Showing Some Humanity to the Homeless
by Tony Chavira
Our society seems to have a weird way of treating the act of being homeless with a mix of compassion and disdain without bothering to really understand and work toward figuring out what made these people homeless in the first place. For example, in Maine there's all kinds of hoopla over a man who found that he was restricted from building on his own property. But instead of fighting the law and dealing with the costs for insane construction, he decided to turn his land into a Nature Park site which was deliberately outfitting to assist homeless people (even added an outdoor restroom and picnic tables). Naturally, the neighbors are pretty pissy about it and are working the zoning system to keep it from coming together.
But where are the actual solutions to solving homelessness in this case? In this case, some are trying to accommodate homelessness, others trying to brush it away... but none are trying to figure out the core reason why there are homeless people using the site in the first place! The same rings true in places as liberal as the Bay Area, with "No Trespassing" zoning laws being enacted to keep them shifty homeless types in the dark and dangerous corners of cities and not in the bright and/or shiny places (where people can see they exist).
In fact, attacks on homeless people are at an all-time high right now and aside from sic-ing the police on these attackers(/murderers), very few jurisdictions are doing anything about it. Here in California though, you can rest assured that we have at least enough common decency to enact a civil rights law on behalf of homeless people as a protected social class. And why shouldn't they be? Hate crimes against poor people are a staple of human society, it's about time they were singled out for some rights! Otherwise, stuff like this will just keep happening and callous on-lookers will ignore their innate compassion based on inhumanely rigid socio-economic prejudice.
In fact, I want to re-post an excerpt from the blog link I just pasted above, to give an example of hate-speech against the homeless on the internet written by Mr. Bevan Sabo of Free Market Mojo (bold emphases are mine):
When economic interventionists (i.e. collectivists, socialists, liberals, etc.) claim that conservatives and libertarians do not care about the poor, they are absolutely right. Capitalists are possessed of the belief that every individual has an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We, the capitalists, want to break the chains of government dependency that lead to generation after generation of the modern day equivalent of feudal serfs living off the scraps that their government masters throw to them. The interventionists work very hard to preserve the poor, in order to maintain their own power. The collectivists hector individualists for not believing in “hope” and “change”, and not having faith in mankind. On the contrary, it is the individualists who have supreme faith in the power of every individual, it is the individualists who embrace the dynamic change of a free-market economy, it is the individualists who advocate the unleashing of human willpower so that hope is made tangible.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Bevan Sabo's "faith in humanity" is to innately tied to an economic structure that he cannot see the humanitarian implications of his classist, "individualist" point of view. I get the impression that he doesn't realize that available services for assisting homeless people are almost exclusively provided by the government (or government funded-programs) simply because the individualistic capitalist system is perfectly comfortable watching these people slip through the cracks. If our system of government/economics were actually socialist, everyone would have a job and everyone would live in a home (no matter how substandard it may be). But it isn't, and people are utterly or chronically homeless out there because the system is still just fine knowing that they exist as it's victims.
I am not a collectivist (whatever the hell kind of insult that's supposed to be), I am simply stating the facts. There are homeless people who need this kind of basic-level help because the fundamental structure of our economic system allows for them to become homeless (and even justifies the existence of homelessness as a potential outcome of "failing" in this system of capitalism).
But is this failure really the fault of the person or the economic system? I would argue that if (last year), 672,000 people in America was homeless on any given night, the system has failed them and not vice versa. That is enough people to have completely changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential election... and they sleep on the street every night. We must have the human decency to intervene on their behalf, especially when so many are in positions of utter psychological desperation. No amount of economic opportunity can help homeless people in this situation, which is why they need someone to look out for their safety for them.
I want to leave you with this idea of a small mobile and safe sleeping space designed by the German industrial designer Cornelius Comanns, called the "Bufalino." Hey, if you're not a politician or a social worker, you do what you can to help I suppose:
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