Hisler
2011-11-01 06:29:09 UTC
A blistering essay by by Barbara Ehrenreich. No one could have said it
better.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/23-3
Published on Sunday, October 23, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy
Wall Street Issue
Published on Sunday, October 23, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy
Wall Street Issue
by Barbara Ehrenreich
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or
build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering
logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept
reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and
rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more
committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one
problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the
destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is
the single question: Where am I going to pee?
Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S.
have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or,
better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne,
Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At
Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for
the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a
Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something
occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the
hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night.
Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy,
prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join
the revolution in diapers.
Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban
camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how
to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with
cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime.
Public restrooms are sparse in American cities -- "as if the need to go
to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once
observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A
report entitled “Criminalizing Crisis,” to be released later this month
by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the
following story from Wenatchee, Washington:
"Toward the end of 2010, a family of two parents and three children that
had been experiencing homelessness for a year and a half applied for a
2-bedroom apartment. The day before a scheduled meeting with the
apartment manager during the final stages of acquiring the lease, the
father of the family was arrested for public urination. The arrest
occurred at an hour when no public restrooms were available for use. Due
to the arrest, the father was unable to make the appointment with the
apartment manager and the property was rented out to another person. As
of March 2011, the family was still homeless and searching for housing."
What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless
people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically
necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets --
not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws
vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida,
which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in
digging or earth-breaking activities” -- that is, to build a latrine --
cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she
has no other place to live.”
It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any
other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws
requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their
indigent citizens.
The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the
1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall
Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the
era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond
weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial
working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart.
As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy” -- the stock
brokers and investment bankers -- were highly sensitive, one might say
finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the
homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an
economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire
overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with
Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows”
or “quality of life” ordinances making it dangerous for the homeless to
loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces.
No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown --
the deaths from cold and exposure -- but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers
this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina:
"During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she
attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then
attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to
relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the
woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day
because she would be ‘squatting.’ In early 2011, about six months into
her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a
hospital, and delivered a stillborn child."
Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before
the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own
defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant
lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary
forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be
distributed, latrines dug, rules -- such as no drugs, weapons, or
violence -- enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy
movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent
cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement.
There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless --
no signs denouncing greed or visits from leftwing luminaries -- but they
have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation
encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant
police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.
All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the
tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster,
Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants
without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last
summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a
local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city.
That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”
What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every
time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America
is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born
“illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of
survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine,
their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil
the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They
are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a
corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn.
But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks
that slope downwards -- from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure --
leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present
occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation
encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter
from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the
borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’
couches or parents’ folding beds.
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’re all eventually headed -- the 99%, or at least
the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school
teacher, and impoverished senior -- unless this revolution succeeds.
© 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich
better.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/23-3
Published on Sunday, October 23, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy
Wall Street Issue
Published on Sunday, October 23, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy
Wall Street Issue
by Barbara Ehrenreich
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or
build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering
logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept
reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and
rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more
committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one
problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the
destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is
the single question: Where am I going to pee?
Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S.
have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or,
better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne,
Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At
Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for
the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a
Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something
occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the
hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night.
Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy,
prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join
the revolution in diapers.
Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban
camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how
to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with
cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime.
Public restrooms are sparse in American cities -- "as if the need to go
to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once
observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A
report entitled “Criminalizing Crisis,” to be released later this month
by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the
following story from Wenatchee, Washington:
"Toward the end of 2010, a family of two parents and three children that
had been experiencing homelessness for a year and a half applied for a
2-bedroom apartment. The day before a scheduled meeting with the
apartment manager during the final stages of acquiring the lease, the
father of the family was arrested for public urination. The arrest
occurred at an hour when no public restrooms were available for use. Due
to the arrest, the father was unable to make the appointment with the
apartment manager and the property was rented out to another person. As
of March 2011, the family was still homeless and searching for housing."
What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless
people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically
necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets --
not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws
vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida,
which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in
digging or earth-breaking activities” -- that is, to build a latrine --
cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she
has no other place to live.”
It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any
other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws
requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their
indigent citizens.
The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the
1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall
Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the
era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond
weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial
working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart.
As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy” -- the stock
brokers and investment bankers -- were highly sensitive, one might say
finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the
homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an
economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire
overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with
Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows”
or “quality of life” ordinances making it dangerous for the homeless to
loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces.
No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown --
the deaths from cold and exposure -- but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers
this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina:
"During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she
attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then
attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to
relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the
woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day
because she would be ‘squatting.’ In early 2011, about six months into
her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a
hospital, and delivered a stillborn child."
Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before
the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own
defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant
lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary
forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be
distributed, latrines dug, rules -- such as no drugs, weapons, or
violence -- enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy
movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent
cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement.
There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless --
no signs denouncing greed or visits from leftwing luminaries -- but they
have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation
encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant
police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.
All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the
tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster,
Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants
without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last
summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a
local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city.
That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”
What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every
time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America
is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born
“illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of
survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine,
their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil
the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They
are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a
corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn.
But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks
that slope downwards -- from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure --
leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present
occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation
encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter
from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the
borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’
couches or parents’ folding beds.
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’re all eventually headed -- the 99%, or at least
the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school
teacher, and impoverished senior -- unless this revolution succeeds.
© 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich