Weirdness In The Temple

Well, that's going to cost us 15K

In Centralia, my Lodge owns a really big Masonic Temple. It’s over 100 years old now, and sometimes between keeping it up, and modernizing as needed it seems overwhelming.

How is it that if you turn off every single breaker and pull every single fuse in the building, that light over the pool table stays lit? You know, fun things like that!

But we try. We actually try really hard, because we want to have a great place to meet, we have commercial tenants in the building who need to be kept happy, and we think that we have a responsibility to keep the building looking attractive for our City.

Cornerstone Re-Dedication, Centralia Masonic Temple

It does though, sometimes, oftentimes, feel like we just can’t get ahead, no matter how hard we try.

This spring, with the help of a government grant, we just finished putting a brand spankin’ new, high tech roof on the place. We’ll be dry for decades! But, then a pipe burst in the middle of the night. It’s amazing just how much damage a little bitty broken pipe can do in only a few short hours.

We’ll get it all restored, soon enough.

But today I’d like to write about what happened yesterday.

Not long ago, we started talking about a possible desire to someday, maybe move to a more secure entry system on our Lodge doorway. That particular entrance is used by us men, but also by the Rainbow Girls, Eastern Star, and the accountants who rent space on our second floor. And those are the folks we were thinking about. Having the Rainbow Girls or the OES meeting all the way up on our third floor, with no really effective means of controlling access to the building has started to worry us a bit. Likewise the accountants, as they seem to be a completely female firm.

The door is unlocked during the business day, and whenever meetings are taking place, but the building is designed in such a way that one can’t really know who is entering or leaving unless you happen to be looking at the camera feed right when someone comes in.

So, we’ve been talking about it. And we got bids.

By the time our Masonic needs are met, the accountants needs are met, and the fire department’s regulations are met, it is not an inexpensive project. We’re retrofitting modern technology into an old building with an old entry.

We’ll have to see how it all pencils out in the end, but it will end up costing just a bit less than fifteen thousand dollars.

We’ve talked about that. We want to do it, but not right now. It is too expensive for us to do it right at this moment. We’ve still got other, more pressing things that have to get done first.

But now we are forced to do it.

Why?

Because yesterday, while the accountants were doing their accounting stuff a disturbed homeless person dragged a shopping cart full of things into the building, up the elevator, and started moving in.

When the accountants noticed him setting up his new apartment, he apparently told them that he’d heard that it was OK to stay in the Masonic building.

We’ve had a handful of other incidents through the years, but they are growing in intensity and frequency. If our Accountants don’t feel safe they will move elsewhere, so we are going to have to spring for the modern access control system.

Even though it is an expense that our Lodge and Temple Board can ill afford right now.

But my intent with this essay isn’t just to complain, or to share the woes of my Temple Board.

I think that we have to consider why these problems are growing so much worse in our society. Because I don’t think we can ever solve them, unless we consider some of the fundamental causes.

A few things come to my mind:

Federal and State policy has made it virtually impossible to force someone into mental health care and/or drug abuse treatment. Somehow it has been deemed cruel to require people who need treatment to receive it. But that seems backwards to me. I can’t see how it isn’t much more cruel to let people slowly die on the streets. Allowing those deadly behaviors to continue seems the furthest thing from compassion to me.

Massive State funding directed towards the homeless problem has been very badly misspent, for years. For what we spend on programs that do nothing to actually help people living on the street we could actually provide houses. Lots and lots of houses. We fund bureaucracy, not housing.

These things are difficult for us, as individuals to have an impact on.

But, not every problem is so hard to solve, and some of them are intensely local.

My County wants to build a new homeless shelter. Large enough to meet the current need. In fact, it was supposed to be built and open now. But the City refuses to give the County a building permit. For years now. The County has actually now filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force the City to give the permit.

I get it. No City wants to house homeless people, if they think that the next City down the road will do it. But the simple fact of the matter is that these homeless people are already living in the City. On the sidewalks, in the parks. How much better for them, and for everyone, if they had a safe and warm place to stay. A place where drug and mental health treatment could be offered?

That’s the kind of problem a small group of citizens can impact. We can demand that our local officials do better. That they look at solutions to problems like this, instead of ignore them.

Another way this can be impacted, is if everyone, starts considering the effects our actions might have on our neighbors.

As I mentioned above, we have through the years had some incidents with homeless people coming into our building, sometimes even crashing our events. But it was always manageable, because it was rare. It was rare because the entrance we, and the accountants, use is actually on the back of our building. It isn’t front and center, it kind of blends in. So, it doesn’t draw attention.

But a group in the City has now been running some sort of homeless program, one night a week, right near our door. It happens to be the night one of our Eastern Star Chapters meets. So, that’s made our doorway visible. And it means that we have very elderly women walking from our building to our parking lot through much younger people, many if not most of whom are in crisis due to drug abuse or mental health issues.

To make things worse, the building next to ours is the largest building in our City, by far, and it is Senior Housing. The residents there share our parking lot. So not only do our elderly members need to walk through this event, so to do all those who live in the Senior Housing next door. It is a recipe for disaster.

And it doesn’t need to be. There is a City owned Park a block and a half from our building where this weekly program could be run. There is a City owned vacant but paved lot even closer. I can’t fathom any reason why this program needs to be placed directly in the path that very elderly people need to walk, in the dark.

Other than the City not wanting it on City owned property.

And that’s the kind of thing that a handful of citizens can make a difference in as well.

But, ultimately, our society must figure out a way to actually solve these problems. It makes no sense, and it is not moral, that the richest nation on earth can not or will not house so much of its population.

Making matters even more troubling, the problem is worst in those places with the most wealth. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Places of immense wealth, and grinding poverty.

That inequality, if it continues to grow, could destroy us.

But, just as keeping our old Masonic Temple in good order seems like an overwhelming task, so too does the idea of ever solving the problem of homelessness. But, we try. We try to keep improving our Temple. And I think that as Masons, we can’t see the problems of homelessness and not at least raise our voices.

Our society can do better, and maybe we, as Masons, do well to point that out.