Amendment I of the Bill of Rights reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The conventional understanding of this amendment establishes Freedom of Religion, as well as Freedom of Speech, and is said to establish the doctrine of Separation of Church and State. We also have the right to peaceably assemble "and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Typically, when we think of petitioning the government, we think of signing our names to a written document espousing particular thoughts or speech, or we think of standing in front of a government office, or on a busy street, holding a sign with words reflective of our thoughts and speech, in the hopes that those in the offices, or the general public driving by, will see our message and agree with it, leading to more pressure on our representatives to effect a legislative change that hopefully solves the particular grievance or problem.
However, it seems there is a third type of speech that some writers are well versed in, particularly fiction writers. This type of speech is known as "showing," and the short educational phrase is, "Show, don't tell." The challenge, for fiction writers particularly, is not only to write using techniques that tells a story as a news reporter might list facts and who said what when, but additionally shows the story in the readers' minds as a series of pictures. Sometimes creative writers speak of using words to "paint a picture." Perhaps the penultimate peak of showing versus telling is television and motion pictures. Most of us have been around long enough to have read that news, movie and television producers have used the First Amendment as legal justification to show us painful or uncomfortable pictures to watch, and to keep available to the public's view material even our own government would prefer that we not see.
Well, great! What does this have to do with the Homeless problem?
Homeless people are forced through a variety of creative survival means to live in ways that most of us are quite uncomfortable thinking about, nevermind seeing. First, they don't have homes (well, duh!), and shelters are often full, so they might live on the streets or in the unimproved canyons near our homes. Homeowners and businesses often object to this, ultimately, either because it lowers property values, or a variety of other well-reasoned objections having to do with fire dangers, sanitation, crime, or simply discouraging customers from entering the proprietor's locale and business. Yes, a homeless person might go through your garbage one day, looking for something to eat, or for something of value they can use. While I've never been homeless, scavenging through trash is an activity that I have participated in in the past, and highly value. You'd be surprised what can be found at times, perfectly good working items that others throw away, as well as discarded food that may not yet be spoiled. But I begin to digress from my point.
Some might prefer to think of this as "reality TV." I propose that homeless folks are essentially petitioning government by showing us, instead of telling us in a formal, written way, what it is like to be an economic outcast, and which constitutes a grievance that other humans can have a place of shelter, rest, and peace; a place to store their belongings, including food; while they do not.
If so, given the persistent and growing numbers of homeless folks, it appears their petitions are not only being ignored, but that in fact any solutions being offered are too little, too late, or are mostly ineffective at solving the apparent underlying problem, economics. I first became aware of the homeless problem in the 80s when they would show up at the park, or the beach, begging the public for a donation. In recent years, I've read that local governments occasionally raid ad hoc encampments located in canyons and brush, generally not visible from the surrounding neighborhoods. The police have not only bulldozed their makeshift quarters, but also thrown away their belongings, an activity that a
Federal Court recently ruled was illegal.
Over the years many complaints about homelessness have been made, including the fact that they sometimes congregate in groups to live (think "peaceably assemble") in canyons and public lands, and that when such encampments are discovered, otherwise homeless-friendly cities reportedly send in the police. If they're solitary, it's less likely they'll be discovered or bothered by the authorities. Given our human species' social and co-operative natures, organizing into "communities" would not only be expected, but be quite normal and natural. It appears our government institutions and cultural pressures are attempting to force homeless folks to live solitary lives apart from others like them, while the reality is that they are humans that, every bit as much as the rest of us, most likely need some social contact. Our species evolved and survived the dangers of the jungle and the onslaughts of other predatory animals by grouping together for communal defense and sharing of food and resources. For our distant ancestors, it was a hard life fraught with many dangers, including territorialism with neighboring tribes, but also it's a history of loving and caring for each other in order to survive.
Homelessness is a tough problem for capitalism and property owners to deal with. When local governments are advised of their unwanted presence, the police are often sent out to "deal with the issue" in the way that government seems most comfortable with, by force. Recently there was a news item
discussed on DU that had to do with
homelessness in the San Diego area, my birth town.
I noticed the new's items listing of specific areas where homeless folks gathered in our county, one seemed out of patterned place with the others listed: the "Pala area". I started thinking about Pala, and how the town itself is on an Indian reservation, with a fancy new casino and hotel, built in the last several years, and if memory serves, is associated with at least one of the large, corporate hotel chains. The Indians who live in Pala are sovereign. For miles on either side of Pala, there isn't much, and beyond that to the east and west along Route 76 are mostly citrus farms. A photo of
Pala (on their front page).
This dissonant pattern got me to thinking about how some of the hard-core homeless, who aren't particularly amenable to social services and other forms of establishment help, are much like hunter-gatherers and at least somewhat like the Indian predecessors that the U.S. Government entered into treaty with some century and a half or so ago and began the granting of particular lands and limited sovereign status. The
Indian reservations, as imperfect and flawed and manipulative a solution as they were, much to small to support their past survival practices and culture, nevertheless seemed to create a certain legal precedent for dealing with hunter-gatherers who liked their form of life: give them some land and some sovereignty.
It would be wonderful to have a 100% full employment economy, with no employee making less than a living wage, with zero price inflation over very long time periods, but when has even one of those items occurred, nevermind all three simultaneously? Instead, we seem to have an economy that keeps some of us at the 'hunter gatherer' stage as a matter of perpetual reality, then calls those folks all sorts of demeaning names such as drug users, convicted, sex offenders, "Get a job, loser", bum, etc. Most of the rest of us, fearing these labels and the social stigma thus created, work harder and longer hours to get increasingly less with each passing year.
The economy of our modern civilization seems to cater to the Top 400 families who reportedly have average yearly incomes exceeding $170,000,000 per year (in 2001), and who, by all indications, are continuing to be well served by U.S. Law and the
growing sovereignty of some of the corporations they own. In spite of politicians proclamations to the contrary, and coupled with the duplicitous games that have been played with the consumer price index (CPI) used for cost of living measurements and wage adjustments (COLA) for the past thirty years, the economy for most of the rest of us is quite poor and getting worse each day, year, and decade. While Congress debates granting private telecom corporations immunity from lawsuits for warrant-less wiretapping, ostensibly because the financial liability of those lawsuits could cripple them, most of the rest of us are but one paycheck away from homelessness.
When the wealthy elite's "investment corporations" such as Bear Stearns fail, our government "prints some money" by taking a loan from a consortium of private bankers known as the Federal Reserve to bail them out, and in return guarantees that taxpayers will pay back the loans, then gives the purchase to another private corporation, effectively privatizing any possible future profits paid for with taxpayer dollars! This is egregious, in-your-face corporate welfare! Yet, for 25 years the
government's response to homelessness (PDF) has been a failure. Isn't this the opposite way a government supposedly of, by, and for The People should work? Are the only people that matter to our leaders now known by their corporate logo and their shareholders' wealth?
If homeless citizens are encamped on public land, then why are they being threatened with arrest and hassled by the police, given the First Amendment clause, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" in their particularly realistic "showing" form of "petition"?
Maybe it would be healthier and happier for everyone, particularly the chronic homeless, if government would conceive of another tried path toward sovereignty that some humans could follow if they so choose, as opposed to the strategy of forced assimilation into an artificial "civilization" of a few wealthy predators and the rest of us as the predators' economic prey.
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