Spent 6 years sofa surfing, its less a fear and more a reality for some. Sadly in most western countries homelessness is seen as a punishment and housing programmes stipulate no alcohol, no drugs, curfew. all of which put people back on the streets.
housing programmes stipulate no alcohol, no drugs, curfew. all of which put people back on the streets.
More often, its the risk of physical or sexual violence that pushes people out. Shelter work is grueling and the pay is shit. The only people in the business tend to be the the boundlessly charitable or the ruthlessly exploitative.
The Texas Youth Corrections System has a scandal every five years or so, in which this or that low level staffer gets strung up for trading drugs to inmates in exchange for pornography or sexual favors. Its a regular low-rent Epstein Island that the state administrators know and actively cultivate, but periodically have to run Limited Hangout on when the heat builds up too high.
The cost-of living crisis is so bleak that some Gen Zers
genuinely fear becomingare homelessFTFY
Whole tent cities under the freeway routinely get raided by the police and “cleaned up”. And our political climate is increasingly moving toward the view that the non-homeless would be better off moving homeless folks into a prison camp or grave.
I do not fear becoming homeless. The state should fear my homelessness as it will only signify the next phase of my radicalization.
Your radicalization poses absolute zero threat to the state.
Sleeping rough is eye opening. But the folks closest to the atrocities are inevitably the ones who have the least power to stop them.
Only remedy for that situation is the kind of mass organizing of the lumpen proles that hasn’t seriously happened since the 70s/80s. Thanks to mass surveillance, brutal policing, and a corporate state increasingly run by algorithms, its harder and harder to see a world in which a mass movement can emerge again.
Doesn’t mean folks shouldn’t try. After 40 years of digging our own graves, we’re in one hell of a hole. But the only way out is to start climbing.
Enough radicals and the state is threatened.
Eventually, minor iterative quantitative changes will result in a drastic qualitative change.
only some? i was in fifth grade worrying about getting a job and how i’d stay alive otherwise. we need FDR back god fucking dammit. give us another WPA.
In one of its most famous projects, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.[1] The five projects dedicated to these were the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). In the Historical Records Survey, for instance, many former slaves in the South were interviewed; these documents are of immense importance to American history. Theater and music groups toured throughout the United States and gave more than 225,000 performances. Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the development of professional archaeology in the US.
