Disposable People

Apropos of last week’s heartbreaking article in The Blue Paper by Naja and Arnaud Girard on the personal stories of three local homeless, two families and one single person, I came across a story making its way around the web. It’s the miraculous human-interest/feel-good story of Rashema Melson, an eighteen year old homeless young African-American woman who graduated with a 4.0 GPA and valedictorian of her class at Anacostia High School in Washington DC. Ms. Melson will be attending Georgetown University in the fall with a full scholarship. She accomplished this miracle in spite of living in a homeless shelter with her mother and siblings for the last two years after a tumultuous existence of moving from place to place previous to landing in the shelter. She is an attractive and poised young woman and will no doubt go on to greatness and I salute her.

She and another young man that beat the odds and graduated valedictorian of his class in Jacksonville Florida, are making headlines and the rounds on morning talk shows. One can’t help but admire these kids and their accomplishments, but unfortunately the news media, in their zeal for good copy, completely ignore the glaring question of WHY these kids are homeless. The morning shows and newspapers will sell a bit more laundry detergent and ratings will go up, but nothing will change. By featuring Rashema’s story one is left with the feeling that perhaps homelessness is really just an extreme character building exercise, the kind of tough love Paul Ryan alludes to when he speaks of eliminating the “welfare hammock” for people’s own good. Color me cynical, but for every Rashema Melson there are countless homeless young women that are never going to finish high school, never mind being valedictorian with a full scholarship to Georgetown. That is not to say having a secure and safe home life is a guarantee of success, anymore than not smoking cigarettes is a guarantee you won’t get lung cancer, but it certainly improves the odds.

As poverty and homelessness of families increases in America, those of us with a heart crave stories like Rashema’s to allow us to sleep comfortably at night and ignore the reality of the horror of being poor. Being so poor you have to sleep in a car and live on canned food from church pantries; or where you live, the only employment is the drug trade and the bread winner of the family is murdered in the course of doing business. Only the pathological and morally deficient feel nothing for these people.

There are whole swaths of territories in our republic that poverty and homelessness are the rule, not the exception. Parts of Detroit, Newark and all of Camden for all intents and purposes have been written off. How would you like to live there? Crushing poverty is not limited to the cities anymore. Rural America is suffering, as well. In spite of what Ayn Randians think and profess, poverty is not pre-ordained like the Hindu caste system, but the results of a systematic failure of a society. As our ruling class becomes less beholding to the people as a result of Wall Street and Corporate’s purchase of law makers, the needs of the people become less and less relevant.

Truth is, the more disenfranchised and uneducated the citizenry, the easier it is to slither around and alter the rules of a just society. There is a concerted effort by an element in our society to crush any and all social safety nets that might help the impoverished. This mean-spirited extremist ideology eschews even the slightest improvement in the lives of the poor initiated by the more sympathetic members of congress and is considered a waste of tax payer’s money.

Yet, this same congress consistently votes for hand-outs in the form of tax relief of multi-billion dollar corporations with the repeated mantra, “We cannot upset the sacred JOB CREATORS” or they will…what exactly will they do? Take away all the jobs they have created? What jobs would they be? If we haven’t figured out what an empty threat that is by now, well, I guess we never will. Let’s also try not to forget these same brass balled kleptomaniacs in congress bailed out the Casino Banks and Wall Street with the people’s hard earned money, but when the people began to lose their homes and asked for help we were told we had acted irresponsibly and now had to pay the price. I know it’s hard to believe, but this actually happened.

Some of these corporate freeloaders don’t pay ANY tax at all and some even get welfare money from our government in the form of subsidies and “incentives”. Wow. These are companies on OUR soil using OUR tax dollar paid for infrastructure in OUR country and taking every advantage that America has to offer and giving back doodly squat in return. Then these criminals have the chutzpa to blame the poor in our country for the socio-economic horrors they, the poor, endure every day. Insane.

Where is the moral outrage? The short poem by German Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) comes to mind. He wrote it in Nazi Germany upon reflection when he found himself in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

This dramatic poem is a cautionary reminder of the danger of political apathy. You could easily say, “Because I was not homeless…” Homelessness has not reached epidemic proportions yet, but tell that to any of the six hundred thousand homeless in America, about a third of which are families and approximately fifty eight thousand military veterans. If you are not poor or homeless you are fortunate, but unless you are in the top two percent that have reached monetary critical mass and will NEVER be poor there is no guarantee you won’t find yourself out on the street with “no one left to speak for you.”

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