Larry Barnes, 53. Oakland Postmaster, church administrator, sings tenor in the choir.

The most special moment? One is coming down on Thursdays to witness the feeding of the homeless. That's very special. Because when I look at those people, I often look at them and I say: "You know, that could be me."

I tell people: I grew up on welfare. But I didn't use welfare to live on for the rest of my life. I knew I had to do something. So when that time came, I said: Well, it was a stepping stone. You got these young girls growing up, 14, 15 years old, girls having babies. Same way with drugs. You know we can't blame drugs on an individual. You brought it to the community and so therefore if you're having that kind of problem, if you want drugs out of your community, than you got to tell them you don't want drugs in your community. We got to learn how to say no. There's nothing wrong with saying no.

Same way with schools today. Parents now drop their kids off at school 8:00 in the morning and some won’t come back and get them till twelfth grade. So schools are not doing what they should be doing. Teachers are probably the most underpaid profession in the country, and something need to be done about that. Who’s going to have to do it? The schools cannot do it. The only thing left is the church to do it, by going out into the community and wrapping our arms around the lost brother and lost sister, regardless of their nationality. Right now we're going to be putting on a program to teach kids how to use computers. This is the information age, and yet we still have kids who are lost. If somebody don't do it, who's going to do it? We going to have to do it. I think that's what the church is all about.

I know some people that have been evicted. Looking at the rents, they’re enormous. It’s totally out of control. I had this same conversation the other day thinking about what we can do. One of the things we can do in the city of Oakland: We have the Navy base, the Army base, and all these buildings are just sitting there empty. So if you look at our church, and if we get more ministers and more churches involved and go out collectively, that we can persuade these government or city officials to make these homes available even if they didn’t make them available full time. Give them a cut rate. Maybe we could put some of the people to work that don’t have any income. For example, let’s say they gave them free rent and in order for you to earn your rent, you have to clean up the streets in Oakland. Or you may have to volunteer to work on the highway. We have a lot of space that’s available. It’s just not being used.

I think that in five or ten years from now you’re not going to find many minorities in West Oakland. Because if you look at the things they’re doing--they’re paving the streets, they’re buying up all the property. I say eventually it’s going to be predominantly white. Two reasons I say that. One reason would be that when you look at the transportation costs, you have BART in West Oakland, so if you build housing around there, first of all you figure you put condos in that area that will cost about $250-300,000 or more. Who can afford those? So now you got the gateway to San Francisco, you can just walk across the street to BART and go to San Francisco, go down to San Jose. I see that happening five or ten years from now.

It’s not just poor people. You have people that have good jobs who can’t afford homes. I read about one in Silicon Valley that used to be $250,000, now it’s a million dollars. I feel sorry for people particularly this time of year, when you have people sleeping in the car, sleeping on the freeways. And oftentimes I look at those people and I say that could have been me if I let my circumstances or my conditions affect me.

My friends who got evicted are out on the street, pushing carts, sleeping on the freeways, not eating. I’ve seen a couple I know that used to work at real good jobs. They come to our feeding ministry on Thursdays. I’ve seen them a couple of times. I used to work with them. When you look at that situation you always got to tell yourself Lord, thank you, because that could have been me.

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Larry Barnes