By Debbie Brady
I am an old lady living on a limited fixed income from Social Security, but when I was working and I had money I used to donate to many charities. I tended to send money to organizations that helped young people, especially LBGTQ youth as I am a transgender woman. Now that I am retired and just getting by, I still get emails and letters from charities from all over the world asking for donations to their many worthy causes. I read them with regret; I just cannot afford to contribute to them anymore.
I have noticed one thing about all of these letters though. There are stories of refugees, disaster survivors, displaced children all over the world, but not one of them asks for donations for the displaced citizens of the United States of America. Not one.
All of these charities send billions of dollars of private donations overseas to help in some very worthy causes, while we have people in our own cities,
Not to mention those that die at the hands of our run-amuck police state. These people are out there, I know. I see them every day, talk to them, work with them, many are some of my dearest friends. You see I used to be one of them. I went from making 70K a year to being destitute between 2008 and 2010. I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say that George W Bush is not one of my favorite people.
I have been a member of Denver Homeless Out Loud for the last two and a half years; it is my way of attempting to pay it forward. One thing about homeless people I have noticed in the last five years that I have been among them is that they are amazingly normal. They range from Mensa geniuses to morons just like the rest of the population. A small percentage of them have mental health issues, just like the rest of the population. There are some who abuse drugs or alcohol just like the rest of the population. See what I mean: amazingly normal.
The only difference between the homeless population and everybody else that I can see is that the homeless are forced to live their lives in public, worse than living in a fishbowl. You have nowhere to poop or pee, you have to keep moving or you get hassled by cops. You need to find a place to eat and later a place to sleep. Your every minute is consumed with the effort to survive. You are hauling around everything you own every minute of the day or someone will rob you. You are looking over your shoulder constantly, you are a nervous wreck. You have a job interview the next day, so you need a place where you can clean up and stash your stuff, so you don’t have to drag everything you own to a job interview. If you manage this then you have to explain your lack of a permanent address and the hole in your employment history and of course you don’t get the job bagging groceries at Safeway.
In many of our cities, my own included, the answer to the homeless problem is to make it illegal to perform acts of survival, such as eating, sleeping and relieving oneself, in public, even though there are no facilities available for people who are unsheltered. This just makes a bad situation worse. It is a documented fact that giving someone a place to live is less expensive than throwing them in jail or attempting to provide services to them while they are living on the street. But that is too easy and goes against the grain of most politicians and the business tycoons who control them. The movers and shakers who run these city and state governments just want us to disappear. They don’t care where we disappear to, as long as we are not disrupting commerce downtown.
There are no big international charities working on behalf of these folks though, at least that I know of. Our only “sin” for the most part is that we fell victim to the greed of the tycoons and politicians who are currently running the show. Other than that most of us are amazingly normal folks.
Americans are a generous people; we have demonstrated that all over the world in many very worthy causes over the course of our history.
I think it’s time to spend some of that generosity a little closer to home and do something for our fellow citizens in need.
I have noticed one thing about all of these letters though. There are stories of refugees, disaster survivors, displaced children all over the world, but not one of them asks for donations for the displaced citizens of the United States of America. Not one.
All of these charities send billions of dollars of private donations overseas to help in some very worthy causes, while we have people in our own cities,
Not to mention those that die at the hands of our run-amuck police state. These people are out there, I know. I see them every day, talk to them, work with them, many are some of my dearest friends. You see I used to be one of them. I went from making 70K a year to being destitute between 2008 and 2010. I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say that George W Bush is not one of my favorite people.
I have been a member of Denver Homeless Out Loud for the last two and a half years; it is my way of attempting to pay it forward. One thing about homeless people I have noticed in the last five years that I have been among them is that they are amazingly normal. They range from Mensa geniuses to morons just like the rest of the population. A small percentage of them have mental health issues, just like the rest of the population. There are some who abuse drugs or alcohol just like the rest of the population. See what I mean: amazingly normal.
The only difference between the homeless population and everybody else that I can see is that the homeless are forced to live their lives in public, worse than living in a fishbowl. You have nowhere to poop or pee, you have to keep moving or you get hassled by cops. You need to find a place to eat and later a place to sleep. Your every minute is consumed with the effort to survive. You are hauling around everything you own every minute of the day or someone will rob you. You are looking over your shoulder constantly, you are a nervous wreck. You have a job interview the next day, so you need a place where you can clean up and stash your stuff, so you don’t have to drag everything you own to a job interview. If you manage this then you have to explain your lack of a permanent address and the hole in your employment history and of course you don’t get the job bagging groceries at Safeway.
In many of our cities, my own included, the answer to the homeless problem is to make it illegal to perform acts of survival, such as eating, sleeping and relieving oneself, in public, even though there are no facilities available for people who are unsheltered. This just makes a bad situation worse. It is a documented fact that giving someone a place to live is less expensive than throwing them in jail or attempting to provide services to them while they are living on the street. But that is too easy and goes against the grain of most politicians and the business tycoons who control them. The movers and shakers who run these city and state governments just want us to disappear. They don’t care where we disappear to, as long as we are not disrupting commerce downtown.
There are no big international charities working on behalf of these folks though, at least that I know of. Our only “sin” for the most part is that we fell victim to the greed of the tycoons and politicians who are currently running the show. Other than that most of us are amazingly normal folks.
Americans are a generous people; we have demonstrated that all over the world in many very worthy causes over the course of our history.
I think it’s time to spend some of that generosity a little closer to home and do something for our fellow citizens in need.
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