Homeless 101.4: Dispatches from the Front

Sylvia's Wedding

As I blog and assess the travails of being truly homeless and try, against all odds, to beat a system that is designed to make participants fail (Try getting out of poverty with just $200 in food stamps and cash of $45 a month from a system you helped build), I wrote the following letter to my good friend Sylvia today.  Sylvia and I go back to our first year of college (me on far left in photo - click it) as we were both art students just getting a grip on what it was we wanted to do with our lives. Over the last few weeks she has written me with care and concern over my current circumstance. So to Sylvia I said:

Dear Sylvia;

This environment (the shelter) is absolutely dire. I'm just trying to keep it as real as possible by writing about it and getting reactions from readers. The general consensus is that I am not crazy, but telling a story that needs to be told.

All of my roommates are ex-cons, one with 25 years in for murder and now on parole, but nobody is guilty in prison are they? They have all become institutionalised and now work within the system. It is an absolute crime that non-criminals like myself are housed with ex-convicts - it can only teach a person how to act according to the environment.

This is the system I protest. I have paid over a half a million in taxes in my life and the first time I need to use social services, I get this? Treated like a criminal. I am not bitter, but distrustful now, yes. I am monitored 24 hrs a day. There are guards in every building I inhabit - even my Back to Work program. I must account for every hour of my day (curfew at 10pm and out of the shelter at 8am every day - Back to Work program from 9-5)) - or, they kill my social programs ($200 a month food stamps and $45 a month cash assistance). Yippee!

I am working my ass off to get a job but I guarantee you, nobody has ever gotten an executive advertising gig out of this environment. I will be the first for sure :)

You are right. Write your congressperson about it :) Or protest on a level that works for you (what I'm doing). 

Our country is broke, out of international prestige and can't even care for it's own people. We have no business being in the 'nation building' business in Iraq and Afghanistan when we can't even support our own. The high speed trains, internet and national health care in Korea (and Europe) would absolutely shock you - more futuristic than Star Wars. Makes us look like 1800s cowboys. To get health insurance in Germany (required coverage for a work permit) all I did was fill out an Internet form and pay 60 Euro ($100) a month - no pre-conditions or med check.

Hilary Clinton even said last week that the nations who will rule the future will do it with economic might and not military power. We spend 800 billion a year on military (48% of the world's military spending) whilst China is building infrastructure, high speed rail and apartments as fast as they can - doing what they can, building at home for the people. Their military spending is just 10% of the world's - what it should be. They have a space program. We don't anymore. Figure it out.

My situation is merely an illustration of America - and not a very good one.

:David

And with that letter sent I busied myself about getting a job again, sending emails and maintaining my other blogs which serve as references to my work. And then in my email, I came across this from Chris Hedges, one of the patron saints of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It let me know that the things I was feeling were not uncommon.

Chris Hedges

“What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?”


Sylvia's note to me was in reference to my living in the shelter. "You've got to get out of that environment", she said. At the Starbucks where I work on my computer the girl next to me is studying psychology. Just by chance her computer screen had the title "Sensory Adaptation". This refers to the idea that the senses become less receptive to the same stimuli. Meaning for me, that the longer I stay in the shelter, the less odd it will seem to me - the less reaction I will have to treatment that is so blatantly, obviously wrong, the more I will adapt - like a victim falling in love with his kidnapper. That's why I need to work my way out. Quickly.