More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.
They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.
Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t provide any further sources about the incident, so we have to trust the author to not have omitted any inconvenient facts in order to sell a story. Which, after seeing the details on the previous one, I’m not willing to do.
The devil is unfortunately always in the details, so I don’t feel comfortable making a judgment in this case. I do think it’s important to help people get back on their feet, and I appreciate these pastors’ willingness to help, but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t put an excessive burden on the community as a whole by creating safety hazards for other people.
Great start! Before continuing the rest of your sentence, please back up two commas and ask the question “where did our society fail in supporting this person to cause them to fall?” But the devil’s after that second comma, because
A community in a society concerned about supporting these people from the beginning, not just trying to fix the most visible symptom, would not see the presence of a fellow human being as a ‘safety hazard’ or ‘burden’ but would rightly see it as a failure of their society to take care of the vulnerable.