One thing I'll never get over is how much street folk desperately need to be seen as human. Today a recently beaten fellow asked me for a coffee, but what happened next was the heartbreaker. As I was making eye contact, his eyes welled up & he apologized. For what? He said for burdening me, because it was his fault he'd been beaten, because he'd said bad words. Just meeting him human to human was enough to spark his shame. He limped off then like so many: in need of therapy that will never come.
Agreed. It's honestly not surprising how much people have been talking about wiping out whole ethnic groups as of late... because that's exactly the same rhetoric applied to rising unhoused populations in places like LA. One day you're in a house, the next day you're evicted and lumped in with a whole group of "dangerous" people who need to be removed ASAP so that there's no risk to everyone else's property values.
We lose our humanity so easily under duress. Lots of work to be done.
yes, it's building up to be a bloodshed situation. i'm concerned by what's happening in Sweden, as a sign of the times.
I'm annoyingly pragmatic about situations like this, so I keep pointing out that if people *really* want to reduce the immigration rate (& with it, the struggle over cultural collisions), their best bet would be aggressively pushing for climate change reform ASAP. Refugeeism and other mass migrations aren't going to stop until resource wars exacerbated by climate crisis diminish. But anti-immigrant activists don't want their taxes going to international relief, so... ethnic war it is!
yes, i agree. we are producing the problems those people are having to flee. economically and environmentally, not to mention politically. wtf does one expect?
Again, ever more succinctly said. :) Thank you, holon.
@MLClark That’s heart breaking :( There’s so many homeless on the streets here on the West Coast and it’s impossible to know what to do about it except show as much compassion as I can.
It never feels like enough.
One starfish at a time. 💛 We have to hope that any kindness shown will only grow.
@MLClark Exactly. What I hate is when I have nothing to give or I don’t feel safe so I don’t want to flash a wallet, because of erratic behavior or what not and I know there’s nothing I can say or offer, but I know they need more than that.
It just puts my heart in a vice grip.
Over 600 unhoused live in Asheville. You cannot avoid their heartbreaking plight. Smarter people than I don’t have a solution. Housing is just one component.
One of my neighbors told me he was institutionalized when Reagan dumped the mentally ill on the streets. He has no memory from the 10 yrs in was drugged into compliance living off/on the street.
There is a chair in hell with Reagan’s name on it. He killed the middle class and replaced it with the homeless.
Oh Lindsay, what a gut punch. I often think about how much the carceral system and streetlife just wipes whole years off the human record. I'm so thankful to hear that your neighbour had a turn in fortune - but the number of people in need of systemic uplift just keeps growing, doesn't it?
And so many of us are *teetering*, which keeps the class war strong; so long as we think that folks worse off are threatening the thread we're holding on to, we'll never bring about better change.
@MLClark
that's so heavy. poor guy. street life is brutal and getting more so.