A few weeks ago, my wife and I attended the premiere of a documentary film entitled “Destiny’s Bridge”, the story of Reverend Steve Brigham and his fight to save “Tent City”, a wooded area in Lakewood that is home to around 20 or so homeless people.
The premiere was held at the Two River Theatre Company in Red Bank, with the proceeds going to the Destiny’s Bridge Foundation that is raising money to build “Destiny’s Bridge”, the prototype facility for the homeless that will provide temporary housing, job training and transition services to the outside world for its residents.
The movie outlines the history behind Tent City, the actions by local and county politicians to shut it down, and the ultimate goal – to build custom shelters for the residents there, and then follow up to build “Destiny’s Bridge”.
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Director Jack Ballo took us directly into Tent City and provided the viewers with an insight into the lives of the makeshift city’s inhabitants -- about a dozen or so people from all different walks of life who, as fate would have it, became homeless and wound up there.
The film moved a bit aimlessly at times, but eventually, everything came together in the end. Part of the film showed an actual raid on Tent City by the local police, along with meetings between “Reverend Steve” and the lawyers who successfully sued Lakewood and Ocean County, preventing both governing bodies from closing them down.
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The movie also showed a few of the residents moving out of Tent City into apartments and living on their own. This was very heartening to see – that the ultimate goal is to find work and move on, because the film was clear in showing that there’s a stigma attached to being homeless, stated through the words of the residents in the film. . .that homeless people are lazy or products of their own bad decisions, and don’t want to better themselves.
A Q&A session with Ballo, Reverend Steve, and the Tent City residents who were featured in the documentary followed.
After watching the film, I have to say that the label attached to the homeless couldn’t be farther from the truth. Currently, there are over 650,000 homeless people in the US. A lot of them are veterans. That’s really hard to believe that we can’t even take care of our vets.
But what’s even harder to believe is that for as powerful a country that we live in, our politicians don’t seem to want to do anything to alleviate these people’s plight. Instead, they employ the NIMBY attitude and just throw money at the problem, with no plan of action or accountability.
If it is ever built, “Destiny’s Bridge” could be a shining example of how politicians can come together and show that our Government can indeed help people in need.
Hopefully, “Destiny’s Bridge” the movie will be released nationally to a wide audience. It was well worth seeing and definitely made my wife and I think.
For further information:
Destiny’s Bridge – The Foundation www.DestinysBridge.org
Destiny’s Bridge – The Documentary www.DestinysBridge.com
Tent City www.tentcitynj.org
(The entire Jersey Shore Retro Blogography can be found at http://longbranch.patch.com/blogs/kevin-cieris-blog. You can also follow Kevin Cieri's blog on his Facebook page, "Jersey Shore Retro" as well as on Twitter @jsretro).
