Call Them by Their True Names by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

No Way In, No Way Out

(2016)

Chances are that you are living the good life, at least in the most fundamental sense. You have the liberty to leave your home and the security of a home you can return to; privacy and protection, on the one hand, and work, pleasure, social encounter, exploration, and engagement, on the other. This is almost a definition of quality of life, the balance of public and private, the confidence that you have a place in the world—or a place and the world.

In the years since the Reagan Revolution, this basic condition of well-being has become unavailable to millions in the United States: the unhoused and the imprisoned. The former live in an outside without access to the inside that is shelter, home, and stability; the latter live in an inside without access to the outside that is liberty. Both suffer a chronic lack of privacy and agency.

Their ranks are vast, including 2.2 million prisoners and, at any given time, about half a million people without homes. These people are regarded as disposable; prison and the streets are where they’ve been disposed. Prison and the streets: the two are closely related, and they feed each other in the general manner of vicious circles. Prisoners exit with few resources to integrate themselves back into the world of work and housing, which sometimes leads them straight onto the street. People living on the street are often criminalized for their everyday activities, which can put them in prison.

In San Francisco, local laws ban sitting or lying down on sidewalks and sleeping in public parks, as well as public urination and defecation—doing the things you do inside your house, the things biology requires that we all do. Many people who lack homes of their own are invisible, living in vehicles, staying overnight in workplaces, riding the night bus, couch surfing, and looking like everyone else. The most devastated and marginalized are the most visible. Even they try to keep a low profile: I walk past the unhoused daily, seeing how they seek to disappear, situating their camps behind big-box stores and alongside industrial sites, where they are less likely to inspire the housed to call for their removal.

The young can’t remember (and many of their elders hardly recall) that few people were homeless before the 1980s. They don’t grasp that this problem doesn’t have to exist, that we could largely end it, as we could many other social problems, with little more radical a solution than a return to the buffered capitalism of forty years ago, when real wages were higher, responsibility for taxes more equitably distributed, and a far stronger safety net caught more of those who fell. Homelessness has been created by federal, state, and local policies—not just by defunding mental-health programs, which is too often cited as the cause. Perfectly sane people lose access to housing every day, though the resulting ordeal may undermine some of that sanity, as it might yours and mine.

In our antitax era,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.