Anyway, TFA doesn't get to the point until 2/3 of the way through:
> Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly intractable—arose only in the 1980s. What had been anomalous suddenly became “the common misery of millions,” observed the writer and activist Jonathan Kozol in his 1988 book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Set in a towering New York shelter that Kozol likened to an urban refugee camp, the book sought to excavate the causes of this great displacement. Kozol refused the dominant explanations, all of which emphasized some mix of individual and group pathology: teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drugs, a “culture of poverty.” He offered a different view. In 1970, the United States had a surplus of 300,000 affordable rental homes; under President Reagan, federal spending on low-income housing plummeted from $32 billion to $7 billion. (“We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a top HUD official at the time.) Affordable units evaporated, and with them many of the legal safeguards allowing poor tenants to stay in the relative few that remained. Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
A level of this is absolutely necessary because there's too much wrong in the world.
I used to think a lot about how to solve the issues in my community growing up. I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I know more, etc.
But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on. All I can do is try not to exacerbate the issues.
And yeah, the world doesn't care about you, or me. You're a chicken in a farm and someone's about to lop your head off for a sandwich. So it goes.
I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.
I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat space.
I wrote this recently and submitted it to HN.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-tow...
I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because it can't be fixed.
I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.
Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I say, clearly.
Please keep submitting your work. The increasing reality for many working people is that they are one or a few misfortunate events away from losing their livelihood. While many HN have believe that they won't ever have to face that fate, their friends, family and neighbors increasingly will.
One of the reasons I run my big fat mouth on the topic is because I do have a much more privileged background than I understood for most of my life, so I have the opportunity to bridge that gap to some degree.
I wish to hell and back that it wasn't such a slog of an endless uphill battle. I'm tired of my life being such a drag and of feeling so burdened, etc.
But I'm really not down with simply vilifying "rich people" in a broad-brush fashion. I see that as a lazy answer and a counterproductive answer.
I'm fine with calling out specific instances, commenting on known track records of individuals, etc. I'm not fine with "those people" are "just bad people."
If nothing else, it's a pot calling the kettle black kind thing and I abhor hypocrisy.
I'm originally from a small rural community in southeastern Ohio. I've often had the same thought. I think I could help, genuinely, but I think there's a problem of acceptance there that I don't know if I could break through at this point. I've been gone for nearly 20 years. I don't really know that community any more. I wonder sometimes if I ever did. Maybe it's just my own ignorance or arrogance or naivety. Because I also don't know my adopted community of SoCal, either.
> the world doesn't care about you, or me.
Indeed. TFA and this comment thread reminds me of the Bukowski poem, "The Crunch." "...people are just not good to each other."
this is my experience telling people you are merely interviewing at Google
Get a third party recruiter and game them employers.
I am probably two or three generations removed from low level German nobility. I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I won (and turned down) a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities in my state.
My father retired from the military as an E-8, a fairly high rank. I was a military wife for about two decades. The ex also retired as an E-8.
I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company, the biggest non military employer in my home town at the time. While I had that job, I would make small talk at eateries or the like and people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.
Then I quit to go live in a tent for health reasons. That long personal history of always being respected and accomplished and one of the privileged few in whatever circles I ran in was no protection from the prejudice against the homeless. It did seemingly nothing to get me taken seriously, respected or result in real help to resolve my problems.
I'm not sure it makes any difference for me to leave this remark. HN is a bastion of goodness compared to everything else, yet still is part of the problem. It seems to mostly just harm my reputation to talk about homelessness, not convince other people that there are systemic issues grinding people beneath its boot.
The only winning move is to not get ground under that boot. After it has marked you, the entire world will heap abuse upon you, deny you real help and tell you, clearly, you are a junkie or crazy.
I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual injustice in my life.
I increasingly hate articles like this. They do an even suckier job than I do of making that point and often just give ammunition to the people of the world who want to blame those whose lives don't work. ("Maybe she shouldn't have had six kids!!" Etc ad nauseum.)