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I have never experienced anything like the rage directed at me this week, dressed in a black hoodie, wearing a black face mask, trying to advocate for others’ rights and well being. People sneered at me with open contempt. I could not understand it. Then I realized,
... as someone handed me a survival kit, that they assumed I was homeless and that’s how they looked at and treated homeless people. I’ve lived a life where people just do not speak to each other, look at each other, treat each other that way. And when you see it, you realize ...
... how quickly, easily, dehumanizations happens. Just by painting people as a nuisance, a problem, a drain on resources, any broad strokes, this language dehumanizes them and makes it possible for people to treat them without respect. That means micromanagement, ridiculous rules
... constant threat of being treated badly ranging from being yelled at to being assaulted by members of the public? By security guards, for the crime of trying to get warm on a freezing cold night, of wanting somewhere safe warm and dry to sleep.
But somehow we have much bigger, more important priorities than making laws or bylaws or revising them to make life more than a constant, minute by minute struggle to find food, water, shelter for our most vulnerable. Someday
I believe this will all@be different, maybe soon, if we just gave the 3 million ppl in this country living below the poverty line a basic income it would change everything about their existence. Would the rest of us suffer if that happened? Not one single bit. But we don’t
make it happen, we talk about property taxes and bootstraps and voters and property values and fear, when we can’t even imagine the constant insecurity people live in when they don’t have shelter, and we just ... let it go on. I never really understood until this week. And
I ask everyone, anyone, who has ever looked at someone on the street with contempt, scorn, with the sense thT you’re superior, to take all of your money and credit cards out of your pockets and put on a hoodie and put your phone down and leave your home and walk into an
encampment and try to figure out where you’re going to sleep and what you’re going to eat. Do it for 72 hours. See how long you last. The people on the streets have seen things we can’t imagine and are
by and large kind and generous, and talented, and just trying to survive. And they just need some help, some temporary, some long term, to get things back under control. Surely all of us deserve that. /fin
