Barbara Ehrenreich published a very significant book called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. More recently, she pointed out the similarities between the Occupy political protesters and people experiencing homelessness, who both engage in urban camping:
Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarps, and relieve themselves without committing a crime.
Whoever defined the three basic needs of humans as food, clothing, and shelter, could have been more accurate. For starters, clothing and shelter are both subsets of the same class, coverings to protect the body from the elements. Clothing and shelter have more similarities than differences. There are places where people get along pretty much without clothing, and even places where they can survive without shelter. There are situations where either clothing or shelter will do. So, neither of them can be called an absolute necessity at all times and places.
But nobody survives without going to the bathroom (or the vacant lot or alleyway, if necessary.) It would be much more in alignment with reality to define the three basic needs as food, body covering, and elimination.
Ehrenreich goes on to say:
As the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, many ordinary and biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just urinating but sitting, lying down and sleeping.
This is what Richard R. Troxell says when inviting members of the various Occupy groups nationwide to consider the Homeless Protected Class Resolution and the Universal Living Wage as issues to coalesce around. Excerpts follow:
We certainly know the pain of homelessness here in Austin. As hard as we are working to end homelessness by getting people mental health care and safe, decent, affordable housing, there are still thousands of folks right here in the Austin area that are sleeping in their cars and living on our streets and in our woods.
While they are experiencing the trauma of losing their homes and being separated from their loved ones, they are getting ticketed, abused, their cars and belongings stolen and arrested… We fixed the No Sit No Lie ordinance… We can fix this as well.
Ehrenreich, in fact, specifically mentions Austin as exemplary, before summing up:
In Portland, Austin and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we all could be headed — the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-laden college grad, out-of-work schoolteacher and impoverished senior — unless this revolution succeeds.
There is, in some quarters, debate over whether the homeless qualify as bona fide Occupy protesters. The answer seems obvious: they are certainly not members of the elite, all-possessing 1%. An anonymous commentator asks readers to think deeply about the difference between the homeless and the Occupy protesters, reasoning that what’s good for one is good for the other:
I have entrepreneurial spirit and I’ve decided to start a homeless camp along the river in Harrisburg… I’m going to buy some $99 tents, then charge the homeless, say, ten bucks a night… When the police show up to displace the homeless, I as their spokesperson, will insist that this is merely a protest. And we have the right to occupy as long as we want, just like our bothers and sisters down the street… I do not understand how any city can roust homeless folks when the occupy crew get to do whatever they want. And heaven forbid we should trample on their rights.
This person meant to be sarcastic, but you know what? Heaven forbid we, as a society, should trample on the rights of either the protesters or the people experiencing homelessness.
Reactions?
Source: “Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Homeless in America,” TomDispatch.com, 10/23/11
Source: “Treating the Homeless the Same As Protesters,” whptv.com, 1/18/11
Image of Invisible Homeless used under Fair Use: Reporting.
