Skip past this if you want. I'm reliving my time of Homelessness again...this happens as you know by now.
Being out there was for me a lonely experience. Unlike my brother's Vietnam war experience. He told me that at least he was with others. At least even if he were killed he'd be with people he knew.
The contemporary Homeless experience, it's near 10 years ago for me. That experience was mostly an individual one. Unlike a soldier's or the Depression era Hobo's experience. There are many reasons for this I guess. The break-up of our sense of community as a nation, and such.
Though I met others, and was given advice by old timers I was we were nonetheless on our own.
This just made it all the more a brutal, and lonely thing.
Like being in a war the experience was an exquisitely intense one on all levels of human emotion. One that will never cease.
In the same way soldiers take their wars with them to their graves. I have found it's the same for others that have had extreme experiences in their lives.
Battered wives abused children assaulted inmates. I'm thinking also of firemen cops emergency workers health workers. The whole community of frontline, and abused peoples
All the forms of human tragedy live on after the events have happened, and outwardly seemed to pass. This over the last 100 or so years was vaguely understood. Only now is taken more seriously. There are millions of walking wounded among us. You see us every day everywhere. You see us, and even know us.
If the scars were visible there would be a national even a world wide shock at how many are walking with hell within them.
All of us quietly coming to terms with our individual experiences of a living death on earth.
5 comments:
As my closest friends know. For a time part of me wanted to go back to the streets. I had learned to survive. It was a very straightforward simple existence. There were no ambiguities 'none'...you live or died each day.
Even when I had a new home that was mine...I would sometimes return to where I hid slept existed on the outside. There was a strange comfort in that. It took I recall two years to stop this. Though sometimes I had, and still for a few moments have the feeling to go back.
I'm older now my health is nothing like it was before. I wouldn't last a week. In winter not even days if homelessness came to me again. Oddly even in that I have a unexplainable comfort. I had faced, and survived hell. Perhaps a kind of pride in that. It's a confused difficult to explain thing, but it is as it is.
I have no ready answer to this. No facile response will serve. Nothing scares me more.
Z
I don't know what to say to you either.
I was lucky in many ways. I still had a job insurance a network of family, and friends...though I kept all this from them. It was their shock of finding out that saved my life.
Next time I'm on my own, and will because of my health, and age quickly perish.
This is war.
What can one soldier say to another about the odds.
January 2017
Police arrested seven people in Tampa, Florida for distributing food to homeless people without a permit. Members of the Tampa-based organization, Food Not Bombs, stated that the arrests prove the city is criminalizing compassion. [Kathryn Varn / Tampa Bay Times]
November 2017
In Atlanta, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving 2017, two Food Not Bombs activists went to a local park to hand out food to the homeless, as they do every Sunday. But on that day, police ticketed them, citing a rarely enforced law requiring organizations to obtain a permit before distributing food. According to a flyer distributed by the Atlanta Department of Public Safety (that cites no actual evidence), enforcement is necessary because “many people become dependent on these activities, leading them to stay on the streets instead of seeking the help and support they truly need.” [Zaid Jilani / The Intercept]
When the cops make their bullshit claims, you have to wonder if they expect to be believed?
Two thousand five hundred years ago they said: Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
Evidently those who govern our land listen to other voices.
It's becoming like 19th Britain. The Poor Laws. The poor were stopped from coming into towns, and cities then. This, and much worse.
Now I hear that debtors prisons have returned.
People arrested for being poor, and in debt. A person was arrested, and put away for not paying for the $1200. dollar ambulance ride when he collapsed on the street,...Kafka would understand this as would Dickens.
Post a Comment