey a law that forbids their existence. Such laws are absurd, immoral and legally invalid.

The City of Cape Girardeau must provide decent shelter or, at the very least, stop obstructing projects that would create shelter and affordable homes for our most vulnerable neighbors.

CYNTHIA DURGAN, Cape Girardeau